What, pray tell, is your idea to increase diversity, and what have you personally done to increase diversity?
My idea? I don't need to have "my idea" to increase diversity. Other people have already had plenty of ideas. Better, they have discussed, researched, and critiqued those ideas. As a white guy, I'm unlikely to have any particularly good ideas, because I have little direct experience of the problem I'm trying to solve. I also try not to have ideas on products to create for the Chinese market, better approaches to goat herding, or the particle makeup of dark matter. I know I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to clutter the discussion talking like I am.
And what am I actually doing? A fair number of things, but the most important of them is to listen. I talk with actual people about their actual experiences. Via RSS and Twitter, I follow a lot of people who think and write about this stuff. I read studies on the topic. I read about America's incredibly fucked-up racial history, and about how we're still dealing with the effects of that today. I listen to actual minorities in tech about their actual experiences. And ones outside of tech, too.
I encourage you to try it. Because then you'd know that racial bias is widespread in the US despite "good intentions" [1]. You'd know that outbursts like this are a symptom of white fragility [2]. You'd know about the white savior complex, where a white person decides the only solution to racism is for them to go share their time and wisdom with those poor unfortunates, ignoring the structural issues that created the situation.
And then, once you get past the Racism 101 stuff, maybe you could help me and others who would like HN and the tech industry to have discussions on this that aren't somewhere on the horrific/remedial end of the spectrum. But take your time with the listening. It took me maybe 3 or 4 years of work. The hard part wasn't the learning, it was the unlearning of what I thought I knew. [3]
[1] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/implicit-test/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/culture/why-white-people-freak-out-w...
[3] http://bengtwendel.com/your-teacup-is-full-empty-your-cup/
Thank you, and keep being exactly what minorities need right now.
And for what it's worth, I'm as impressed as hell by people in their 20s today. As an old, I think I'm supposed to grumble about kids these days. But I see so many young-ish voices that are so much smarter about these topics than my cohort was. I have enormous hope for the future.