What It's Like to Be Black or Female in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Be Black or Female in Silicon Valley

bloomberg.com

34 pointsprostoalex31 comments

I think it is a little strange to lump in Asian and Indian Americans as having white privilege.

I think it says more about "white privilege" than anything else.

They are well represented, therefore they are privileged, therefore they are white. I think. Pretty straightforward logic, it seems to me.

I understand why you may be serious when you say this, but the authors are hand waving when they talk about white privilege because it's long winded and tangential to the experience of the individuals profiled to explain that Asian and Indian Americans often have privilege in the tech industry that black and Hispanic Americans aren't granted. If you take an honest appraisal of the social landscape and the prevalent racial stereotypes in the United States you would quickly understand why the authors hand waved in that way.

Pedantic comments like yours do little to move the conversation forward they merely distract from the real issues. It's really frustrating to click through into what I hope would be a serious discussion about discrimination in the industry and find instead HN commenters are trying to score pedantic points. This would be less frustrating if you made a substantive comment about how different groups face different stereotypes rather than attempting to undermine the original article due to its failure to be specific enough in its analysis of who is granted privilege.

When you say Indian American do you mean Middle Eastern Indian, or Native American Indian?

Indian is not in the middle-east, it is South Asia

Pedantic comments like yours do little to move the conversation forward they merely distract from the real issues.

I would argue that making incorrect and oversimplified premises is far more distracting to real issues than some person's brief pedantic comment. You can't have a debate if you start by poisoning the well and declaring false axioms.

Is it oversimplified for a short article? Maybe if it were an a longer or academic piece I would agree with you. But the focus of the article is how individuals deal with bias against social groups they belong to moreso than which groups are granted privilege. Not every article needs to be an exhaustive treatise that engages every concept exhaustively.

For what it's worth, the linked article never actually uses the term "white privilege".

It would be excellent to have some better verbage for what the authors are trying to express. There are some components of white privilege that apply in this case, and some that don't. Obviously, Asian and Indian Americans don't get the benefit of "you're white and I'm white, so I like you," but they do get the benefit of some kind of "expectation of quality." And there's probably a third component, which may be closer to the authors' original intent: "you have similar cultural values to me, so I like you."

I think it's useful to consider those components separately. They suggest different vectors of attack against these endemic problems.

My thinking here is framed by John Ogbu's concept of the involuntary minority: all the minorities that became minorities in America by choice are doing pretty well; all of the minorities that were made minorities in America by force (either conquered in situ or brought by force) are doing pretty poorly. It takes a shoe-horn to fit native-blooded Hispanics into that dichotomy, but it helps there too.

It makes me laugh a little. If you look at wealth by race, Asians (East Asians) out earn whites. Does that mean I (as a white person) should point out their "Asian privilege"?

Who said anything about Asian and Indian Americans having white privilege? (The linked article doesn't...). Of course, they are quite well represented in the tech industry, but that neither means Asian and Indian Americans have the full constellation of cultural presumptions as default referred to by "white privilege", nor that the tech industry has no need to investigate its issues with diversity. Asian and Indian Americans have their particular struggles as minorities, with some commonalities with and some differences from other minorities' struggles.

There's the concept of passing: a minority group that might be discriminated against in one context is accepted as and afforded the privileges of a member of the majority group in another context, often to close ranks against a different minority group the majority sees as more of a threat.

As nemothekid says, it does say a lot about white privilege in that white privilege is a social institution that can be expanded or retracted. For instance, it was expanded to include the Irish, who were once viewed as degenerates. There is still a legacy of anti-Irish sentiment, but they've largely been accepted into the fold.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

These large corporations only want more female and diverse workforce because they have the perception that they can pay these groups less than their white male counterparts. They claim what they're doing is completely egalitarian, but in reality they abhor the idea of equal pay. Just look at the recent spat with Satya Nadella:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/10/microsoft-...

All this comes down to is paying workers less under the guise of social progress. It's absolutely disgusting.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

These large corporations only want a more female and diverse workforce because they have the perception that they can pay these groups less than their white male counterparts. They claim what they're doing is completely egalitarian, but in reality they abhor the idea of equal pay. Just look at the recent spat with Satya Nadella:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/10/microsoft-...

All this comes down to is paying workers less under the guise of social progress. It's absolutely disgusting.

Why do people look for problems where there arent any?

Lol right... we should just go ahead and close the racism and sexism tickests - wontfix, worksforme. /s

Why do you assume there aren't problems because you haven't experienced them?

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