Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
When he receives a resume or is contacted by a recruiter, he has no idea what color the applicant is. In the 25 yrs in the industry, he's interviewed one African American with the needed skills who barely acted like he was even interested in the position in the first place and never had the courtesy to show up for his second interview or even call to cancel. (This isn't a representative story, just one single example of one person).
I don't think this is true at all. There is a lot of evidence on stereotyping based on names on a resume. Not everyone has an "ethnic" name, but having one doesn't help your chances.
I happen to have a non-ethnic name. I have gotten a lot of surprised looks when I walked into the interview (I am a black female).
I worked in a company, to profile the CEO, he was a an immigrant to the US, and had a rough time. As a result, when he was hiring, he looked for people with "american" sounding names for any customer facing role. And if it so happened he found someone without one? He would encourage them to adopt a western name, as he did himself.
When we were looking for a writing role, and I showed him resumes of clearly ethnic people, he would ask for more writing samples for those candidate than those with American sounding names... If we did an interview, and someone had an accent? More writing samples needed....I don't think it was even a conscious thing for him, but I noticed it.
People often make unconscious decisions based on appearance, voice and even names. Indians get stereotyped as engineers, so they get less interviews for sales or marketing jobs. It is a well known fact that having a "black" name makes it harder to get in the door. I'd imagine there is some stereotyping with Nigerian names as well, even though I haven't seen any studies on this yet.
The biggest challenge for blacks in Silicon Valley is getting into the network. The best engineering students tend to go to black colleges. Great for education, crappy for networking. It is really hard to make the intros in order to get in the door if you don't have a network from college. Most hires (especially in S.V.) are from referrals, not blind resume submissions.
I didn't see anywhere in your link where I could watch a video.
But regardless, it sounds like what you are saying is that in order to get your foot in the door in SV, you have to have connections, you gotta network, etc...well guess what, that is true for someone of any race. I'm a white male, but I didn't go to Stanford, Berkeley, or an Ivy league school, and I don't have very many connections in tech - is it going to be extremely difficult for me to find a job in one of the most competitive job markets in the country? Yes, most definitely. Do I cry foul? No. Just be careful before throwing out these claims of racism. Is it difficult for blacks to get ahead in America for a variety of reasons? Definitely yes. Is SV racist because there's not a lot of black engineers working there? No. I think if you dove into the numbers, you'd find that among the black community there's a disproportionately low number of young men and women that go to college for engineering and computer science. When you go to college, the degree you choose is purely a personal decision. Is it really the fault of Silicon Valley that a small proportion of blacks choose Tech as their career? Of course not.
Silicon Valley responds first and foremost to $$$ and ideas. If you have a great idea and a sound business plan, you'll find funding no matter what your race.
Not to mention, all these SV firms are subject to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and applicable laws. If they were actively weeding out black candidates, you can be sure there would be plenty of lawsuits in the news. I don't recall anything of the sort.
I didn't see anywhere in your link where I could watch a video.
But regardless, it sounds like what you are saying is that in order to get your foot in the door in SV, you have to have connections, you gotta network, etc...well guess what, that is true for someone of any race. I'm a white male, but I didn't go to Stanford, Berkeley, or an Ivy league school, and I don't have very many connections in tech - is it going to be extremely difficult for me to find a job in one of the most competitive job markets in the country? Yes, most definitely. Do I cry foul? No. Just be careful before throwing out these claims of racism. Is it difficult for blacks to get ahead in America for a variety of reasons? Definitely yes. Is SV racist because there's not a lot of black engineers working there? No. I think if you dove into the numbers, you'd find that among the black community there's a disproportionately low number of young men and women that go to college for engineering and computer science. When you go to college, the degree you choose is purely a personal decision. Is it really the fault of Silicon Valley that a small proportion of blacks choose Tech as their career? Of course not.
Silicon Valley responds first and foremost to $$$ and ideas. If you have a great idea and a sound business plan, you'll find funding no matter what your race.
Not to mention, all these SV firms are subject to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and applicable laws. If they were actively weeding out black candidates, you can be sure there would be plenty of lawsuits in the news. I don't recall anything of the sort.
You can check it out on itunes. They rerun it occasionally. The basic premise, they follow about 10 black entrepreneurs in a live-in accelerator program. Through pitch meetings, etc. They also interview VCs, other entrepreneurs and so on. It is very hard for non-white males to get funding, and they talk about the whys too. People are pigeonholed unfortunately. I have met around half of the people in the documentary, and am involved in other groups for entreprenuers, and everyone tells me the same thing whether they are black, asian or female..... it is way harder to get people to hear your good idea if you aren't a white male. It is really popular for people to get a "white male" spokesperson to help with that. And that is disappointing, especially when S.V. is purported to be so merit-based.
As my grandad always said: you have to be twice as good, work twice as hard to get half as much. Unfortunately this is still the case.
Sorry, the burden of proof here is not on me. If you are going to make a claim that an entire industry is racist (and when I say industry, I mean a wide variety of companies, public and private, that employ thousands of diverse individuals), the burden is on YOU to provide evidence of that fact.
And no, anecdotal evidence from a disgruntled job seeker on an internet forum does not count. Any random person can get on the internet and complain about how they weren't hired by a Tech firm because of racism - of course, that same person would never dare admit that perhaps he or she was just not as qualified as other candidates.
Perhaps. But given a choice between attributing what they say to baseless conjecture or a pervasive problem which can't be measured by traditional means, why choose the perspective that discards their viewpoint when you have no personal insight or clue? You're in no position to do anything but learn from them.
Claiming that these deep and real experiences, the proof of which are readily obvious if you were so inclined to notice, are irrelevant because they haven't met a BOP, is your way of saying that being indifferent and ignorant of the experience is a good place for you to be.
Unfortunately, such indifference makes you part of the problem, and really is proof to what they're talking about. Your indifference and condemnation of their experiences without having the slightest personal insight to believe otherwise, helps them and provides the BOP that you so desperately rely on here.
Frankly, attributing the problem to blacks being unqualified, makes your viewpoint far closer to that of a clueless Conservative or Klansman than not. This view has no place here.
I find their perspective very enlightening. This topic is one of the best I've read here in the SF forum, and raises a valid problem.
How exactly is SV the "epitome of institutional racism?"
The area just so happens to be the world capital of Tech. So naturally, most of the people that live there are going to be trained and work in the industry. And most companies are simply going to hire whoever is best qualified for the job. Perhaps black people simply aren't seeking out these jobs in the same proportion as other races? Perhaps black people, very generally speaking, don't like working in Tech?
Tech companies are generally very forward-thinking and results-driven, so I doubt there's some sort of grand conspiracy to shut blacks out. In fact, if you read about the programs some of these companies are involved in, they seem to be actively recruiting more black people to the industry:
IDK how much or little you know about the hiring politics of Silicon Valley. To put it really simply, birds of a feather tend to flock together... most of the SV companies are founded by whites and south Asians and that's who tends to get hired. the very racially-split nature of the area contributes to that a lot... the idea most people in the South Bay/peninsula have of blacks is what they hear of EPA whereas whites and asians are associated with SV. Professional blacks are not visible at all in the Silicon Valley area. When you have a lot of people who are not from the country running a lot of the businesses here, it is somewhat a-given that they are going to go off of reputation when looking at candidates that aren't in their own group... blacks have by far the worst reputation in the area. There's also the perception that American recruits are usually lazier and dumber than their Asian counterparts, and no one contends with that more than blacks. The most visible black group in Silicon Valley is Africans and the most visible latino group tends to be directly from Latin America... it says a lot about how American candidates fare in the hiring process. The only American candidates who are prevalent in SV are whites and Asians, and again that's largely because they're the ones who are founding most of the companies. Notice that companies founded by Asian immigrants tend to have very few non-asian employees. Indians in particular tend to stick to their own.
I didn't see anywhere in your link where I could watch a video.
But regardless, it sounds like what you are saying is that in order to get your foot in the door in SV, you have to have connections, you gotta network, etc...well guess what, that is true for someone of any race. I'm a white male, but I didn't go to Stanford, Berkeley, or an Ivy league school, and I don't have very many connections in tech - is it going to be extremely difficult for me to find a job in one of the most competitive job markets in the country? Yes, most definitely. Do I cry foul? No. Just be careful before throwing out these claims of racism. Is it difficult for blacks to get ahead in America for a variety of reasons? Definitely yes. Is SV racist because there's not a lot of black engineers working there? No. I think if you dove into the numbers, you'd find that among the black community there's a disproportionately low number of young men and women that go to college for engineering and computer science. When you go to college, the degree you choose is purely a personal decision. Is it really the fault of Silicon Valley that a small proportion of blacks choose Tech as their career? Of course not.
Silicon Valley responds first and foremost to $$$ and ideas. If you have a great idea and a sound business plan, you'll find funding no matter what your race.
Not to mention, all these SV firms are subject to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and applicable laws. If they were actively weeding out black candidates, you can be sure there would be plenty of lawsuits in the news. I don't recall anything of the sort.
To the bolded, it very much depends on who's being targeted for recruitment. For the most part, urban high-schools in the Bay Area are left out of the Tech equation... the tech track is something reserved for public schools in wealthier communities and ritzy private schools. The South Bay/Peninsula (the epicenter of SV) has a very tiny black presence to begin with and little to no professional black representation, least of all in said ritzy private schools. Notice that you don't see any tech recruitment whatsoever going on at EPA Academy or Lick High. The inner East Bay on the other hand has a lot of professional black families who go to the ritzy East Bay private schools, but active Tech recruitment is very much limited to the surrounding SV area. In part this is because of who is doing the recruiting... the inner East Bay is very much seen as the armpit of the Bay by the more elite types in SV. Some posters on this very site have displayed those very attitudes I'm talking about...
The operative word is feel. Asians are absolutely part of the umbrella term "people of color" but if you talk to a typical Chinese, Japanese or Indian person who grew up in CA, they do not identify at all as a "person of color" to be lumped in with "blacks and latinos." They identify as their particular sub-group and not as a minority, even though clearly they are. It isn't until you leave and have a better perspective on your minority status that you do.
This is 100% related to their position as the "model minority." Because generally speaking the stereotypes about Asians are really positive, and Asians, particularly in the groups above are doing pretty well, they feel like they are pretty high up in the hierarchy.
I know this thread is about Black San Francisco but... the main difference between Asians in California and the West Coast compared to the rest of the country is that there is a much wider ethnic, cultural, economic and lifestyle diversity within the Asian community in California because California is home to the largest Asian American community in the U.S. In the Bay, you have wealthy and upper middle class Asians of all nationalities who do not think of themselves as minorities in any way shape or form. Asian Silicon Valley yuppies and successful small Asian business owners who are around more Whites than Asians etc.
However, you have the complete opposite side of the spectrum in the Bay as well. The more impoverished, crime-ridden, poorly publicized side of the Asian American community which is purposely not talked about in the mainstream media to keep the "model minority" myth alive in the minds of the blissfully ignorant. Minorities are actively kept divided amongst each other through the perpetuation of the model minority myth so that Asians, Latinos and Blacks will never come together to overthrow the mostly White ruling elite in America.
Asians are not a homogenous group by any means. Many South Asian groups (i.e. Hmong, Cambodians) statistically have much higher poverty rates than both Blacks and Latinos. In my previous post on this specific topic, I already illustrated how Asians have similar to worse incomes as Blacks with similar family structure in San Francisco. Anybody who follows this forum knows that the average Black SF resident is dirt poor. San Francisco is really no different from any big city in that fact that it has a pretty high crime rate, wide income inequality as well as having many sketchy and or rough areas. However, San Francisco is different in the fact that it is undoubtedly, proportionally, the most Asian big city in America. Numbers don't lie and a large percentage of the Asian population is just as impoverished and ghettoized as the Black population in SF. BUT problems with crime and poverty within SF's Asian community are even less publicized than these same problems within SF's Black community. These Cambodian kids from SF obviously do not see themselves as being on the same social status as Whites in The City. You see some Blacks peppered in their crowd and I highly doubt that these Cambodian kids would fit in well with latte sipping White yuppies. Their questionable illegal hobbies and occupations seem to be no different from Black kids in Lakeview or Fillmore or Latino Kids who like to wear red or blue in the Mission. Just somehow, I don't think all those R.I.P. t-shirts and guns are fake. You won't see scenes like this in Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, Detroit or Chicago, but you will in San Francisco and many other California cities:
Last edited by goldenchild08; 05-31-2012 at 12:17 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This view has no place here.
