First, I'll say, tptacek, virtually everything you write on HN is spot on, but it's most on when you're talking about issues of sexism, racism, power, and privilege. The tech industry suffers from a collective privilege-blindness and I appreciate anyone who spends any amount of their time and energy talking about it coherently and persuasively.
When I was in seventh grade, we were assigned to write a little speech about what we'd do if we were in charge of the school. One of my classmates, Dan, gave a speech about how he'd use computers to more rightly integrate school and home-life. After I was done, I asked, "What about people who don't have computers at home?" He responded with a look of confusion on his face, "What? You mean like poor people or something?"
My family didn't have enough money to afford a computer growing up. I got my first computer in 10th grade: a 486 running Windows 3.1 that my mother's boss was going to simply throw away. Dan's words felt like a slap in the face, even in 7th grade.
If I had read pg's words in 7th grade, they would have felt like a slap in the face, too. Getting my face slapped does not make me or anyone else more interested. It makes people think, "This thing isn't for me."
People in technology, especially men, are utterly blind to privilege. It's astounding. It's also frustrating because explaining privilege to someone who has never seriously experienced the lack of it is like trying to explain to a fish what it's like to breath without water.
Here's another story. I recently mentored a 13-year-old kid through an after-school non-profit. I taught him the basics of programming. He had all the affinity in the world, but it was still hard even with my guidance. Why? There was one laptop shared among all the members of the family — mother, father, 3 brothers, 2 sisters — and he'd only show up to our sessions with the laptop maybe 50% of the time. Any work he'd do between session would often be lost because other people would tinker with it. Everyone around him teased him for playing with computers so much and being so "nerdy" and "gay." Neither of his parents spoke much English — a Spanish translator had to be present when I was having an extended conversation with either.
But obviously my student just didn't want it bad enough.
But what is your proposed solution to this idea of privilege? It seems like you're more disappointed with a lack of awareness of it (although a young child shouldn't be blamed for ignorance of what everyone else's home is like), rather than the existence of it. So if I say "yes, I get it, I'm a white male and therefore life is statistically easier for me," have I sufficiently recognized my "privilege"? Or do I have to spend my entire life keeping to myself the fact that I occasionally have to work hard and occasionally still fail due to my own choices and abilities?
It's not easy. Call it out. Respond to the biases that come from that position.
Yield the floor to those with less structural support when speaking. Encourage people who are ordinarily excluded. NOTICE AND CALL OUT. Use your privileged position to help where you can, and step out of the way when you can't.
It's pretty powerful when a room full of dudebros is silenced by the one guy who says "Uh ... that 'Aunt Tillie' you're designing for is actually damn smart, just hasn't used a computer yet" or "Uh, guys, you're forgetting HALF THE POPULATION". Or "That was sexist, jackass. Don't ever do that again." Or "Maybe we should acknowledge that having people who have families and would like to see them might like to participate here."
Some of these are actual statements of differing values. They are sharp instruments on wall of the bubble of the echo chamber. They're powerful.
And then, when you've women on your team, listen to them. Remember that status isn't conferred as readily on us. "She's just a junior dev" ... well, yeah, and might have been passed for a couple promotions. When you go out for an expensive meal with folks from a funding firm or industry cohorts, remember who might have had to check their bank balance before coming and may have passed. Try to include those voices. Call 'em up. Offer to pay for a meal -- or if you're in a position of company power, fix it structurally by making it not an individual problem.
And look for sources of bias and privilege. Don't just focus on women. Look for all the myriad ways that you can explain how someone ended up in the social heirarchy how they did, and think long and hard about what's fair. It won't feel nice if you came out on top by accident and you'll try to explain it away. Don't.
Even more telling is when you fail: What are the repercussions of failure for you? What might the repercussions for a woman on your team be? Are they different? That's an especially telling place to look, and it explains a lot of why women are paid less: their risks are bigger for the same gains.
Do spend your life checking it. Don't spend your entire life keeping your experiences to yourself: just be aware that your experiences aren't universal nor even prototypical. Don't be the default voice. Just a voice.
I'm not sure what you mean by "solution." To abolish privilege? That's neither possible nor desirable, IMO. Privilege exists wherever there's a differential in power for any reason.
The problem is being blind to it and not understanding how it operates in your life and the lives of others. The solution to that problem is being committed to developing a deep sense of empathy.
1) To understand the perception others may have of of things I say and to know when I don't understand something enough to talk about it. Knowing that my life experience has differed from that of others and that my statements are perceived differently because of my privileged background allows me to more efficiently communicate and prevents faux pas (like the original PG one that caused this whole furor in the first place).
2) To build empathy. Recognizing privilege allows me to more readily understand those who are not identical to myself and relate to them. In addition to making me (I feel) a better person, this enables me to more easily befriend a diverse set of people.
3) By consciously thinking about privilege as a concept, real toxic social and political structures which can be actively deconstructed become even more evident.
I see people complaining frequently about the use of the word "privilege" as though it's some kind of pejorative being used against them; in general, it's not. Rather, privilege is a way of thinking about the effects of one's background on their social and economic position by identifying taken-for-granted advantages that society has granted them.
Frankly when I first started learning about the concept of privilege it seemed obvious to me: of course those with different backgrounds have different sets of advantages. But thinking about the concepts consciously and with the ability to label them has really helped me to both identify inequalities and combat them where I am able.
> I see people complaining frequently about the use of the word "privilege" as though it's some kind of pejorative being used against them
If the people using this term didn't want it to be taken as a pejorative, perhaps they could have chosen a less loaded term, that didn't already have a legacy usage with negative connotation.
"Asymmetrically advantage", "special powers" etc. all would be fine. But when you tell someone they're "privileged", it's very hard for the average speaker of English who doesn't have 100+ hrs of reading feminist literature to not be somewhat offended. The vernacular implication of the term is that someone who is privileged "had it easy", or the effort they've put into achieving their position and status is somewhat invalidated because they had "natural advantages".
My observation is that one of the core dysfunctions of discussions about diversity in tech is that people don't properly respect how impossible it is to go from talking about ensembles and populations, to talking about the behaviors of individuals. Those are two entirely different regimes of theory. We might come up with all manner of fancy terms and bodies of theory to talk about systemic cycles of oppression, vicious cycles of privilege, etc. etc. But to use any of that theoretical framework to talk about the motivations or actions of a single individual is certainly fraught with error and presumption.
Physicists recognize that you can't go from a thermodynamical description of an ensemble of atoms to individual particle trajectories without explicitly having a statistical model of the distribution of particles. But people are so quick to jump down each others' throats with accusations and assumptions about "you're blind to X!" and "you're assuming Y!". It's really just kind of sad. Just as "heat" is a bulk property of a body of particles and is pretty much meaningless when talking about a single particle, I think that a concept like "privilege" is meaningful when talking about a particular demographic versus another demographic. But to say that any given individual "is privileged" because of the color of their skin or their parents' tax bracket is assuming too much, and informs nothing. Individual variance within the distribution is just too high. The Asian immigrant kid with the perfect SAT and lawyers for parents might have taken up coding to escape his parents yelling and fighting every night. Is that more or less privilege than the black girl in a middle class suburb with a huge supportive extended family? What does "privilege" even mean when regarded in such individualized context? What are the broad patterns of systemic inequality that is affecting each of these individuals, and how can you possibly demonstrate that they are the dominant (or even significant) factors in the trajectories of these two lives?
It doesn't require that one has "100+ hrs of reading feminist literature." I don't have that many hours. Indeed, I don't know if I've read anything that could be classified as "feminist literature" at all, but the idea of privilege or of being privileged is fine with me.
I don't know whether you consider these things "feminist literature," but regardless it's less than 1 or 2 hours of reading total. My challenge to you is to read and watch all that, digest it, and then come back to comment. If you find yourself compiling a list of objections as you read, I'd also challenge you to pause and really try to understand what the author was trying to say before jumping to conclusions (as you say).
If you think the way people ("feminists" as you say) talk about privilege is counterproductive, I encourage you to read the above if you haven't and come up with a better way of explaining it! I'd love to read it, myself.
I don't want to derail the conversation since the #1 hurdle is the collective blindness people have to the concept on HN and in the tech community at large. It's a complex thing to understand and I don't claim to understand it perfectly or even well.
Everyone is privileged in certain ways that make them blind to other types of privilege. Feminists use the word "intersectionality" to describe this state of affairs.
Anyhow, the point (IMO) is to learn how to navigate in the world without unknowingly exercising your privilege to the detriment of others, like an oafish tourist who walks right through the middle of someone's rock garden because they didn't know any better and when they're informed respond with, "It was just a bunch of stupid rocks! What's the big deal?"
If you grok the concept of privilege, great! My experience is that on HN virtually nobody does. tptacek's comment above is the clearest I've ever seen on the subject here.
Spot on! Maybe it's beneficial to use a term that doesn't make people defensive ('privileged? me? I worked hard to get where I am!), but I do agree it's important to make people aware of it.
A week or so ago one of our former Dutch politicians wrote a column about 'the elite' in Holland. This resulted in a highly entertaining but tragic borderline-flamewar between said politician and some well-known Dutch people. Entertaining because it was fascinating to see such 'impactful' people commenting on an internet forum, and tragic because the discussion became about the term 'elite' and the perceived insult by the 'accused' individuals, rather than about the point of the article: pointing out the reality of there being an 'elite' and asking some relatively open questions on what this realization means.
The last paragraph took some weight from your post, in my opinion. I agree with you in general, but comparing that description of your student with my own experience, I can't help but think that maybe he really doesn't want it enough.
Having a computer at home, he's in a much better position than I was, when I learned programming at 13 by going to a public PC for 3h/week. I also didn't know English, nor did I have any programming classes until many years later.
Later, my first home computer was a BASIC interpreter, and I also couldn't save the programs because it had no storage, so I wrote all the code to paper before shutting it down each time.
I know I'm probably missing a lot of hindrances you haven't described, so I won't judge the situation just from that, but it does make your post weaker, IMHO. Also, why haven't you got him a pen drive yet? ;)
It does sound like you wanted it more or at least had a way of approaching the problem that made it possible for you to get what you wanted more easily than my student did.
But let's teleport all the people pg or anyone else here would consider "hackers" into your situation at age 13. How many would've kept at it?
I'm also wondering why you left out the most important dimension, IMO, which is social support. Did your friends antagonize you for pursuing this as a child? Were there any other people in your life who understood even the faintest bit of what you were doing?
Anyhow, this isn't battle of the anecdotes, as if one has to win. It's easy to see the way out from the outside; it's another question when you're on the inside. It sounds like you were a precocious and intimidatingly determined child. I'm sure that's served you well in many things! :)
Regarding social support, my friends didn't really know and my parents couldn't really help (they're both actors with no particular affinity for technology). As for the determination, unfortunately not, I was always a pretty lazy kid - I just freaking enjoyed it.
Anyhow, this isn't battle of the anecdotes, as if one has to win.
Sure, and as I said, I agree with your post, it's just that when you're talking about the poor conditions that many kids have, and the you describe one with a home computer and access to programming classes, it takes the strength from your point. I was picturing worse conditions, frankly.
When I was in seventh grade, we were assigned to write a little speech about what we'd do if we were in charge of the school. One of my classmates, Dan, gave a speech about how he'd use computers to more rightly integrate school and home-life. After I was done, I asked, "What about people who don't have computers at home?" He responded with a look of confusion on his face, "What? You mean like poor people or something?"
My family didn't have enough money to afford a computer growing up. I got my first computer in 10th grade: a 486 running Windows 3.1 that my mother's boss was going to simply throw away. Dan's words felt like a slap in the face, even in 7th grade.
If I had read pg's words in 7th grade, they would have felt like a slap in the face, too. Getting my face slapped does not make me or anyone else more interested. It makes people think, "This thing isn't for me."
People in technology, especially men, are utterly blind to privilege. It's astounding. It's also frustrating because explaining privilege to someone who has never seriously experienced the lack of it is like trying to explain to a fish what it's like to breath without water.
Here's another story. I recently mentored a 13-year-old kid through an after-school non-profit. I taught him the basics of programming. He had all the affinity in the world, but it was still hard even with my guidance. Why? There was one laptop shared among all the members of the family — mother, father, 3 brothers, 2 sisters — and he'd only show up to our sessions with the laptop maybe 50% of the time. Any work he'd do between session would often be lost because other people would tinker with it. Everyone around him teased him for playing with computers so much and being so "nerdy" and "gay." Neither of his parents spoke much English — a Spanish translator had to be present when I was having an extended conversation with either.
But obviously my student just didn't want it bad enough.
Blagh.