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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men?

a jewish guy and a half arab guy aren't exactly the best examples of the point this guy's trying to make.

there's also no shortage of asian and indian "key players" so ... i think this guy is trying to make one point, but accidentally making another point altogether, and then failing at it.

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I think the author's greater point is correct but you're right, those two are terrible choices. I also think most people would not stop and question whether Jobs & Zuck are "white" and that says something about how we pick and choose who is "white." I'm black and I remember a time in high school where I was planning a trip to a baseball game with my friends (who were white) and one friends' father told us "I don't like the idea of you three white kids in that neighborhood late at night." Which was funny because, as I said, I'm black but he certainly didn't see me as so in that context. People use race to describe how they think of another person as much as they use race to describe skin colors.

of the point this guy's trying to make

i think this guy

I think this post makes the article's point nicely.

(take another look at the article byline, and lookup the author on Google)

well the point specifically said white men. not men, white men. i was reacting to the content - what does it matter who wrote it? aren't we discussing ideas here?

The article was written by a woman, so why would you assume it was written by a man? We're discussing ideas, yes, and those ideas have a lot to do with gender.

> so why would you assume it was written by a man?

i dunno, maybe it's because i'm sexist, misogynist asshole that supports the patriarchy?

you people are making a mockery of yourselves, to be honest. it's kind of pathetic.

Why do you care about the gender of the author so much? I thought we were supposed to evaluate things based on merit...

Not the parent, but I can't be the only guy who uses "guy" as a synonym for "person" (i.e., not necessarily "male person").

She might be referring to the 36M African-Americans & 50M Hispanich-Americans in this country. So American still has a White majority at around 60% of the population.

In the year 2010, only 36 million African-Americans in the US, is that right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

Anyway, these groups are under-represented in the Technology field. I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually.

>I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually.

I'm not sure about Hispanics, but this is definitely a problem in many African-American communities. It's considered 'white' or essentially bending over for the system if you go to school and actually try.

I think that's the general idea. Going to school - rather than getting a job right away - is considered a waste of resources, or elitist and therefore a rejection of one's community.

For some reason, education does not carry the stigma of sports or the arts or business in these communities.

It is trendy to talk about Women in technology, but we need to think about Race and technology. Everyone notices it nobody wants to talk about it.

Coming from a poor black community I have heard that many times, but only from people that would never be able to obtain higher education for some reason outside of their control. I think it is more so an excuse, or a way to feel better about their own situation.

However, often times when someone has a valid opportunity it's usually encouraged

In what ways a jewish white man is not a white man ?

It's a serious question, are people of jewish faith not considered "white" in the US ?

it depends on who you ask.

and what decade you ask it in.

You know full well what decade we're in, and virtually everyone today outside an Aryan Nations get-together is going to call Zuckerberg a white guy.

you are delusional if you think jewish is uniformly accepted as 'white', even today.

it's not. full stop.

You call him delusional yet offer not one bit of real evidence.

It's complicated. Jewish is a religion as well as an ethnicity.

The much-before-CE cult turned into a religion turned into one of the longest running breeding experiments we have. The historical focus on internal tribal mating self-selected certain superpowers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence) that come in quite handy these days.

Also, this statement isn't proof of anything! Assuming white males have the same probability of being successful as any other demographic and there also happen to be more white male engineers, then it makes sense that the majority of "key players" in the computer industry will be white males!

It would be much more convincing if the author said X% in the industry are white males and Y% of CEOs/founders are white males.

It's important to separate the argument that society is failing in encouraging/promoting engineers outside of certain demographics and the argument that Silicon Valley is unfairly supporting one demographic over another.

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