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Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

> why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?

I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.

> How do you know that?

I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".

There's obviously some very low-hanging fruit in terms of having even one voice who will look at the situation and notice stuff like that.

All that said: Obviously a white person can notice that, and a black person can miss it. It's just statistics. And a white person can still be diverse along a dozen other axes! If you want to sell your product to conservatives, you probably want at least one conservative on your team for the same reason!

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It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories.

I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them.

This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.

> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.

“All else being equal” doesn’t make sense. All else is never equal here and that’s the point yet we pretend everything swivels on skin color.

> all else being equal

But all else is not equal. People are more than just their skin color. Ignoring all other diversity and focusing only on race (or a few other arbitrary factors like sexual orientation of all things) is exactly the problem here.

> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.

The problem is the assumption th at all else is equal.

> I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".

Face recognition is one of the few areas where skin color matters. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Using basic statistics in order to determine behavior from people based on race is called racial profiling. It is why the police assume, all else being equal, that a black man is more likely to be involved in crime than a white man.

Alone, "It's just statistics." should never be the justification if the outcome has a strong negative for an individual.

Carl Sagan describe such profiling in his book The Demon-Haunted World. He calls it lazy thinking. People take in a complex person and reduces them down to single bits of information, man or woman, black or white.

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