Always seems like Asian men in the U.S. get the 'worst' of being a minority. Neither the societal advantages of white majority, nor the ability to access services available to Hispanics/Blacks or women.
Even 19th century racialists in their ignorant understanding of the world didn't lump 2/3 of the world's population into a miscellaneous category.
What makes you think that YC is categorizing by skin color rather than, as is more typical, self-identification?
The common racial categories today (of which others are subcategories) are (though different names are sometimes used) Black, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American. Sometimes Pacific Islanders are considered a separate high-level group, rather than part of a top-level group with Asian. [0]
(Hispanic is an ethnic group that is usually treated as cutting across racial groups.)
> There are Indians, Central Asians, Arabs, Persians...
In terms of the usual racial categories, that's Asian, Asian, White, and White.
> Even 19th century racialists in their ignorant understanding of the world didn't lump 2/3 of the world's population into a miscellaneous category.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the old Mongoloid from the long-dominant threefold racial category -- which is the closest parallel in the old scheme to the modern Asian category but is even broader -- certainly did so even more than one could argue that "Asian" does in the dominant modern scheme.
[0] See, e.g., the categories used by the US Census (and the US government more generally, which do break out Pacific Islanders separately) http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
The claim that race is too murky a concept to pin down is generally invoked in cases like this; observed preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged races. If race can't exist, the argument implies, neither can racism. Always ask who wins if we allow ourselves to believe this.
The truth is that racism does exist, and we can test for it using methods that are repeatable in experiment. Race is not "meaningless" in this country, and anyone claiming so is selling you something.
As for hispanic, that's an ethnonym, i.e. an ethnic group, that's exactly my point. This is how we talk in say the Netherlands about what you call the 'racial debate', on the basis of ethnicities like hispanic. And these ethnicities can indeed comprise of black peoples, and within that context we can and do, all the time, talk about racism and discrimination, but that's wholly different from the notion that the human race has different subraces, a black, white, yellow whatever, that's a ridiculously silly and outdated sociological model and anyone claiming otherwise is terribly ignorant.
As for 'who wins if we allow ourselves to believe', really? Do you really base your beliefs on who wins, rather than on what is true?
Anyway, maybe this wasn't clear, when I say race isn't a thing I'm saying it's not a tenable scientific theory of human or biological taxonomy.
That doesn't mean that race as an erroneous social construct doesn't exist in the minds of people. In that way, race as a concept is still very much alive. But when someone says 'Asian is not a race', I think it's important to also note that black or hispanic or white, isn't, either, it's a social construct that is outdated, silly and that we should move past. Just like when people say 'homosexuality is a choice', when scientifically this is wrong, doesn't mean that this idea is not very much alive in the minds of some people. But when someone makes mention of it, it's important to note that it's a wrongful belief that homosexuality is a choice.
Some quick references for those who're unfamiliar with race as a social construct:
> As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, historians, cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct—a particular way that some people talk about themselves and others.
> Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race", following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.
> Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realized that although the genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1–3% (instead of the previously assumed 1%), the types of variations do not support notion of genetically defined races. Venter said, "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."
> Stephan Palmié asserted that race "is not a thing but a social relation"; or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym", "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference." As such, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: History and social relationships will.
Like a black person from Nigeria has very different experiences than a black Amercian, but black people from LA and NYC probably have a lot to relate about.
Besides which, the US as a country has put 100's of years of effort into making black a race through the force of law and through societal pressure.
Weird. Don't you think? :)
Do I get to raise interest rates?
How about being a credible candidate for US President?
Can I pay money to fuck kids and spend only 5 years in jail?
We (asian men) are well represented in tech--even when I was a kid, MIT specifically said they did not consider Asian as a underrepresented ethnic group.