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Black people in STEM

psikeyhackr said:
Sometimes I think the social pressure that black Americans put on each other to maintain the black American tunnel vision is worse than racism.
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And you get called a racist for addressing it.
 

Hmm… are you sure about that (bolded above) assertion?


en.wikipedia.org

Andre Norton - Wikipedia

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en.wikipedia.org

Leigh Brackett - Wikipedia

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ttwtt78640 said:
Many seem to assert that when black elected officials screw over black people or neighborhoods (just as white elected officials do) then their actions are (somehow) not racist.
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There is a small difference between open racism and 'systemic' racism. Blacks live in a neighborhood because they have always had to.

I don't think most white Americans can appreciate just how that institutional/cultural racism affects everyone over time.

Years ago I started ignoring race questions on government documents. Nothing happened. I've since added gender questions (why does Canada Revenue Agency need to know the gender of an employee?). Nothing happened.

A few years ago I started telling people.

Now I notice some government forms still ask the question, but answering is optional. Now questions are asked 'with which race do you identify - mark as many as needed. I click all of them, including Asian, Indian, Indigenous and African. (I'm Polish/Sottish/German).

The 'because we always have' mentality has to die. If we want to change systemic anything, we need to push back. And along the way we might also accidently streamline government, but then I have oft been accuse of being a dreamer.

PS What really jams their ass is refusing to give a cell number!
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Many seem to assert that when black elected officials screw over black people or neighborhoods (just as white elected officials do) then their actions are (somehow) not racist.
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That is called selfish crookery.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Show me how melanin affects math ability.
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White teachers can see a kid's skin color.

A white nun told me, "You will get into a good high school but you won't do well." That was in 8th grade. Reading science fiction since 4th grade helped me ignore nuns and conclude that they were idiots from jump street.

But how do you measure the effects of years of psychological sabotage? Electrical engineering never would have occurred to me without SF.
 
Lovebug said:
That is called selfish crookery.
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Or simply a double standard - if the same policy is called racist only if the politicians in charge are white (and not demorats?).
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
That kind of teacher has no business in the education field.
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Where do you draw the line?

Years later a history teacher told me that the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about preserving the Union. He was looking me straight in the eyes at the time.

I remember the cover of the history book we got in 5th or 6th grade. I sat in my desk staring at that cover for a while.

It was a landscape of a flat plane with mountains in a distant background. There was a winding line of people standing in the plane and by their clothes it was possible to tell that people farther back in the line were from the past.

Of course everyone in the line was white. So I sat there thinking, "So only white people matter in history." In high school I got C's in history with my A's in math and sciences. Studying propaganda made no sense to me. I cannot say what SF book I read in grade school that best expressed the concep of propaganda but I understood it by high school.

Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky was very mind expanding in communicating the thinking of the characters.
 
How are you still making these bait threads?
 
Andyh2299 said:
I did some entry Computer science and to get in the more advanced you need a math test. You can learn the math courses in College but you might need to stay longer than 4 years
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Yeah, the math requirements for a CS degree are gross. I think they need to come up with a Software Engineering degree, separate from Computer Science, that focuses on things relevant to everyday software development like databases, networking, multithreading, OOP, architectures, design patterns, etc. All that advanced math they make you take is really only needed if you're making a niche thing like a 3D engine or astrophysics simulation. High school algebra and geometry is all the math you really need for most everyday jobs. As for the non-math stuff, you can learn everything you need from books, practice, and stackoverflow.com if you get stuck on something. And many of the jobs out there call for a Bachelor's degree "or equivalent experience", so I made a bunch of personal projects for practice and put them on my resume. I started self-learning in the early 2000's and it was a little rough compared to nowadays with so many more online resources and tutorials available. But it's still not for everyone.
 
I soldered together my first computer in 1978, years after I dropped out of electrical engineering. Then went to work fixing computers for IBM.

A lot of "education" seems totally arbitrary especially now that anyone can get a computer dirt cheap and put Linux on it. Companies should just create tests and ignore degrees.
 
 
Felis Leo said:
Hey, he is just raising these concerns because he deeply cares about underprivileged black youth. Clearly.
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The funny thing is that STEM people should be able to figure out planned obsolescence. What if PO is really a high technology form of slavery since our brilliant economists just ignore the depreciation of durable consumer trash. What do consumers lose on the depreciation of Apple iPhones every year?

Does that qualify as macroeconomics?
 
I worry about you sometimes @Andyh2299. You should spend less time thinking about racial issues.
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My STEM education started before "STEM education" became a thing.


Science fiction made science and technology more interesting than science teachers. No science teacher ever suggested SF to me. But now a lot of old SF is free in Project Gutenberg. My first book:

Star Surgeon by Alan E Nourse

has been in PG since 2006. And there is:

Deathworld by Harry Harrison
Cosmic Computer by H Beam Piper
Night of the Trolls by Keith Laumer
Black Man's Burden by Mack Reynolds

Some you still gotta buy:

A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C Clarke
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven
Brainwave by Poul Anderson

Up to date stuff has to have lots of computers causing trouble though:

Daemon & Freedom by Daniel Suarez
 
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I think that can be called systemic racism
 
My STEM education began with the Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s and the "New Math" controversy that created a generation of computer programmers. I didn't need science fiction, I had the real thing. Although, I did enjoy reading Arthur C. Clarke.
 
Its all about your grades and your willingness to complete the required course work. Most profs are more than willing to help you with a tutor but you need to show up to class, take part in discussions and ask for help if you need it.
 
Glitch said:
Although, I did enjoy reading Arthur C. Clarke.
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I read Clarke's A Fall of Moondust in 7th grade.

He used Plato's Allegory of the Cave to explain reality as viewed by infrared and had an astronomic observatory at a lunar Lagrange point.

Now we have the James Webb Space Telescope at the Earth-Sun L2 point doing infrared telescopy.

The right SF is very informative about reality. Only nitwits think Star Wars is science fiction.
 
My favorite Arthur C. Clarke book was "Rendezvous with Rama" which describes a derrick alien spacecraft drifting through our solar system. That was published 44 years before the Oumuamua asteroid from another solar system drifted though our solar system.
 
Poor and Dire Poor whites had access to STEM for Centuries before black people were free from slavery and another 100 yrs during the century of racial segregation, now explain why they are not in college and why they have some decrepit areas and many have been relegated to "tornado magnet mobil homes in tornado alley", rather than homes built on a foundation with storm shelters, or tell us why across America there are so many poor and dire poor white people, who many did not perform well in high school and never even considered they had means or options to go to college.
While you are at it, explain why so many poor, working poor and dire poor whites know so little about the civics of America's Representative Democracy, and many have very poor sense of knowledge of financial literacy. Then explain why so many white people are perpetually buried in life long credit debt.

You need to come our of your racist shell and look across the reality of life in America's white society with an intent to face "truths". You are a prime example of the willfull ignorance that the ideology of white nationalist and delusions of white superiority has done to screw up so many white people with racist ignorance and self blindness.

I'm sure none of that ever crossed your bigoted white nationalist bias racist based mindset.

Black people in inner cities were prospering before white people panicked and destroyed the business and industry in those cities, because they did not want to see black people prosper.
It's no different than white people "burning down prospering black towns" in their envy and resentment of black people prospering, Read and learn about Tulsa, and Rosewood and other black communities that were damaged and destroyed by racist white people.... envious because black people were prospering better than some of the poor whites were.

Then ask yourself, why did white people spend so many centuries and decades doing everything they could to try and deny access to education and equal pay on jobs to black people.

I'm sure none of that ever crossed your bigoted white nationalist bias racist based mindset.

Your indulgence into willful ignorance... only demonstrates your ineptitude to gain an informed education based on reality truths in and of America white society and the broader society of what has been damaged by white society for both poor and working poor whites and blacks and other non white people in America.
 
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