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Comment by sbilstein | Hacker News Reader

I think you might be reading into what I wrote a bit. This is just how I feel...not how I WANT to feel. Obviously, these are biases and anxieties that exist in my own mixed-race low-income immigrant brain that i wish weren't there. As another latino founder told me..."walk into a VC pitch meeting with the confidence of a tall white man."

Like I don't hate caucasians but sometimes can't help but notice these differences. I also can't just focus on fucking Netflix during an interview! These anxieties and nervousness creep into our heads whether we like it or not!

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This sounds like your problem is not so much any actual discrimination as it is the expectation of it, and you are suffering real disadvantages due to that expectation. It might be better to try to reduce your consumption of US culture war content (including this article and discussion thread) and maybe even seek the company of more people who are not constantly preoccupied with it.

People of color don’t have a switch that allows them to turn off the experience of being a person of color. Your comment amounts to a claim that sbilstein is inventing all of the issues he’s faced in life.

If you’re seriously claiming that people of color aren’t treated differently, look at the implicit bias test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

It’s a very easily reproducible experiment (you can conduct it on yourself by following the link) that shows that most people respond differently to disadvantaged groups, even if those people are not consciously aware of having bigoted attitudes.

I think that if somebody is telling you they’ve faced discrimination, it shows respect to at least acknowledge the possibility that they are telling the truth and not hallucinating it.

I agree with you, but the implicit bias test has been crumbling under the replication crisis.

https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...

https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

From that last link: "Both critics and proponents of the IAT now agree that the statistical evidence is simply too lacking for the test to be used to predict individual behavior."

I don't understand how you get that out of my comment. Regardless of what problems the parent poster actually faced, it's clear from their descriptions that (1) at this point they are genuinely experiencing problems from their expectation of discrimination (it's not like the "anxieties and nervousness" creeping into their heads would have any benefit even if the interviewers are in fact biased against them!), and (2) their usage of terms like "LatinX" indicates that they had a lot of exposure to the sort of writings that tell them to expect concealed discriminatory attitudes in everyone - which, even if true, is very unlikely to be a healthy or useful mindset for the putative target of those discriminatory attitudes to have.

I would argue it is comparable to (an outward-oriented version of) body dysmorphic disorder: instead of social anxiety due to the perception that people are disgusted by your appearance, you get social anxiety due to the perception that people hold a negative view of your ethnicity.

I don't know if this will be of any use to you. If you're pitching to VCs, you're already operating way above my level. I also don't know if it's different over here. I live and work in the UK and I'm white. I genuinely don't think I've worked with anyone in the tech industry who cares what race or background their co-workers have.

There's definitely an underrepresentation problem (most grievously with female engineers), but I sincerely believe the problem is mostly systemic, rather than driven by personal prejudice.

From my (limited) perspective, the only thing anyone gives a damn about is whether you're a good developer. If you can code, if you can ship, if you can work well with your other colleagues. Please don't feel like you have you walk into meetings pretending you're somebody else. Walk into meetings with the confidence of a great engineer and founder - because anybody who gives a crap about anything else isn't worth impressing.

With love, from one engineer to another ️

The best athletes in the world still get nervous before games. Same with musicians. I don’t feel meta bad about getting nervous. It just sucks to feel nervous!

As long as the nervousness doesn’t seriously affect the presentation it is ok or even good. I find a bit of adrenaline helps me put my best effort in.

Having lived and worked in the UK for five years, the class system overrides race. You would have to go far down the chain of accent, education, area you live in, people you hang out with and more before you hit race.

There are immigrants at the bottom that feel discriminated against because of race but they miss the basics of the culture and the ones that learn the system excel.

Not being a straight cis white male etc is now a MASSIVE superpower for fundraising and company building. I am happy to help anyone in this bucket for their pitching process if they do not already see that.

Lesson on HN: This comment got a whole bunch of upvotes, and a few hours later, super downvoted. I think we've learned something unfortunate about what the global community here wants to see happen :(

> "walk into a VC pitch meeting with the confidence of a tall white man."

As a tall white man, I find it hilarious you think we are all confident.

As a tall while Caucasian I think you need you have a problem with the environment, not a racial one. I live in Eastern Europe and we don't really know what racism is because we have no history of problems in the past; I had direct reports that were Latino and Latina, Europeans (Caucasians), black (African): they were friends more than subordinates. In Bucharest my South African colleague, the Brazilian one and the Chinese lady are cool and they attract attention in a positive way, they have absolutely no issues living here. I think the problem is the US with the long history of treating poorly other races, not with your race.

> I live in Eastern Europe and we don't really know what racism is because we have no history of problems in the past;

Then why do I read stories like this about black soccer players being racially abused?

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/01/racism-at-the-heart-of-b...

Unfortunately, Wikipedia finds your experience to not be universal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Europe . I hope this continues to change, however!

More relevantly, it is useful to understand the VC process as selling to a mix of individuals. The horrible ones stink and need to be written off. It sucks, but that's life. (You probably don't want to work with them anyway: should you really trust them with your life's work through all the closed door activities that happen?) At the same time, there is a strong wave of individuals and firms that view non-traditional backgrounds as a valuable leading indicator for key difficult aspects of company building. Fundraising is a form of sales. You only really need one yes, so having access to otherwise closed off sources of capital is an amazing advantage.

It's a weird world and something I care about, so I'm genuine in my offer to folks here.

I'm from Eastern Europe, and we absolutely know what racism is.

Just look at Roma.

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