"Twitter attempted to have a conversation about race and the tech industry yesterday. The loudest voices? White men on either side of the argument shouting each other down."
Actually I'm not convinced that Jason Calcanis is as wrong as he looks in the linked story. He's kinda right that if you want to be a top tech writer, you can probably get there by starting your own blog, building a following, and then being rewarded with a column on <insert major tech site here>. And this process will probably work just as well for a person of any given ethnicity.
The real problem isn't that awesome ethnic minority tech writers can't succeed, it's that there's an awful lot of mediocre white male tech writers, and relatively few mediocre black/female ones. This is presumably because a lot of tech writers aren't really judged on their merits; their editors need to employ some people to write about technology, and they're making 'safe' choices by going for the white guy who fits the pattern of 'tech person'.
> That might also be the reason why, when we read about how black people use Twitter, it’s so rarely from their own perspective.
Isn't this whole framing that "black people" use Twitter differently than "white people" or "Chinese people" part of the inherent dysfunction in these discussions?
I wish civic discourse in America would grow up and talk about the issue of socioeconomic class as a first-class concern (no pun intended), instead of overloading it on race.
4 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] thread[Edit: yeah I missed the word "Media" in the title which would have been a hint...]
The end of this para links to Buzzfeed, which adds nothing except a lot of crap advertising to this Storify: http://storify.com/mattbuchanan/how-to-not-be-racist
Actually I'm not convinced that Jason Calcanis is as wrong as he looks in the linked story. He's kinda right that if you want to be a top tech writer, you can probably get there by starting your own blog, building a following, and then being rewarded with a column on <insert major tech site here>. And this process will probably work just as well for a person of any given ethnicity.
The real problem isn't that awesome ethnic minority tech writers can't succeed, it's that there's an awful lot of mediocre white male tech writers, and relatively few mediocre black/female ones. This is presumably because a lot of tech writers aren't really judged on their merits; their editors need to employ some people to write about technology, and they're making 'safe' choices by going for the white guy who fits the pattern of 'tech person'.
Isn't this whole framing that "black people" use Twitter differently than "white people" or "Chinese people" part of the inherent dysfunction in these discussions?
I wish civic discourse in America would grow up and talk about the issue of socioeconomic class as a first-class concern (no pun intended), instead of overloading it on race.