Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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

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