| Just to get it out of the way: no one who has ever posted on Hacker News or has ever been even slightly associated with the Bay Area tech scene is the least bit racist. We are all 100.0000% meritocratic, and when we popped out of the womb we were instantly the most color-blind people in history. This is a given, and anyone who would say otherwise is a whiner who's just too lazy and stupid to code. (This, by the way, is also how we know that people here are not at all sexist or homophobic and have highly progressive views on gender. We're just that good.) Now that that's out of the way, we can talk about the role of race in tech. I think it'd be useful to divide it into four categories. 1) Race as felt through through social structure. Minorities (defined as AA, Native American, and Latinos) have less access to educational resources than other ethnicities. This is a broader social injustice, and tech can't be held responsible for it. Tech is also hard at work to help mitigate this problem, though with varying levels of success. 2) Race as felt through choice of majors. Minorities disproportionately choose not to major in techy fields. This is in large part due to a combination of 1) and 3) (to follow). Even to the extent that minorities do have access to high quality education, it tends to be more liberal arts and non-techy. Minorities may also perceive that the tech scene tends to be less friendly toward them. 3) Race as felt through network effects. This, I think, is probably the biggest cause of the recent complaints. Everyone knows here how valuable having their social community overlap at least somewhat with the tech community is. Knowing someone who knows someone is how you get jobs and get involved in new projects. And you learn a whole lot through these informal interactions (having no CS background, I only learned about Lisp on a date). People whom we know are usually of similar racial and class backgrounds. Not through any conscious decisions, but because of shared interests and the fact that people make friends through other nodes in their own social networks, nodes that have the same tendency of showing race and class similarity. 4) Racist prejudice. Examples of this are the null set, because no one here is at all racist. In the end, though, 3) builds off of itself. You start out as an isolated island, and if you don't break out of it you'll never achieve your full potential. Once you do get pulled into it, though, the sky's the limit. The question we should be asking is how to deal with 3). |