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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> One where if I call out that our board has too many white men

With only 1 woman on facebook's board of 9, men are considerably over-represented. But white people are not.

The board has 5 non-hispanic white people, 3 jewish, and 1 black. US demographics for those groups are 60%, 1.77%, and 12.6%.

This means white people are 92% represented, black 88%, and jewish 1880%.

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"Jewish" and "white" are not considered to be mutually exclusive. It's very odd to see that categorization. Why do you group them like that?

A Jewish friend of mine once told me to pay attention to instances where they were classified as white or not and, dang, was she right. She called it being _selectively_ white. I think this is a good example of that.

Asians get the same treatment, though. They're the minority that gets forgotten about, because it doesn't fit some convenient narrative of e.g. "White males are dominating STEM fields", or "Minorities are discriminated against and thus fail to achieve success and affirmation".

They were treated as a separate group throughout most of Europe's history, and faced extreme prejudice and suffering because of it. Hardly seems fair to dilute their achievements and experience by lumping them under 'white'.

To the point, they are orthogonal and it's an incorrect comparison (regardless of any viewpoint on diversity).

In fact, even "Hispanic" and "white" are not considered to be mutually exclusive! These ethnic classifications are just weird.

For me (a Hispanic) it's odd to see any race categorization at all, it seems like an obsession for both right and left wings in the US. Why does it matter so much? White and Hispanic is not mutually exclusive in a lot of cases, the same for Black and Hispanic or Native American and Hispanic, in most cases it's difficult to even set a race tag.

Race used by statistics and government is of course a simplification, so if you have to do it, you kinda need to embrace the simplicity of it. Personally I think the term caucasian works well.

Jewish has of course a historic racial component, but practically (again, the simplicity) is more like an identity such as "hispanic". So if you are white hispanic, you're white. If you are jewish, you are white. If you're a black hispanic, you tick the box for black.

How are the jewish people 'white'? Are black people white? Arabs? How are YOU drawing the line?

Most of the Ashkenazi Jews are certainly white, as in they have white skin. I’d say that even the Sephardic Jews would be considered white based on their skin color alone. But categorizing people by skin color is one of the stupidest things ever, though, as I for myself am white (as in I have white skin) while my brother is more brownish, the reason for that being that our father is white-skinned while our mother is more dark-skinned.

Is zuckerberg white or jewish?

I wonder what is the correct way to look at the board representation. Sure you can use gender or race (are Jew's white or a separate race?). But what about BMI, hair color, eye color, height, sexual orientation, gender identification or index-ring finger ratio. How do we decide on which demographics we want to equalize? Surely, whatever board we decide on there will be one set of attributes which will show an unfair distribution.

It's out of topic, I know, but there's something I've wondered for a long time: if a Spanish person immigrates to the USA, do they count as Hispanic?

All the jewish people I know are white, so I am not sure these categories make sense. It may make more sense to refer to caucasians (albeit a broad category).

If the goal is diversity then I'm not sure "white" makes sense. If the goal is to be culturally diverse, then yes jewish people tend to have different experiences and culture than other "whites".

Most of the time people use the word “caucasian” because it seems somehow more “technical” or “scientific” than saying “white people”. It’s an unfortunate word, for sure.

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