Racial Fault Lines in Silicon Valley
I have a caveat to add to the author&#x27;s assertion that discussing race becomes easier with practice. That&#x27;s not always true in the short run, but I agree that it is in the long run, assuming good faith on both sides.<p>What I&#x27;ve found is that it depends on so many variables between the people wanting to have the discussion that it&#x27;s entirely unpredictable how it will turn out - and often unpredictable even if it&#x27;s the same two parties with discussions separated by time.<p>I&#x27;m a white man married to a black woman. We&#x27;ve known each other over 35 years. We&#x27;ve had discussions on many aspects of the racial divide over the years, of course. I think that I understand her point of view as a black woman much better now than I did in the &#x27;80s, or &#x27;90s, or &#x27;00s, though even today she may say that I just don&#x27;t get it. (And I think she understands where I&#x27;m coming from better, too.)<p>But the effort has been worth it. It&#x27;s just very, very difficult sometimes to have such discussions.<p>As far as the substance of his experience with the interviewer, sadly, I completely believe it and am not even surprised. The author handled himself with dignity at every step. It had to take a lot of courage to tell it straight when the session on interviewing brought it all back up years later. So what everyone went silent? Their discomfort isn&#x27;t comparable to what I suspect his was.<p>Telling the truth is always worth it, especially when it&#x27;s hard. Hopefully sharing his negative experience helped at least one person in that session to reconsider what they probably considered to be long-settled (and probably vague) opinions about their own rightness in this regard.<p>tl;dr: It&#x27;s easy to learn to avoid saying what you really feel and think when you&#x27;re in a work environment and you know there could be repercussions. It&#x27;s hard to challenge yourself and others to go beneath the surface, but the rewards are great.