Just finished the thought-provoking "Thick" by @tressiemcphd, where I was introduced to the idea of "black American" and "black ethnic".

I applied this concept to faculty hiring in Computer Graphics in the United States. The results are not pretty. 1/

She defines black American in order to: "differentiate black people who were born in the United States from those who were not."

As opposed to black ethnic, where "universities are generally cherry-picking the winners of extreme social stratification in other countries." 2/

She goes further: "It is a sticky thicket to discuss, but for many reasons, black ethnic students and faculty can bring cachet to a university that plain black students, like me, cannot."

Such as: "black ethnic students presumably cause fewer problems" 3/

I know of only *two* Black Computer Graphics faculty in the US. "The pipeline" is often blamed: there just aren't any Black Graphics PhDs to hire.

By this logic, if we started graduating more Black Graphics PhDs tomorrow, faculty representation would gradually improve. 4/

Let's examine a proxy. US universities have been bursting with "model minority" Asian BS / PhDs for decades.

Then let’s count core Graphics faculty at the top 5 CS schools (CMU,Stanford,MIT,Berkeley,Cornell) plus the Ivy League (Dartmouth,Penn,Harvard,Yale,Princeton,Brown). 5/

That’s 11 elite universities.

I count 56 core Graphics faculty, where 43 are white, and 13 are Asian. That’s 77% white, after more than a generation of Asian student over-representation.

The gender numbers are worse: 89% male. But that at least gets blamed on “the pipeline”. 6/

The picture is grimmer at the junior level. Of the last ten junior Graphics hires at the top 5 schools in CS, nine (!!!) were white men. The tenth was an Asian male.

Old white men are not skewing the numbers. Young white men are. The present is worse than the past. 8/

Following @tressiemcphd, let’s define “Asian American” as Asians born in the US, and “Asian ethnic” as those born elsewhere. As she warned, it gets weird, but let's set the boundary there.

There are *two* Asian American Graphics faculty (3.8%) across these 11 universities. 9/

I’m one of them. That’s because my Yale cover letter opened with: “In 2012, I won an Academy Award.”

An Oscar supposed to be the *fruit* of elite access, not the *price of entry*.

I am not throwing shade at Yale. Other universities on the list still would not interview me. 10/

At the BS level, the Yale CS class of 2020 was 36.6% Asian American. It was also 25.7% white male.

With current trends, our Asian American grads aspiring to be top Graphics faculty can expect a 90% elimination rate. Their white male peers can expect a 350% signal boost. 11/

The PhD numbers match: 40% of SIGGRAPH papers in 2018 and 2019 had Asian first authors. Where are the corresponding elite faculty hires?

The answer for Asian Americans is: come back with an Oscar. Diversity in Graphics is a problem of double standards, not "the pipeline". 12/

The industry numbers match. There is one Black and five Asian CEOs in the 25 highest-valued US companies. Industry leadership is 76% white.

*Zero* meet our definition of Asian American. The closest is Jensen Huang, who immigrated from Taiwan as a kid. 13/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/09/us/powerful-people-race-us.html

Let’s stop pretending that if there were tons of Black Graphics PhDs, they would get hired into faculty.

The data shows that even “model minority” hiring in Graphics is super-racist. Unless hiring committees actively fight this momentum, things will keep getting worse. 14/

Finally, to revisit my @sciam op-ed, racist hiring produces racist research. Break the cycle by recognizing the pattern.

If your Graphics faculty hires are all white men, the problem is your department, not the pipeline. 15/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-racist-legacy-of-computer-generated-humans/