7 ms·

I'm very happy to see this. I grew up in a town that, before I was born, decided to actively integrate (from being an historically all white, wealthy suburb) an

• jedberg 10y ago
  > silicon valley white Interesting term. Does that basically mean Asian (both eastern and southeastern) and White?
  • throwa34567 10y ago
    Yeah, I don't know how common the phrase is, but that's what I and the other folks I know who say it basically mean.
    • differentView 10y ago
      Does the term exclude all non-whites/Asians, regardless of upbringing, education, and background?
  • vostok 10y ago
    And South Asian!
  • nonce42 10y ago
    My prediction is in 20 years Asian will be considered part of white. Maybe it's just being in the Silicon Valley bubble, but it already feels much of the way there. (Not trying to offend anyone, but feel safer with throwaway account.)
    • tptacek 10y ago
      This isn't a crazy prediction. "White" means a lot less than people pretend it does. Before the 20th Century, it excluded many European ethnicities. At various points, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jewish people have been "non-white". Solidarity among the relatively fair-skinned only became a thing during the fight to perpetuate Jim Crow, and as a response to the Great Migration. It's hard to pin this down because there's a powerful cultural normalization effect around "whiteness"; we accept the notion that there are "white", "black", "latino", and "Asian" people, in part due to history and in part because breaking "white" down further would be cumbersome. But it's worth remembering that while there really is a sui generis "black" culture (the US African American culture, a product of displacing millions of Africans and stripping them of their original culture), there isn't "white culture". Irish and German people don't have that much in common culturally: they don't share a language, they don't eat the same food, they don't listen to the same music, they don't have the same folklore. Since one important sense of the concept of "whiteness" is "membership in favored ethnicity", it's not unreasonable to predict that it will eventually expand to include non-European ethnicities, too.
      • mynameishere 10y ago
        Quit spreading lies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.5f2fa1480a59 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
        • tptacek 10y ago
          First, don't address me or anyone else on HN that way. Second: this post is playing a sneaky lawyer trick. It acknowledges --- ferociously --- that there's historically been a hierarchy among European ethnicities in the US, then frames "whiteness" exclusively in terms of the early 20th century, when --- as I said --- Jim Crow and the Great Migration forced a measure of solidarity among European ethnicities against encroachment from blacks. Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
• xienze 10y ago
  So, let's say you were born in China. Would you have a similar level of anxiety about never seeing anyone outside of your ethnic group? I find it very odd how white people are seemingly the only ethnic group so hung up on seeing people of different races one day-to-day basis. On a related note, if being around so many white people bothers you so much, why aren't you living in, say, East Palo Alto or Richmond?
  • djtriptych 10y ago
    Buuuut this isn't China. It's America. Ethnic diversity is part of the DNA here.
    • xienze 10y ago
      Buuuut the implicit claim is that not being around diversity is somehow bad for you.
      • remarkEon 10y ago
        I think the claim is actually this: not being around sufficient levels of diversity is somehow bad for you.
    • monkmartinez 10y ago
      Where are the "all" hispanic outreach programs in tech?
      • harryjo 10y ago
        http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/10/14/to-diversify-work-force-google-grants-1m-to-groups-aiding-silicon-valley.html http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/10/14/to-diversify-work-fo...
      • djtriptych 10y ago
        Fair to mention that Howard U does not discriminate on race in admissions.
• pram 10y ago
  What would an optimal diversity level be in your opinion? Should your child see a black person on a daily basis? Should the black people your child sees be from a diverse socioeconomic range? Should the black people be a mixture of African Americans and literal Africans?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• humannature 10y ago
  If you were white or asian (like most parents in the bay area) would you want to send your kids to a school with black and mexican kids with low test scores or prefer they attend a school full of mostly asians and whites with higher test scores?
• oh_sigh 10y ago
  > I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community How do you know this?
  • throwaway91111 10y ago
    "Better off" seems subjective, especially when looking at the particulars. I didn't grow up in a diverse community, and living in one now I certainly feel the lack. How do you quantify a cultural divide? How do you quantify what it means to you? Given your comment, I can guess, but that would be rude.
    • hindsightbias 10y ago
      I'm sure there are awesome monocultures and ideologies one can wrap themselves in permanently, but every one I've been in for an extended period looks like a prison in hindsight.
• humannature 10y ago
  "I worry when I realize my kid can go a week or more without seeing a black person" Why? what will happen to him if he doesn't see a black person? "and I'm disappointed in myself when I realize I have no black friends" Do you know why that is? Cause your not black. Black people like to hang out with black people, asians with asians, whites with whites, it's natural. The animal kingdom does this the world over. Do you see zebras hanging out with horses? Do you see tigers hanging out with lions? People feel more comfortable and like to hang out with people that look like them, it's genetic and human nature.
• dmix 10y ago
  > I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community. I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that. That plus living in a city like most young people are starting to do today, I find exposure to different cultures to be highly accessible with little investment. This is not really the result of forced integration policies but simply through technology, market options (restaurants, entertainment, etc) and proximity in dense housing areas. It's interesting that not long after the Civil Rights act passed (which included legislation to make mandatory increases in housing and school integration) that there was a big migration from cities to suburbanization starting in the 1970s - reducing integration in both schools and housing. Most people falsely believed 'white flight' to be a cultural thing when if fact it was largely the result of regulatory policy making. There's a great book about how local government policies was the largest cause of this shift towards suburbia: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933115157/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933115157/ I've read that statistically today's schools in the US are even more segregated than even before the civil rights act. Yet one could argue that despite this the young generation is the most open and accepting to other cultures than ever before. So I'm not sure that (mandatory) integration policies are a necessary construct in order to improve social conditions and relationships between communities/races - as much as it used to be. The solution may simply be to reverse a lot of the existing legislation that pushed so many communities away from dense naturally integrated urban areas to small towns and suburbs. Trying to improve economic and quality of education via integration is another question (I'm mostly looking at cultural considerations). Although I've also heard of mostly black charter schools in poor communities doing as well as public schools in upper class neighbourhoods. So, again, on the surface that seems to be more about access to quality services rather than racial integration. You have to be careful not to mistake the chicken for the egg.
  • Impossible 10y ago
    I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that. In my opinion the internet makes it just as easy to be culturally homogeneous if you want to. There are many people that, due to interest or necessity will be exposed to a variety of cultures, but you can just as easily filter your internet usage so you engage mostly with people that are like you. It doesn't help that on the internet, in text discussions, you don't know what someone's background is without research due to anonymity. For example, by default I assume everyone on HN is an upper middle class or wealthy white male in his mid-20s to early 40s, unless otherwise stated in the context of the comments, even though I know this isn't true. This creates the problem of, instead of viewing internet communities as diverse collections of people, they are viewed as stereotypical hive minds, further enforcing discrimination and stereotyped views of large groups of people.
• ancap 10y ago
  How do you know that everyone is "silicon valley white"? Perhaps they identify as black, or hispanic, or ticuna, or martian?
• FT_intern 10y ago
  > it's all "silicon valley white" You don't consider the thousands of immigrants who grew up in completely different cultures with different primary languages in Asia and Europe as diversity? Instead, you consider the American born Black person whose primary language is English and who grew up with American culture as "diversity"?
  • entee 10y ago
    Of course immigrants and different languages increase diversity. But it's also true that other people from within the US are critical to developing a balanced view of the world. A black person is going to have a very different experience that I will as a white dude, and we are all poorer for it when we don't know people with those experiences. The same goes for the white farmer who grew up on a ranch in Nebraska, I would love to know more of those people, they see the world differently than I do.
  • temp246810 10y ago
    This is precisely a point that irks me as well. It's fine if you want to lament the lack of black people in any given domain, but to generalize and say there is no diversity at all because a lack of black people is short changing not only the efforts of many people, but many people as well.
  • tptacek 10y ago
    Drive through the neighborhoods of Chicago, through enclaves of Irish, Polish, German, and Jewish people. You won't miss them: the signage will abruptly change to Polish, or the streets will be full of men in suits wearing their hair in payots. This is a form of diversity, to be sure. But it's not the kind we're concerned about. The problem here is the word "diversity", which is very easily hijacked to distort discussions. I think we're all pretty much on the same page that the concern being addressed here is the exclusion of specific, prominent ethnicities from SFBA tech culture, not the absolute number of different ethnicities being represented.