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Continents don't have cultures (and neither do ethnicities), people do. So what is your point again?

• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  The point is that the statement “Asians value privacy less” doesn’t talk about “Asians” as a racial group, rather, it merely observes that for whatever historical/cultural/sociological reasons, a particular group of people, whom happen to live in a certain area of the globe, might be less predisposed to raise concerns about the privacy implications of their software engineering practices. Thus the claim that the original comment was racist is false in my opinion. Another argument against this claim would be the fact that Asian software engineers (here “Asian” is used in the racial sense) raised in Western countries with a strong culture of privacy, seem to be just as privacy conscious as their Caucasian counterparts.
  • jpoesen 4y ago
    I get your point, and I should have said "you did a prejudice there" instead of "you did a casual racism", because the OP's opinion did not express systemic oppression or a belief that (in this case) 'Asians' are inferior as a whole to other ethnicities. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to correct myself. That said, both the original post and several comments, including this comment's parent, are equally prejudicial: attributing qualities to large groups of people based on location or ethnicity and solely relying on anecdotal evidence as opposed to controlled and peer-reviewed study. Case in point: are there any studies to back up the claim that 'Asian' folks raised in Western countries are more privacy conscious than their 'natively raised' counterparts?
    • twawaaay 4y ago
      I am not actively thinking about "asians" in a racist way. For me this is a term that describes people coming from certain geographical background which is distinct from say "europeans" or "north americans" or "africans" or "indians" or "latinos". It is useful term because all these groups come from different environment with a different history and all are distinct enough from other environments that it makes the name useful to describe certain things. It does not mean that all asians or europeans are the same. Any thinking person understands that talking in general is useful to describe certain things but also understand there is much more subtlety and exceptions under every statement like that. So we know that people from different backgrounds have different IQs, education or predisposition to different health issues. It is not racist, these are just statements of facts. Racist is when you try to take these facts and paint them to discriminate or entice discrimination against people just for the fact they share same background. So when I say that "asians typically care less for privacy" is a statement of fact. You have to contend with the fact that not all people around the world care about privacy the same way and the moment you do so you understand there are some identifiable groups of people that care less. If I somehow did this to communicate that asians are somehow worth less as people because they care about privacy that would be racist. That would be coming as view of a person from a western country somehow telling that people who do not value same things as me are somehow worth less. Which is a stupid an narrow way of thinking about the world. When I say "asians value privacy less" and you say "this is prejudice/racism against asians" what it really is is your racist brain. You are saying that your western values are better than values of people coming from some other region. Part of being racist is being closed to the idea that other peoples have different values that aren't necessarily better or worse.