Why is that the first thing people think of when it comes to explaining black behavior is that they must be poor? Not all black people are poor. Stop it with the stereotypes.
It’s not about stereotypes. I am sure that everyone on HN knows that not all Black people are poor. I am Black by the way.
But, we also have to look at statistics and think longitudinally instead of anecdotally.
I came from a middle class family in a small town in the south. But my mom being a well connected high school math teacher did give me some advantages.
When I graduated from college, I had a choice between taking a job in a slightly larger city where I could have afforded to take care of myself or move to Atlanta where I could get a job as a computer operator based on a previous internship. But the pay was crap.
I wanted to move to Atlanta because I knew I would have more opportunities. My parents had already bought me car, they subsidized me for the first year, and the rest is history - I was able to network my way into getting a software development position. This was in the late 90s.
My classmate couldn’t afford to make those choices. He was stuck taking a COBOL programming job in the 90s - the same job I turned down and still is doing that to this day in the same city.
Nice story. COBOL programmers started making some serious money with Y2K. At least, the contractors started billing advanced hourly rates. And were making more than they ever did.
And from what I’ve been seeing, COBOL just isn’t going anywhere. Those mainframes really are built to last. So he should probably have a job for the rest of his life. I hope he’s got a nice pension.
I hope so. I posted on Facebook that I found my old FORTRAN, Pascal and COBOL textbooks from college when I went home to visit my parents and tagged him and few other classmates.
We graduated in the mid 90s. The book was last updated in 1985. He told me he was still programming in COBOL. I just got quiet. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to insult him.
"A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities. At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016."
Of course not all black people are poor, but that's a very poor understanding of statistics. Just because a black man became President or there are millionaire black men, doesn't mean that institutional racism is suddenly over or economic equality has been established.
So that means there are less poor people in STEM, no?
Poor blacks are a subset of poor people regardless of race.
If the average black family were wealthier than the average white family AND we would keep seeing such difference, it would be interesting to wonder why. But there is nothing new in poor people not being able to access to long studies.
Of course not, but what's your point? The stereotype is accurate. Go read the very article this discussion is about, and it says black families average about 2/3 the income of non-black families. That is reality, and wishing it away won't make it less true. If we want to figure out a long term solution, we can't deny uncomfortable truth.
Not all black people are absent from STEM. If we're only going to talk about what all black people are or are not, we're not going to find anything useful.
I feel like I have to mention that I'm a black person here.
I don't know why behavior like yours exists. Nobody knows why X is happening but people notice that a potential solution Y is only possible if Z is true. Then someone says Z is wrong and therefore we lost all our agency and ability to solve X.
If this was too difficult to understand then I'll explain it differently. If there are environmental differences between races such as socioeconomic background then you can fix things like educational attainment by improving the socioeconomic background of black people. If there is no environmental difference or solving the environmental difference gives no improved outcomes then this basically means black people are somehow inferior to white people simply based on their race. I don't think that is true. Poor white people suffer from the same things poor black people suffer from so an explanation that is purely based on race is completely insufficient. However you want to deny the socioeconomic differences and blame the differences in ability entirely on race.
> If there is no environmental difference or solving the environmental difference gives no improved outcomes then this basically means black people are somehow inferior to white people simply based on their race.
Or it means perfectly competent black people are excluded simply because they are black; because the white people who gate-keep academic institutions are racist.
