I'll be very happy when everyone can just stop worrying about what race everyone else is. I understand the issue, but at what point does it sound ridiculous to even use the term minority when there are 1B+ Chinese and not much less Indian descendants around the world? In the tech world it is certainly ridiculous. Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity.
Interesting. What counts as minority though? Does Chinese? It feels like in Silicon Valley they don't qualify as minority, but maybe in business/government.
It's controversial because it's selectively applied and advocates for D&I know it.
There are plenty of Asians in tech (men and women) and yet we're always hearing about a "diversity" problem. This is why tech no longer uses the term minority - they use "underrepresented minority" instead.
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.
Only two very special types of racial minorities are over-represented - Indians and east asians(specifically Chinese) are overrepresented relative to their US population.
These groups are generally forgotten about or elided when talking about how Google or US tech has a diversity problem - there is just a diversity problem with blacks, latinos, and women, and my hunch is that it has nothing to do with tech being racist or sexist and has everything to do with either larger structural issues in the US, or people choosing through free will to not enter the field.
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.
It's also curious that everything that ever seems to be published on diversity - especially in technology - seems to focus either on the percentage of representation of black people or the percentage of representation of women. I guess this author focused on the percentage of representation of black people because he's black, and that impacts him, but just anecdotally based on the 25 years I've been doing this, I'd say that Indian people (men and women) are vastly overrepresented as a percentage of the tech workforce. Is that due to racial preferences for Indian people? Articles like this would seem to draw that conclusion - either the underrepresentation of black people is not due to racism or the overrepresentation of Indian people must be, correct? I also find it interesting that people are studying, say, the representation by gender and race but not, say, religion - how under/over represented are Jewish people or Muslim people in technology? Are there biases there?
The larger point is that minorities are more minor in tech than in the general population.
There are a lot of hispanic people in San Francisco. There are next to no hispanic people in startup offices in San Francisco. Unless they're cleaners, but I think we can all agree that doesn't count for what we're talking about.
Same for black people. There are many of them in the streets in San Francisco. Next to nobody in startup offices in San Francisco.
> this sort of overt discrimination appears to be rampant in certain tech circles
It's rampant in society, prevalent in most bureaucracies. It's minority essentialism, a subordination of entire minority groups to everyone else under the belief that these people, by virtue of their identity, cannot help themselves.
God that statement made me roll my eyes. It felt so condescending.
Let's totally forget you know, us Asians (people of color and a visible minority in the West) who contribute to tech companies at a high rate and who also have had to overcome racism, stereotypes, and artificial ceilings. Oh wait, we don't count when it comes to determining what contributes to diversity! Somewhere in the 20th and 21st century, our skin colour turned white and we're no different than white people.
I wonder when/if Asians (incl. Indians) will start to be recognized as being in a disproportionate majority or too-large minority in tech companies. Then, will diversity activists be demanding that companies hire fewer Asians and more white people? Somehow they've been ignored in most of these stories. I suppose because they don't fit the popular believe of white racism?
reply