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Comment by sveron | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful analysis of privilege, class signifiers and race.

Technology culture and employment in the United States is dominated by straight white males, usually with some form of class and economic privilege--people who haven't had to navigate within their society with an extreme outsider status--but there are welcome signs of a growing critical self awareness.

Over the years on HN, I've seen many posts questioning the economic value of a four year college education, particularly an education in the humanities. This right here is a great post to keep in your pocket the next time someone says something like that.

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And yet she shows the barrier to entry for a woman to be other women in HR who were of the same race. How is 'critical self awareness' of straight white males going to help that?

I've talked about this before at length, but assigning the term 'privilege' exclusively to 'straight white males' is fairly intellectually dishonest. The problem is bigger than that - our culture values behaving like a 'normal person', our definition of 'normal' just happens to have a lot of white people in it. Some poor white people living in trailers with heavy accents and unkempt clothes would have had (and do have) similar problems.

I don't think you two are really disagreeing.

Privilege is not exclusive to straight white males, it just so happens that in this country, at this moment, straight white males enjoy an order of magnitude more of it than everyone else. It becomes convenient to point at the largest elephant in the room instead of fully qualifying the point.

But white privilege, straight privilege, and all other forms of privilege affect not just those who have it, but everyone else around them. The barrier to entry for this woman was other women in HR, of the same race - who have internalized and normalized straight/white/male/etc privilege.

Normalization is privilege. Without normalization you don't have privilege - you don't have thoughts like "that's not a black guy job", or "that guy's too fruity to interact with my clients". Privilege is the unfair treatment of people based on their deviation from a perceived norm. The perceived norm may be perceived even by people who are on the losing end of the particular proposition - whether it is their race, gender, orientation, or other.

When one thinks of judging people by choice of fabric combination or wearing specific designers, "internalizing and normalizing" straight white male doesn't exactly come to mind. I think there are limits to how much this idea can explain.

The barrier to entry was knowing the set of codes, knowing how to communicate nonverbally. Knowing how to tell someone 'I belong in your group' in the way that you speak, the way you dress, the way you move. It's very difficult for people 'on the inside' to appreciate how difficult this can be.

Also, to clarify my earlier point, I would never suggest that the concept of privilege is exclusive to straight white males, and I agree that social and economic class are the basis for discrimination and exclusion. I was just trying to say:

1) Technology industries in the United States are dominated by straight white males, often with some form of class and economic privilege. By this I do not mean that there are no exceptions.

2) The posting and discussion of this blogpost on this website is reflective of (I hope) a certain self awareness surrounding race, gender, money and privilege, and the importance of considering it--not dismissing it as an irrelevance.

The barrier to entry wasn't the people with whom she was competing

The women in HR weren't competing with the woman trying to get hired; they were the ones making the decision whether or not to hire her.

For a second I thought I had stumbled onto tumblr.

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