Facebook removed post by ex-manager who said site 'failed' black people

Being black in this industry really, really sucks. I&#x27;m certain that for the vast majority of people I interact with on a daily basis, it doesn&#x27;t even cross their minds. But living with an unending fear of having your entire self worth immediately judged at the color of your skin is something that no other race lives with in this industry. I have to <i>immediately</i> force myself to be twice as charming, friendly, witty, and intelligent sounding as the equivalent white or Asian person just to be taken seriously. I don&#x27;t really know that there&#x27;s any solution to this, it&#x27;s just something we have to live with.

&quot;Create internal systems for employees to anonymously report microaggressions. &quot;<p>This is the &#x27;happy path&#x27; to ideological totalitarianism, and it&#x27;s a scary statement.<p>In the UC system, it is now considered a &#x27;micro aggression&#x27; to make the statement &#x27;America is a Meritocracy&#x27;. Why? Because it doesn&#x27;t necessarily reflect the fact that for some people it&#x27;s harder than others. Surely - there&#x27;s a lot to be debated about the statement. But that it cannot be said, or is even considered problematic is utterly Orwellian.<p>The author makes the case of &#x27;undue or overly harsh&#x27; criticism of Black employees? Unfortunately, this is a difficult thing to measure, and if FB turns into a &#x27;government office&#x27; - it simply won&#x27;t be possible to give even a fair assessment without the fear or being labelled a racist.<p>I&#x27;m actually quite sensitive to aphxtron&#x27;s comment above about the insecurities of being black in tech, and there is work to do ... but I think the intersectional &#x2F; authoritarian approach, especially those whereby we &#x27;assume racism&#x27; is wrong.<p>I don&#x27;t think the Colin Kaepernick approach is going to work on this, I think it&#x27;s just going to take a while.

The first 3 comments in this thread &quot;The Left is eating itself.&quot; &quot;Good thing they shielded me from that post. I don&#x27;t know if I could have taken reading that.&quot; &quot;&gt;ex manager &gt;manager why would their opinion be at all relevant&quot;<p>That pretty much sums up the state of the dialog in the industry and it&#x27;s pretty sad that you can&#x27;t even find thoughtful comments on Hacker News. Regardless of your politics, everyone deserves a fair shake. I&#x27;m a black engineer and manager with experience at several tech companies, including Facebook. At every company I&#x27;ve worked for I&#x27;ve heard jokes about African-Americans (overheard, to my face, from managers and ICs alike) and dealt with people assuming I&#x27;m a junior engineer at the beginning of every encounter despite the gray hairs lining my chin. At the conclusion of my tech talks and even technical interviews people routinely ask me if I have an engineering background! These things may seem insignificant (&quot;they&#x27;re just jokes&quot;) but we&#x27;re social creatures want to feel recognized and accepted. That hasn&#x27;t stopped me from building a career I&#x27;m proud of and I don&#x27;t lose sleep at night. But I&#x27;m an outlier in that regard.<p>The larger subtext of the entire diversity conversation is learning to coexist. It&#x27;s not about black people, women, the LGBTQ community, or any other single group. It&#x27;s about a better working environment for everyone indefinitely. Being against that is literally pathological.<p>Based on the quality of discourse on this site lately, I&#x27;m sure many of you will take my words out of context and make broad assumptions about my beliefs. For the sane ones, please reflect on the words I actually wrote.

Disappointed to see the Guardian refer to Facebook as “a tech corporation that largely excludes African Americans.” “Excludes” implies a deliberate and willful act which they cite no evidence for, and the editorializing is more appropriate for the Daily Mail.

The post for anyone who hasn&#x27;t read it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;facebook.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;mark-s-luckie&#x2F;facebook-is-failing-its-black-employees-and-its-black-users&#x2F;1931075116975013&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;facebook.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;mark-s-luckie&#x2F;facebook-is-failing...</a>

I hear these stories of people making racial surls and other accusations of poor treatment of blacks at the work place.<p>I am shocked. I live and work in the south and have never seen anything even remotely like this. It&#x27;s almost hard to believe this occrus and HR simply does nothing. Of the few non racial issues that HR needed to intervene in it has always been swift removal of the offender and a company wide email.<p>Maybe the south is not so racist ?<p>Side not- bring a minority can&#x27;t be a complaint. If you are a minority it is just a fact. Being a minority and expecting to walk into a conference room and find many faces like yours is just not an expectation anybody should have. Even if we had a perfect representation of blacks it still is going to feel like a sea of white in any white majority country.

Sure I’ll add on to the black engineer diaspora.<p>I find this industry selects for and exacerbates social anxiety issues amongst almost any demographic.<p>“Is this one of those circumstances where a cabal of men misunderstand my ability to contribute to their company?”<p>Most experience comments I’ve read in this thread are social anxiety related. And then people debate on the quality of that particular social anxiety issue than the similarities of there being social anxiety at all.<p>My experience has been mostly positive and inclusive. But this isnt intended to be another anecdotal data point, this is intended to highlight widespread social anxiety.

Blacks comprise about 14% of the US population, but only 1.4% of the top 1% household income. That means that whites are about 10 times more likely to belong to this elite. Many on the intersectional left consider this evidence that blacks are (still) oppressed by whites.<p>Jews comprise about 2.5% of the US population, but about 25% of billionaires are Jewish. That means that Jews are about 10 times more likely than non-Jewish whites to belong to this elite. Nazis consider this evidence that there is a Jewish conspiracy to oppress whites.<p>What is the difference?<p>(Btw, I&#x27;m not American, and in my country, there are fairly few of both blacks and Jews, so I see this from the outside.)

This is interesting since I know of an initiative at FB that aggressively pursued talented AA engineers. The compensation packages they were willing to offer as part of the initiative were impressive even for FAANG. Why put that effort forth if the environment at the company is not adequate to retain whatever AA talent you get?

Slavery and the genocide of Native peoples is America&#x27;s original sin. The legacy of racist policies permeates through every aspect of American life -- Silicon Valley is NOT an exception, liberal havens are NOT an exception. North East Portland is a traditionally black neighborhood, but now I see more &quot;Black Lives Matter&quot; lawn signs that Black people.<p>It&#x27;s not a surprise that being black at Facebook is a tough experience, as all of us who are black in tech know. Being 2-3% of the population would be tough for anyone to deal. Add on to that the very real notion of &quot;micro-aggressions&quot;. My girlfriend was delivering a presentation and a manager literally admitted to day dreaming about which way she braided her hair that day, it totally threw her off base. At the end of the day a majority of us who are black in tech are dealing with death by paper cut as we try and traverse through our careers. Employee groups have been a big help to me, all I can recommend is to try to integrate yourself with other black employees at your organization -- there is strength in numbers.

This is the problem with putting the onus for regulating speech on Facebook. It sounds like it&#x27;ll be all rainbows and unicorns when you think it will prevent genocide (hint: it won&#x27;t), but as soon as Facebook is responsible for removing any content that anyone, anywhere might conceivably object to Facebook as a platform for speech becomes useless.