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Comment by gyc | Hacker News Reader

While the article is well worth reading, I was bothered by the article implicitly defining Asians as not counting towards a diverse workforce. I admit my point is unrelated to the bigger points of the article.

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This is quite true. Recently I've seen where neither Chinese nor Indians are counted as minorities. I think what happens is once a minority makes it then you're no longer considered a minority in some discussions... It should be noted Chinese in California were highly discriminated against in law till the 50s and 60s (could not own land, for example) so its not as though they had it "easy". They had to work hard to get to where they are. on the other hand I get it we want to lift up the classes which have not made it yet so once a current minority makes it we work toward integrating left out minorities till one day no one is a minority, economically speaking

I read it as more so that Chinese and Indians are overrepresented by population in tech sector jobs. So while they are culturally minorities, in the workforce that might not be the case.

Don't forget that the tech sector hires globally, and Chinese and Indians are the majority ethnicities in the world.

Perhaps you meant "plurality ethnicities of the world," which is basically correct mathematically. A world with lots of ethnicities would be hard put to have two majority ethnicities. Wordage quibble aside, yes, I would expect analysis of workplace diversity in the United States to treat east Asian people and south Asian people (who in both groups in the United States are mostly recent immigrants, often but not always from families with fairly high levels of completed schooling and occupations with above-median salaries) as contributing to workplace diversity differently from other minority ethnic groups in the United States, as counted in official statistics, because those groups often include people from families who have historically been poor and with lower rates of completed schooling and lower salaries than the national average.

It would be unrealistic to expect workers in any one local workforce of a particular occupation to match exactly the overall national ethnic proportion (or even the overall national male:female ratio). Local distributions of people by ethnicity are not the same as the national distribution, in almost every locality, and preferences for pursuing various occupations are not culturally the same across all ethnic groups. But socially perceived ethnicity also influences personal opportunities,[1] so smart employers go out of their way to look for talented people who have something to contribute not just in the usual places, but in all the places the employers' desire to hire talented people can be communicated.

[1] http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm

That link you provide is an awful lot of anecdotes and ascribes a lot of things to 'stereotypes'. In other words, while the reasons for the different experiences he relates could have been myriad, he always ascribes them to a (positive?) stereotype.

If that's how I'm going to analyze my life, I had better be well prepared for weird things. It's silly to view my life trough the lens of stereotypes. Why did my parents not send me to private school? Stereotype. Why did that person turn me down for a date? Stereotype. Why was I encouraged to do X? Stereotype.

These days whenever I point out I'm a member of a minority by being Jewish I am practically laughed at.

Strangely enough, our "not" being a minority doesn't seem to stop people shooting up our community centers or pushing us onto train tracks so much as make it excusable.

While I do not want to take away from the large struggles that African Americans and hispanics/latinos face (I very well understand them, having attended a public high school in the NYC suburbs with over 70% being black in one of the most affluent counties in the US, where most of the affluent white parents moved their kids to nearby top 100 public schools or private schools), as a Korean American, I have encountered subtle reverse discrimination. It is partly due to luck that I have overcome the effects of such discrimination to succeed.

I would like to see us move towards a help people who need it mentality, and not have to worry so much about the ethnicity of the person who needs it. I realize that this isn't quite possible currently due to the strong correlation between the two at the moment, but it is the long term goal that would prevent this type of issue from perpetuating.

Happy to answer this. At the very top of the story, I linked to my own family history, which I wrote a year ago. I am both white and Asian and it's true that my parents and grandparents worked incredibly hard to get to where they are in Silicon Valley -- through both poverty and war. However, the point of this story was to dissect exactly how there are substantially different structural barriers that face both African-Americans and Latinos in post-war California. I don't think pointing this out takes away or diminishes the things that my family had to overcome to succeed in America as immigrants.

Because diversity isn't intended to make class photos more colorful but to include members of marginalized communities in more powerful circles.

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