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> I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture

I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.

> Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship

Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then?

> lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.

Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.

If you've ever been Indian or Chinese in the US, you know the US is racist against you, just not in a way that excludes you from programming work. And, yeah, there's quite a bit of Indian-American senior leadership in Silicon Valley.

I live in Latin America now, and the universities almost all suck. Latin America culturally has the idea that universities are for job training and are basically all equivalent. China and, generally speaking, India instead place very high value on education and on good universities, and China also has a massive research budget. Latin America, broadly speaking, has zilch. The result is that in lists like https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... the top 100 universities include 11 in China, 4 in Singapore (which is largely Chinese), and 0 in Latin America. Most of India's IITs don't appear on that list for some reason, but they should — and the ones that do appear are the wrong ones.

Here in Buenos Aires, the University of Buenos Aires was badly damaged by Perón demanding loyalty oaths from the professors, driving those who valued their intellectual freedom out of the university and often out of Argentina entirely. A few years later, it was damaged further by an anti-Peronist military dictatorship attempting to purge it of Peronists https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos. The first computer in Latin America was lost in the shuffle. Decades of such intermittent political violence disproportionately affected the intellectual classes; the last dictatorship, backed by the US in its secret mass murders of political dissidents, notoriously blamed society's drug problems on "an excess of thinking" among students: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro Those intellectuals who could move abroad often did so, including Favaloro, who invented heart bypass surgery after refusing to swear loyalty to Perón, and Chaitin, the discoverer of the random number omega at the heart of computability and the graph-coloring formulation of the compiler register allocation problem.

Despite all that, the University of Buenos Aires is still one of the best five or so universities in Latin America. That may give you a clue as to how bad the situation is in places like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Honduras, or even the poorer provinces of Argentina.

>I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.

You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese? That says more about your imagination than it does America.

> You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese?

I don't know why you infer that from my comment. I am merely responding to the GP's post which I disagree with. I believe US, or at least Silicon Valley which I am very familiar with, is one of the least racist place. At the same time, it is also highly classist.

Unfortunately, race and class correlate for American blacks. Not so for, say, Nigerian blacks because the ones able to migrate from Nigeria to the US are already the privileged ones in their society. Same goes for immigrants from India, China, Philippines or Egypt.

Look at class, not race, if you really want to understand the SV demographics.

>I don't know why you infer that from my comment. I am merely responding to the GP's post which I disagree with. I believe US, or at least Silicon Valley which I am very familiar with, is one of the least racist place. At the same time, it is also highly classist.

I don't think you are responding to the other poster's point at all. I think you made up your own, and that's exactly what I pointed out. Because it's so facially asinine.

>Look at class, not race, if you really want to understand the SV demographics.

Weird, I thought we are talking about American culture, not just SV? Anything else you want to swap in so you can make your obtuse points?

> Weird, I thought we are talking about American culture, not just SV?

kragen's post literally starts with "As a white software engineer...", so I am addressing the context of being a software engineer, i.e. SV (the metaphorical place, not actual physical location). Broader American culture is besides the point here.

I agree that SV (the actual physical location) and the US software industry are less racist than most of the rest of the US. But they're still way more racist than, say, Porto Alegre or Caracas, which are no egalitarian utopias either. And the reason for this is, in fact, the broader culture of the US. (Not “American culture” because that would affect Brazil and Venezuela just as much as the US.)

There are significant numbers of upper-middle-class black people in the US, and there have been for decades now. Their kids still don't end up as programmers in significant numbers. White rednecks' kids do; they're facing a pretty stiff uphill battle too, but a lot more of them prevail. That's racism, not just classism.

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>kragen's post literally starts with "As a white software engineer...", so I am addressing the context of being a software engineer, i.e. SV (the metaphorical place, not actual physical location). Broader American culture is besides the point here.

This is nonsense.