So if you're asking what you should do, the answer is: the exact opposite of whatever you're doing now.
Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. If mistakes are being made because of clueless action, then having them "do the opposite" is still going result in clueless actions. The proper antidote is honest and open communication.
The key takeaway is that her environments didn't foster this communication. I doubt that the majority of the environments she was in had enough capacity for self-awareness and introspection to make such a thing easy and apparent. I would also posit, that the very mechanical pattern-matching way we currently implement "political correctness" is counterproductive in this way. I wonder if the fear around issues of race and group inclusiveness didn't drive the HR response she described.
Political correctness shouldn't be about enforcing superficial behavior. It should be about the epistemic health of a group. It should be about how well a group can discover and absorb cultural issues is isn't yet aware of.
There is no definition for a diverse group, but her one sample isn't diverse. Google searched "Picture of Diverse People" http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/056/19e/34082f9.jp...
The reality is that yes, people are going to feel more comfortable with people who are like them. I don't see that changing any time soon, and I don't fault her for that feeling of relief. But it's disingenuous at best to say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with" is the solution, or even a solution, for how to deal with diversity. The average group of 10 Americans will have one black person and six non-Latino whites. It's understandable for that situation to make you uncomfortable, just as I'd probably be at least mildly uncomfortable on a team with six blacks, a Chinese person, an Indian, and a Hispanic. I'm open to suggestions to make it easier, but if the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes, I really don't know what to do.
No, she wasn't "naturally conformant", saying she was is a bit of racism on your part.
In the very next paragraph:
"After The Home Depot, I took a position at a lottery/parimutuel company. I returned to being the only black woman, but the team there wasn’t very close knit so everybody did their own thing, did their job, and went home."
It makes it clear that the issue is not a lack of racial homogeneity, but racism, especially when combined with a cliquish work environment.
With the above quote, the author directly refutes your claim that "the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes".
The author does not say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with", but consistently says "My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted."
(It's also a bit weird that people keep calling that example 'non-diverse', when entirely-white groups of developers are still the norm. Even a predominantly white group -- but with some people of colour -- is unusually diverse in this field, sadly.)
By this definition, a team of white, south asian and east asian people is diverse. A team of black Americans is not.
You seem to be using some alternate definition - I'm guessing diversity for you means "sufficient numbers of non-Asian minorities", but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Let's take the immediately preceding example, where the author had a black woman as a supervisor. The author describes this as 'diversity lightning'. If you interpret this narrowly, this makes absolutely no sense: there's no way in which a single person can be considered diverse. On the other hand, if you think about it at an environmental or company level, things look different.
Suppose we take a random US tech company's employees and dump them in a vase. (Let's ignore the ethical issues with this for a moment.) At this point, we'd expect the odds of a random draw to reflect the tech industry's demographics, which is to say, predominantly white and asian males. If you draw this 'predominantly black' development team from the vase, though, you need to update your priors. You probably shouldn't calculate your posterior as 'everyone at this company is black' -- but you'd still probably guess that you're looking at a tech company where there are more black people and women than average. Which is to say, you'd expect that the company as a whole was more diverse.
I think this second reading is a lot more charitable to the author. I also think it's the more interesting reading; the demographic representation in a small group is subject to a huge amount of randomness, but the demographics of a entire organization are more telling, and can reveal more interesting things about policy and bias. As a community, software people are normally biased toward systems-level thinking; it's weird to me that in this particular issue people have this laser-focus on small groups and tokenism.
[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man - basically the opposite of a straw man.