9 ms·

How the Asians Became White

139 points by kevbin 12y ago

beloch 12y ago
Enforcing racial hiring quotas is probably the worst way to address inequalities amongst minority groups. It enforces the stereotype that minorities are inferior and don't deserve the jobs their appearance has given them. If you look at, for example, blacks in the U.S., two things stand out rather starkly: Poverty and incarceration rates. On average, kids in wealthy, stable, two-parent families do better than kids in poor single-parent households. Poverty and incarceration rates for blacks in the U.S. are significantly higher than for whites or asians. To compound matters, schools/teachers in poor areas are often of poorer quality than schools in rich areas. The U.S. has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The for-profit prison system and complicit judges/politicians have created this sad state of affairs. This needs to change. One way to accomplish this might be for state and federal governments to take control of the prison system. More public funding needs to be directed towards schools and youth programs in poor areas. More money needs to be focused on easing poverty. Give these kids back their parents, reduce the desperation of extreme poverty their families experience, and give them quality education. Do all this, and we won't still be talking about race-based hiring practices a generation from now. In general, children are an investment in the future and the U.S. has not been investing in all children equally. Edit: Note that I am Canadian. Disproportionate incarceration, poverty, and inferior schooling are all problems faced by (many) first nations communities up here, only with the added difficulty that acting to change any of these is guaranteed to turn into a political fecal-storm. The feds recently tried to improve the education system, but it basically blew up in their faces and undermined the AFN (assembly of first nations) in the process.
- xienze 12y ago
  > Give these kids back their parents What exactly does this mean? The government didn't create all those single parent households. I mean, who exactly are you blaming here?
  - bluthru 12y ago
    Racial profiling, three strikes rule, and the drug war for starters.
    - xienze 12y ago
      Pales in comparison to baby daddies up and leaving the household. That's a cultural problem.
      - bluthru 12y ago
        I'd say it's more of an economic problem. Sex is free. The pill, IUD, nuvaring, and other forms of low-effort birth control are not. Combine that with the fact that a lot of poor young women have nothing to give their lives purpose except a baby, and all of a sudden single-parent demand is created for procreation.
      - trustfundbaby 12y ago
        > Pales in comparison to baby daddies up and leaving the household Thats an interesting assertion. Do you have any data to back that up? ... because I'd posit that these cultural "problems" that you mention a. pale in comparison to the cumulative effect of Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of explicit racist housing policy from the federal government b. are probably a side effect of a.
        NoPiece 12y ago
        The best data to support his assertion is the out of wedlock birthrate. Up until the 60s, in spite of all the horrific racism, the out of wedlock birth rate was still below 20% for african americans. As of 2010, it was 73%. http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/files/2013/06/moynihan-births-wedlock.jpg http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/files/2013/06/m...
        trustfundbaby 12y ago
- tootie 12y ago
  The idea behind quotas isn't that minorities are inferior and need help, it's that they are equal and being discriminated against unless the law prevents it.
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  > One way to accomplish this might be for state and federal governments to take control of the prison system. While I'm not saying this is wrong, given there is a privatized system I've always thought; If the prison is private they should pay the prisons an absolute minimum fee for running costs and large bonuses based on re-offence rates. Something like if a prisoner has held a job and not re-offended in the 3 years post release they get a significant bonus. At the moment it there is an incentive to keep them criminals so you'll see them back for even longer stays. And given past behaviour in this industry I imagine this thinking is in action at some penitentiaries.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Bringing up things like poverty or parental education is a red herring. An Asian student from a family earning $0-10k has a higher average SAT math score than a black student from a family earning $70k+. (Data was leaked from the college board in 1995. I'm not aware of more current data - anyone else? Specifically, I'm looking for a data set which slices some sort of outcome score by (race, income) pairs.) http://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.in/2013/10/black-suits-gowns-skin-sat-scores-by.html http://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.in/2013/10/black-suits-... I'm not sure what you mean by "easing poverty" or "desperation...their families experience". Could you explicitly list what good/services poor children lack which cause them to underperform?
  - trustfundbaby 12y ago
    > An Asian student from a family earning $0-10k has a higher average SAT math score than a black student from a family earning $70k+. This is true but heres something to consider, my feeling is that Asian Americans are what I consider newer immigrants to America. My understanding is that they actually started to come here in large numbers after 1965 when the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments eliminated racial/nationality-based discrimination in immigration quotas. Why is this important? I think that you'll find that if you compare the SAT scores of Asian Americans to recent black immigrants to the United States (Nigerians, Ghanaians and jamaicans for example), you might find that their scores are much closer than your initial comparison. The reason for that is what I call the immigrant effect ... explained by this quote from a David Brooks NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=2&referrer=&assetType=nyt_now http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives... "Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students"
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      My only point is that parental income is not driving force behind racial achievement gaps. Perhaps immigrant status is the driving force behind the Asian/Black and Asian/White gaps. But then what causes the Asian/Mexican gap? Also, if you have data showing Nigerian/Ghanaian/Jamaican immigrants do as well as Asians, or the original source for Amy Chua's data, I'd love to see it.
- mh_yam 12y ago
  >>> More public funding needs to be directed towards schools and youth programs in poor areas. More money needs to be focused on easing poverty. Give these kids back their parents, reduce the desperation of extreme poverty their families experience, and give them quality education. Do all this, and we won't still be talking about race-based hiring practices a generation from now. There is an enormous amount of public funding going to these very things right now and it doesn't seem to have changed anything. The stereotypical black family (missing father, poor single mother) is not the result of a lack of action on the part of government. The government did not cause parents to abandon their children. It is the result of the changing message of mass media, celebrity icons, and social trends-from one that rewards integrity, and hard work to one that glorifies violence, 'thug' culture, and insubordination.
  - brown_ghost 12y ago
    >>>The stereotypical black family (missing father, poor single mother) is not the result of a lack of action on the part of government. It's not lack of action...our crazy drug policies are a direct contributor to this situation, and it's by design.
firstOrder 12y ago
From the Google NY Times article ( http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-employee-data-illustrating-techs-diversity-challenge http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp... ) > Thirty percent of Googles 46,170 employees worldwide are women, the company said, and 17 percent of its technical employees are women....Of its United States employees... 2 percent are black ... Of Googles technical staff, 60 percent are white, 1 percent are black...Though Google did not specifically say how it planned to change the numbers, it said that it hoped releasing them would start a dialogue. The company had made changes in the past to recruit and retain women... Then it goes on and on about women. If 30% overall and 17% technical are women, compared to 2% and 1% for black, it sounds like women have it relatively good. Many of my CS classes had more black guys than women of any color. Yet there is almost no discussion of this. It's Jesse Jackson who prompted that this data be released. While this is about Google, they've been the most open and forthright about it in releasing the data. The situation is widespread through the Valley. I hear happy horseshit about Watsi and other nonsense in the Valley. Begin at the source - with the LPs of VC's exploiting mostly young talent in the various startups - startups where 1% of the hired technical workers are black, if that.
fishywang 12y ago
I guess most people are not aware of California SCA5 [1] That's basically an idea to brutally "reflect the demographics of the country". And that's actually racist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Constitutional_Amendment_No.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Constitutional_Amendmen...
tokenadult 12y ago
Volokh here is decrying the same kinds of policies that I decry, for many of the same reasons. Forcing people into Procrustean categories more narrow than "citizen" for the people of one country builds division in the country and keeps people from treating their neighbors humanely as their fellow human beings. That kind of categorization was wrong and a moral outrage in the days of Jim Crow legally enforced segregation and it is still a bad idea today, even to correct the previous wrong. I care about this issue deeply. I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement. One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest. It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up. One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking. Why not treat all of my neighbors as individuals, one at a time? And anyway I've seen this issue go wrong for people in other countries. Also in my childhood, in the other state I lived in growing up, I had a classmate in the early 1970s who would get on the school bus each day wearing a button that said "Serb Power." I thought that was very strange, because I knew my history well enough to know that Serbia hadn't been an independent country since Yugoslavia was formed after World War I. And, anyway, he was living in the United States and had been born here, so why was he so concerned about Serb power? We all found out during the early 1990s how crazy many people in Yugoslavia were about former historical grievances, which made that country disintegrate and killed many innocent people born long after the grievances should have been forgotten. Most reporting to the federal government about "race" and "ethnicity" is based on the U.S. Census bureau definitions for ethnicity and race categories, which in turn are based on regulations from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which were announced on 30 October 1997 http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards to take effect no later than 1 January 2003 for data collection by all federal agencies. You can look up the detailed category definitions on the website of the United States Bureau of the Census. As the Census Bureau itself notes, "U.S. federal government agencies must adhere to standards issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in October 1997, which specify that race and Hispanic origin (also known as ethnicity) are two separate and distinct concepts. These standards generally reflect a social definition of race and ethnicity recognized in this country and they do not conform to any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. The standards include five minimum categories for data on race: "American Indian or Alaska Native," "Asian," "Black or African American," "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander," and "White." There are two minimum categories for data on ethnicity: "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not Hispanic or Latino." The concept of race reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables." https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=191 https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=191 It's politics all the way down. I'd be happy to see the United States move in the direction of treating individuals like individuals, equal before the law and all deserving full legal protection of civil rights, period.
Bahamut 12y ago
As a Korean, I don't think I've ever been called white - the article does mention some good points, but I don't think its mention about asians being mistaken for whites is well-articulated.
- chetanahuja 12y ago
  This was linked from the original article in lieu of listing such examples directly in the article: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1208147286.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1208147286.shtml
- thkim 12y ago
  Surely nobody's going to call an Asian a white -- I think he just meant to say that it's becoming less meaningful to group Asians among minorities in demographic analysis, perhaps because Asians are showing similar pattern as "whites".
fatjokes 12y ago
I doubt Asians have integrated into "white" society the way American Jews, Irish and Italians have. E.g., their example of interracial marriage is heavily imbalanced by gender.
- dba7dba 12y ago
  > their example of interracial marriage is heavily imbalanced by gender. I read somewhere Asian women is most desired by men of other races while Asian men is least desired by women of other races. Read that somewhere... No, Asian is not white.
Mangalor 12y ago
> My point is simply that, if one thinks that the problem is lack of “reflecti[on of] the demographics of the country,” “white[s]” aren’t the problem. I don't think anyone is saying that white men are a "problem". There's so much defensiveness in these counter-articles coming out as though this is some specific attack on white males. I don't think Google was trying to shame itself over its own white male percentages, it was just exposing its own racial breakdown data instead of previously keeping it a secret.
- brighteyes 12y ago
  In articles about the google diversity numbers, many people were "shocked by how overwhelmingly white and male they are" and similar things. The implication is clearly that overrepresentation of white males is a problem. Hence white males are part of the problem. It's obvious why this makes many people defensive, even though there is in fact a problem.
  - bruceb 12y ago
    The term white male needs to stop being used as an epithet. Of course there is going to be a backlash from X when you say there are too many of X. Saying we need more Y, Z, etc makes the same point without needless turning X against the goal of a more balances company, school, gov't etc.
- xienze 12y ago
  People get defensive because the image presented is precisely that there's a problem with demographics being "too white" and "too male". For instance, today CNN presented this: http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-males/index.html?iid=EL http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-male... ("Google: Overwhelmingly white and male") > I don't think Google was trying to shame itself over its own white male percentages I'm not sure what other conclusion you can draw when Google says "we're not where we want to be" and the giant pie chart slices are 70% male, 61% white. They were apologizing and acting contrite about _something_, don't you think? The implicit message is "we did a bad thing hiring too many white males." It absolutely is an attack -- not by Google directly, but by our culture which strives to make whites feel ashamed about who they are. I don't blame Google, they're looking out for their best interests. They don't want to get slammed for having too many white dudes in their ranks.
hiroaki 12y ago
As a South Asian Indian, I am puzzled by ethnicity questionnaires which never have an option that seems appropriate. "White" seems wrong as does "Caucasian", even if we are supposedly anthropologically related. "Asian" seems to refer to Asians except for persons of the Indian sub-continent. And "Indian" refers to American Indians. Sigh...
- enneff 12y ago
  Woah woah! "Indian" should not be used refer to Native Americans in a questionnaire!
  - harryh 12y ago
    Nah, you're Indians! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VMY8X9rU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VMY8X9rU8
  - splintercell 12y ago
    That's not the point. The point is, its super confusing to me(and possibly to Native Americans too) if 'Indian' is meant for one group or the other.
  - bignaj 12y ago
    Yeah man, big no-no there. Indian refers to the ones from Southeast Asia (i.e. you), not Native Americans.
  - majika 12y ago
    Nor should "Indian" be used to refer to South Asians. Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalis are not Indians.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Likewise, Tibetans living in India and Nepal are not Indian or Nepali (if these are ethnicities). Nepalis living in Bhutan are not Bhutanese. South Asia is pretty colorful (at least compared to Han-dominated East Asia). I do think they have "South Asian" as an option on many query forms now.
rtpg 12y ago
This article seems to think that White will turn into the "winner's category", but historically this is what that meant. "White" as a racial definition only exists to allow opposition to the "colored" races (for things like slavery, colonialization,etc).
deleted 12y ago
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- noobermin 12y ago
  The original sentence most likely contained the words "reflecting the demographics of the country."
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Asians are in an interesting position from a sociological perspective. They're "white" in the sense that they're largely implicit and they mostly blend in, but they have the (misfortune?) of being largely ignored, even by those concerned with social justice, in favor of other minorities. This is also evident in discussions about diversity in tech. On the other hand, white people are white people. They're always at the center of controversy and just about everything else, as is usual for a majority.
- bmmayer1 12y ago
  Is it possible that Asians are so successful in America precisely because they have been largely ignored in the pursuance of social justice?
  - thkim 12y ago
    Not in a passive sense. Majority of Asians chose to pursue personal development over fighting for social justice.
    - andrewfong 12y ago
      > Majority of Asians chose to pursue personal development over fighting for social justice. That might be technically true, but I'm pretty sure a majority of all ethnic groups spend most of their time engaged in things other than civil rights activism. Nor would I suggest that Asian civil rights activism is somehow less active than that of other ethnic groups. There's a pretty rich history of Asian-American civil rights activism dating back to the 1860s (e.g. Yick Wo v. Hopkins was a landmark civil rights case decided in the 1886) and dealing with issues ranging from internment in the 1940s (look up Fred Korematsu), hate crimes (look up Vincent Chin), and general xenophobia (the whole debacle around Wen Ho Lee). If Asian Americans seem less prevalent than, e.g., African Americans, I'd suggest it has more to do with making up a smaller portion of the population than any cultural distinction.
  - hashbanged 12y ago
    Are you actually suggesting that other minorities might be more successful in America if they were less visible?
rayiner 12y ago
Asians account for 1.8% of Fortune 500 CEO's, despite being 6% of the overall population and 20-25% of the enrollment at places like Harvard or Stanford business schools. Not quite white yet by my estimation.
- hellgas00 12y ago
  Since the 1970s the Asian population as a percentage has grown more than 5x (greater multiple than all other demographics) You would expect that if the median age of a CEO is in the 50s the enrollment numbers of Asians back then (1970-80) weren't expressed nearly as significantly. So still sounds 'white' any estimation.
- anologwintermut 12y ago
  does that hold as well if you control for undergraduate/graduate major?
- Steko 12y ago
  Were they 20-25% 30 years ago when today's CEOs were in college?
chroem 12y ago
Why should this even matter in the first place? How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet have this level of scrutiny on the racial makeup of a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race? I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but this isn't far off from having political overseers at production facilities in the former Soviet Union.
- Mangalor 12y ago
  > a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race 1. There's no way to tell whether they are or aren't just from exposing this data. 2. Racism/Sexism is discussed a lot in American culture, but I fail to see how "ignoring" actual data (which Google is proactively choosing to share) would somehow fix these issues.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    2. The problem when you talk about the data is that you fix yourself on numbers, you try to set objectives and you end up with quota, instead of actually understanding that's the underlying problem. You don't and you shouldn't start addressing these issues with numbers.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Numbers allow us to identify problems. Without numbers, there are no problems, so there are no issues to address; I see how that would solve the problem!
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        > Numbers allow us to identify problems. The problem is in these sorts of cases the numbers are generally useless. Even if we eliminated 100% of all racial discrimination from society, fewer African Americans would attend college because fewer of their parents can afford to send them, and those type of consequences would carry down for generations completely regardless of continuing racism. So you say you want to stick with the numbers anyway and try to account for income level. OK boss, that will reduce your confidence interval by a good bit but we can do it. The trouble is poverty is not the only issue. The fertility rates are different. African Americans on average have more children than whites and Asians according to the most recent census (2.1 vs. 1.8), so for the same parental income level the money is split between more children, as is parental time and attention. African Americans are also significantly more likely to grow up in single parent families. That one's 65% for African Americans vs. 23% white and 16% Asian. Ouch. So we have to account for that stuff too. And those all interact. If you have three children being raised by one parent making $30,000/year as compared with two children being raised by two parents each making $50,000/year, expecting to get anything resembling the same results is bonkers.
bmmayer1 12y ago
Anyone interested in this topic should read "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter, who shows how in America the very definition of "white" has changed to include a widening circle of people. For example, in the 18th century, German Americans weren't considered white. In the 19th century, Irish Americans weren't considered white.
- trustfundbaby 12y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation and the information. I didn't know any of that, looking forward to getting through the book!
huherto 12y ago
Should there be a distinction between white Asians and colored Asians? The more we mix the harder is to make this classifications. Also, immigrants who come from far a way are usually better off. So may be they should not be considered a minority in the traditional sense.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  > Also, immigrants who come from far a way are usually better off. What!? There were plenty of Chinese and Vietnamese (+ Hmong and so on) who came over during the Vietnam and Chinese-Vietnam wars as refuges who, like most displaced peoples, had (and still have) many social and economic problems; e.g. gang violence that you normally wouldn't associate with upper class Asians.
  - analyst74 12y ago
    Recent Chinese and Indian immigrants (probably true for other Asian countries too) tend to be either wealthy or highly educated, due to stability of the region and changes in immigration policy.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      We are still taking in Asian refugees from where there are still many conflicts and instability. According to [1], we took in 19,000 refugees from East Asia (I'm betting mostly southeast), 35,000 refugees from the Near East/South Asia, 2,000 from Europe and Central Asia (why they clump those together...weird). [1] http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_rfa_fr_2011.pdf http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/o...
scarmig 12y ago
"White has stopped meaning Caucasian, imprecise as this term has always been, and has started to mean “those racial groups that have made it.”" I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." Even Germans were once considered not-white: as recently as WW1, much of the anti-German propaganda up-played the idea that they were somehow more Asiatic than good Anglo-Saxons and Frenchmen. Before a strong sense of minority ethnicities was forged in the mid-20th century, whiteness was the word applied to the demographic categories that had made it; if they hadn't, they simply wouldn't be considered white. Now we feel it's pretty ridiculous to say that Asians are white, and for good reason. But it's silly for Volokh to pretend that whiteness-as-pale-skin is anything but a pretty recent innovation; in a way, pulling Asians (at least, the successful subgroups, the Chinese and Japanese, and to a lesser extent Koreans) into whiteness is the conservative, traditional approach, and his idea that there's a real "whiteness" that people either do or don't fall into is the kind of ethnic studies navel gazing he'd usually vociferously denounce.
- icambron 12y ago
  > I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." The title of his piece is almost certainly a reference to "How the Irish Became White" [1], so presumably not so much. I'm with you on the broader point, though, that the hand-wringing about who is and isn't white is silly, and that if it serves as shorthand for racially privileged people, that's pretty much fine. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095 http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/....
- baddox 12y ago
  > I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." Why would that shock him? That's perfectly in line with his claim.
  - gavinpc 12y ago
brighteyes 12y ago
For me, the interesting thing is how this was overlooked by almost everyone that read the statistics. People just saw large amounts of white people and of men in the data, and jumped to the "obvious" usual conclusion about overrepresentation. The data vaguely fits the narrative, so people quickly moved past the data and fell into the usual talking points. Instead, the interesting thing in the data is the large amount of overrepresentation of Asian people. There's nothing wrong with that, but perhaps the sense that overrepresentation is a sign of wrongness that is the cause of people being afraid to mention it or focus on it. Overall, the group most overrepresented in tech (judging from google's numbers and others) are Asian men. Yet, because the overall political narrative is focused elsewhere, that will remain un-remarked upon.
- chetanahuja 12y ago
  As someone pointed out above, the hiring pool for google is global. Especially focused on the population of graduate students in CS and related courses in US colleges. If you look at the data from that perspective, you'd find that Asians are in fact under-represented in Google's (US) work-force :-)
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yen223 12y ago
You gotta think global. Han Chinese make up almost 20% of the world's population. Calling us the 'minorities' seems pretty laughable.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Well, disadvantaged minorities also exist in China; e.g. Uighurs in Guangzhou.
  - yen223 12y ago
    I more surprised at the fact that people are touting the high number of Asians at Google as some sort of success story about us Asians and our culture. Google hires people from around the world, not just the US. I'm more inclined to believe that there are high number of Asians simply because there are more Asians in the world, period.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Well, I know plenty of poor Chinese...but then again I live in China. From that perspective, this discussion is all very American biased anyways.
  - analyst74 12y ago
    I can't say the case for Uighurs, but in general minorities in China have either blended in, or taking minor advantages in some areas. i.e. minorities get a boost of score in university entry test; they are also not bound by one-child policy.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      The races that are obviously not Han (so the western side of the country) don't blend and have many problems. We are going through a bout of terrorism right now for this reason (coupled with Han paternalism, which makes the problems worse). The races in the east have mostly inter-married and integrated with Han culture, though there are still some tensions (the largest Zhuang minority has been very rebellious up until the 20th century).
alextgordon 12y ago
> Of course, it would be appalling for Google to fire Asians... > I think it would be equally appalling for it to fire, stop hiring, or hire fewer whites as well. You think it would be? How have we got to the point where racism has to be rhetorically hedged in? In the UK, not only is it illegal to hire on the basis of race, but it's also deeply taboo. I like to think that a UK company would not have the racial data on their employees to compile such statistics. I hear a lot about "white males" from supposed leftists, and frankly it disgusts me. There is a large amount of casual racism that oozes from the American left under the guise of "equality".
- nylonpsycho 12y ago
  I am bothered by the last line in this comment; I think would agree if we all grew up in the exact same conditions with the exact same stigma against each one of us and exact same social, educational, and capital resources at our disposal, but we do not. Here's a dissenting opinion, or at least something to think about. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/millennials_racism_and_mtv_poll_young_people_are_confused_about_bias_prejudice.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... It's worth considering that a workforce might be 90% "white male" because 90% of the time, the environment we live in nurtures "white males" to fit there better, not because intrinsically, 90% of the time "white males" are just better at it. That's not to say I disagree with the first part. Google isn't going to make people that don't fit in the job suddenly magical at it; however, I think it's important to recognize racial disparity as a problem that --will not fix itself if left alone--, instead of calling disgusting those who might consider an equalizing force somewhere in society to be important. These numbers clearly aren't so disparate because "no reason at all" or because "whites are just better," so why do you think they are? And also, how can we even have a discussion or make changes without paying specific attention to race?
  - alextgordon 12y ago
    In Europe, there are many white people who are the subject of racism. In the UK there's racism towards Eastern Europeans and Irish Travellers. On a personal level, many of my (white) relatives were racially purged. That is why I find the term "white male" to be wholly disgusting. I can't speak for America's problems, only to say that if racism is your weapon to fight racism, then all you will achieve is to ensure its continuing existence.
neves 12y ago
This has a creepy precedence. During South Africa Apartheid, Japan was one of their main commercial partners. South Africa primary goods were essential for the japanese miracle. A law suddenly declared all Japanese white, giving them the same rights.
andrewfong 12y ago
I think his point is that "white" is becoming synonymous with "privileged", and that people are responding by grouping Asians with "whites" because they are increasingly enjoying the same systematic privilege that whites do. The whole privilege debate has always bothered me a bit. I don't doubt that having a particular ethnic background helps in certain situations, but "privilege" suggests a certain binary-ness that doesn't accurately capture all the nuances of race and ethnicity in America. For instance, there's a large amount of variation among different Asian groups. There is a world of difference between the socioeconomic status of the Hmong community in Michigan and the Taiwanese community in the Bay Area. Or even between the Chinese immigrants who came in the 1800s and the latter wave of immigration in the last few decades. And while it may be fair say that, all else equal, being to a particular ethnic group grants certain advantages relative to belonging to other groups, that advantage isn't uniform. For example, being Chinese or Indian is probably a net plus if you want to be a software engineer in the valley; it's probably a net minus if you want to be an actor in Hollywood. That said, I don't think the answer is to be color-blind. Race and ethnicity clearly matter in America -- it's just not as simple as privileged / not-privileged or majority / minority.
- deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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- adventured 12y ago
  It's the escalation of an agenda of class warfare that some sides of the political spectrum push non-stop as their particular flavor of system abuse, power seeking, and greed. It's going to get a lot worse. We're in the early stages of a huge revival in populism, and a lot of it is targeting the rich.
contingencies 12y ago
Asia is goddamn massive, encompassing thousands of significant and distinct cultures. "Asian" is, to my mind, therefore a pretty pointless adjective when applied to migrants from this huge region who have moved in to western societies, and merely reflects the ignorance of the west toward the earth-shatteringly different cultures of Asia. Shame on the west.
cloudwizard 12y ago
I live in SV and my son competes in math and robotics competitions. I have never seen an African American at a competition. Robotics has more caucasians. Still below 50% but Bay Area skews Asian so hard to tell. Elementary School Math competitions are almost completely SE Asian and South Asian. Maybe 2% Caucasian. Girls/boys are about 50/50 across Asians. Fewer Caucasian girls than boys but small sample size. Just random observations.
chroma 12y ago
As horrible as it sounds, I think racism is a social problem in need of a technological solution. If people could change their physical appearance as easily and as cheaply as their clothes, this problem would disappear overnight. If everyone could choose their gender, race, height, etc, there would be no point in discriminating based on those traits. To quote Dr. Seuss, people could change their appearance... > until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew > whether this one was that one... or that one was this one > or which one was what one... or what one was who. (Minus being scammed by Mr. McBean.) Sadly, that sort of technology won't be around for centuries, if ever. But I think we can get most of the way there with present-day tech. More and more jobs allow remote work, and on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. With the right blinding in the hiring process, we could make discrimination impossible. Even if the job isn't remote, the hiring evaluation could be done without meeting in person. Once a person is shown to be intelligent, mindful, productive, kind, etc... it's very hard to maintain a prejudice against any trait they may have been born with. This wouldn't solve the problem of a bias in applicants, but it would eliminate any implicit or unconscious discrimination.
- cottonseed 12y ago
  > With the right blinding in the hiring process, we could make discrimination impossible. Even if the job isn't remote, the hiring evaluation could be done without meeting in person. I've been suggesting for a while someone build a blind hiring website. I'm imagining you'd have a service to help cleanse gender, race, age, etc. information from the application materials. Even if you have phone or in-person late-stage interviews, this could radically change the makeup of the candidate pool at the final step. I agree that meeting might never be necessary. I know an academic department that doesn't meet faculty candidates because they find the application materials are a better predictor of the kind of academic success they're looking for. I'm inclined to think this is true more often, but I have no data.
erikb 12y ago
Maybe this also comes to Europe one day. But from the current perspectives I don't know any German who considers the Asians here as white. Therefore it seems to be quite the US thing from my perspective.
uouv 12y ago
When is race going to be replaced by meaningful (more quantitative) properties for grouping people?
alexeisadeski3 12y ago
Google is pre-empting the coming Silicon Valley shakedown by civil rights groups.
jasg 12y ago
For those who insist on ignoring race, here's some racial food for thought that I hope you will take a moment to consider. Why is it that we can categorize people by age, sex, disability, income, etc., but when it comes to race, race is all of a sudden some sort of taboo, something "we need to finally move on from" in a supposed post-racial society? Sure all these categorizations of people are "human," regardless of race or income or any sort of background -- but their experiences and situations growing up are not all the same, and that's the key point. That statistical correlations exist with race across the spectrum in so many vital facets of American life means that it's a meaningful idea. To deny the existence of race as it affects people's everyday experience and situations denies that race is a factor that actually matters. And that's a problem, because it does matter. And it's more than just data, as meaningful as data is. You can simply ask a minority about their personal experiences growing up in America to learn about some of the things a minority may go through. Also consider that there is an inherent bias here in HN since it's reasonable to say that most of us come from privileged backgrounds, regardless of race. Always consider the background of any minority who dismisses race as an issue. They only speak to their personal experience and it may not be indicative of the mounds of minorities who organize and find common ground in their situations and experiences. And I'm not here to argue necessarily over what "race" means, its definition or its construction and meaning over time, because that's not the issue I'm trying to bring up. It's clear to anyone with common sense that this construction of "race" that we perceive still matters, and it has always mattered for centuries in countless civilizations and societies, though how it plays out may not be universal. I understand that it's not easy. If we could ignore race completely somehow, in theory, perhaps we really could whisk away many of the problems that it brings. In some sense, race is unique from other categorizations of people because of how fluid its definition is, how subjective race really is. Yet, it amazes me how with something as complex an issue as poverty or economic growth, we can take great measures to study it and analyze its history and come up with all sorts of policies to tackle its many dimensions... but when it comes to race or racism, we think we can solve the issue by dismissing it. "Let's just forget about race, it will go away!" Does that simple diagnosis really make sense for one of our oldest social ills? Many of us don't want big brother meddling with affairs they need not stick their noses in, but even if you hate the government, I think we could all agree that if the government were to disappear tomorrow, the world would collapse. I say this again to point to the complexity of race issues, that you simply just can't throw the idea away and expect the issues to fix themselves. At the very least, it's something that deserves to be treated with seriousness, whose intricacies need to be appreciated to be understood. The ability to simply ignore an issue or approach it shallowly because it may not affect you is what real privilege is, not the petty term that it is unfortunately so often thrown towards white males or whichever privileged group is in question. One last word, which truly applies to issues beyond race: If you feel uncomfortable talking about race in this post-racial world you envision, then I'm sorry but it's not about your personal feelings towards race, when there are people out there facing real problems that deal with race. And it's great if you "personally don't see race," but unfortunately that's not the experience of many others, or the people born into a situation that is a product of systematic racism. I encourage you to step away from those personal feelings and your worldview and to instead consider the lives of others, at least for a moment.

139 points by kevbin 12y ago

Enforcing racial hiring quotas is probably the worst way to address inequalities amongst minority groups. It enforces the stereotype that minorities are inferior and don't deserve the jobs their appearance has given them. If you look at, for example, blacks in the U.S., two things stand out rather starkly: Poverty and incarceration rates. On average, kids in wealthy, stable, two-parent families do better than kids in poor single-parent households. Poverty and incarceration rates for blacks in the U.S. are significantly higher than for whites or asians. To compound matters, schools/teachers in poor areas are often of poorer quality than schools in rich areas. The U.S. has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The for-profit prison system and complicit judges/politicians have created this sad state of affairs. This needs to change. One way to accomplish this might be for state and federal governments to take control of the prison system. More public funding needs to be directed towards schools and youth programs in poor areas. More money needs to be focused on easing poverty. Give these kids back their parents, reduce the desperation of extreme poverty their families experience, and give them quality education. Do all this, and we won't still be talking about race-based hiring practices a generation from now. In general, children are an investment in the future and the U.S. has not been investing in all children equally. Edit: Note that I am Canadian. Disproportionate incarceration, poverty, and inferior schooling are all problems faced by (many) first nations communities up here, only with the added difficulty that acting to change any of these is guaranteed to turn into a political fecal-storm. The feds recently tried to improve the education system, but it basically blew up in their faces and undermined the AFN (assembly of first nations) in the process.

xienze 12y ago
> Give these kids back their parents What exactly does this mean? The government didn't create all those single parent households. I mean, who exactly are you blaming here?
- bluthru 12y ago
  Racial profiling, three strikes rule, and the drug war for starters.
  - xienze 12y ago
    Pales in comparison to baby daddies up and leaving the household. That's a cultural problem.
    - bluthru 12y ago
      I'd say it's more of an economic problem. Sex is free. The pill, IUD, nuvaring, and other forms of low-effort birth control are not. Combine that with the fact that a lot of poor young women have nothing to give their lives purpose except a baby, and all of a sudden single-parent demand is created for procreation.
    - trustfundbaby 12y ago
      > Pales in comparison to baby daddies up and leaving the household Thats an interesting assertion. Do you have any data to back that up? ... because I'd posit that these cultural "problems" that you mention a. pale in comparison to the cumulative effect of Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of explicit racist housing policy from the federal government b. are probably a side effect of a.
      - NoPiece 12y ago
        The best data to support his assertion is the out of wedlock birthrate. Up until the 60s, in spite of all the horrific racism, the out of wedlock birth rate was still below 20% for african americans. As of 2010, it was 73%. http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/files/2013/06/moynihan-births-wedlock.jpg http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/files/2013/06/m...
        trustfundbaby 12y ago
tootie 12y ago
The idea behind quotas isn't that minorities are inferior and need help, it's that they are equal and being discriminated against unless the law prevents it.
Gustomaximus 12y ago
> One way to accomplish this might be for state and federal governments to take control of the prison system. While I'm not saying this is wrong, given there is a privatized system I've always thought; If the prison is private they should pay the prisons an absolute minimum fee for running costs and large bonuses based on re-offence rates. Something like if a prisoner has held a job and not re-offended in the 3 years post release they get a significant bonus. At the moment it there is an incentive to keep them criminals so you'll see them back for even longer stays. And given past behaviour in this industry I imagine this thinking is in action at some penitentiaries.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Bringing up things like poverty or parental education is a red herring. An Asian student from a family earning $0-10k has a higher average SAT math score than a black student from a family earning $70k+. (Data was leaked from the college board in 1995. I'm not aware of more current data - anyone else? Specifically, I'm looking for a data set which slices some sort of outcome score by (race, income) pairs.) http://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.in/2013/10/black-suits-gowns-skin-sat-scores-by.html http://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.in/2013/10/black-suits-... I'm not sure what you mean by "easing poverty" or "desperation...their families experience". Could you explicitly list what good/services poor children lack which cause them to underperform?
- trustfundbaby 12y ago
  > An Asian student from a family earning $0-10k has a higher average SAT math score than a black student from a family earning $70k+. This is true but heres something to consider, my feeling is that Asian Americans are what I consider newer immigrants to America. My understanding is that they actually started to come here in large numbers after 1965 when the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments eliminated racial/nationality-based discrimination in immigration quotas. Why is this important? I think that you'll find that if you compare the SAT scores of Asian Americans to recent black immigrants to the United States (Nigerians, Ghanaians and jamaicans for example), you might find that their scores are much closer than your initial comparison. The reason for that is what I call the immigrant effect ... explained by this quote from a David Brooks NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=2&referrer=&assetType=nyt_now http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives... "Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students"
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    My only point is that parental income is not driving force behind racial achievement gaps. Perhaps immigrant status is the driving force behind the Asian/Black and Asian/White gaps. But then what causes the Asian/Mexican gap? Also, if you have data showing Nigerian/Ghanaian/Jamaican immigrants do as well as Asians, or the original source for Amy Chua's data, I'd love to see it.
mh_yam 12y ago
>>> More public funding needs to be directed towards schools and youth programs in poor areas. More money needs to be focused on easing poverty. Give these kids back their parents, reduce the desperation of extreme poverty their families experience, and give them quality education. Do all this, and we won't still be talking about race-based hiring practices a generation from now. There is an enormous amount of public funding going to these very things right now and it doesn't seem to have changed anything. The stereotypical black family (missing father, poor single mother) is not the result of a lack of action on the part of government. The government did not cause parents to abandon their children. It is the result of the changing message of mass media, celebrity icons, and social trends-from one that rewards integrity, and hard work to one that glorifies violence, 'thug' culture, and insubordination.
- brown_ghost 12y ago
  >>>The stereotypical black family (missing father, poor single mother) is not the result of a lack of action on the part of government. It's not lack of action...our crazy drug policies are a direct contributor to this situation, and it's by design.

firstOrder 12y ago

From the Google NY Times article ( http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-employee-data-illustrating-techs-diversity-challenge http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp... ) > Thirty percent of Googles 46,170 employees worldwide are women, the company said, and 17 percent of its technical employees are women....Of its United States employees... 2 percent are black ... Of Googles technical staff, 60 percent are white, 1 percent are black...Though Google did not specifically say how it planned to change the numbers, it said that it hoped releasing them would start a dialogue. The company had made changes in the past to recruit and retain women... Then it goes on and on about women. If 30% overall and 17% technical are women, compared to 2% and 1% for black, it sounds like women have it relatively good. Many of my CS classes had more black guys than women of any color. Yet there is almost no discussion of this. It's Jesse Jackson who prompted that this data be released. While this is about Google, they've been the most open and forthright about it in releasing the data. The situation is widespread through the Valley. I hear happy horseshit about Watsi and other nonsense in the Valley. Begin at the source - with the LPs of VC's exploiting mostly young talent in the various startups - startups where 1% of the hired technical workers are black, if that.

fishywang 12y ago

I guess most people are not aware of California SCA5 [1] That's basically an idea to brutally "reflect the demographics of the country". And that's actually racist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Constitutional_Amendment_No.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Constitutional_Amendmen...

tokenadult 12y ago

Volokh here is decrying the same kinds of policies that I decry, for many of the same reasons. Forcing people into Procrustean categories more narrow than "citizen" for the people of one country builds division in the country and keeps people from treating their neighbors humanely as their fellow human beings. That kind of categorization was wrong and a moral outrage in the days of Jim Crow legally enforced segregation and it is still a bad idea today, even to correct the previous wrong. I care about this issue deeply. I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement. One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest. It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up. One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking. Why not treat all of my neighbors as individuals, one at a time? And anyway I've seen this issue go wrong for people in other countries. Also in my childhood, in the other state I lived in growing up, I had a classmate in the early 1970s who would get on the school bus each day wearing a button that said "Serb Power." I thought that was very strange, because I knew my history well enough to know that Serbia hadn't been an independent country since Yugoslavia was formed after World War I. And, anyway, he was living in the United States and had been born here, so why was he so concerned about Serb power? We all found out during the early 1990s how crazy many people in Yugoslavia were about former historical grievances, which made that country disintegrate and killed many innocent people born long after the grievances should have been forgotten. Most reporting to the federal government about "race" and "ethnicity" is based on the U.S. Census bureau definitions for ethnicity and race categories, which in turn are based on regulations from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which were announced on 30 October 1997 http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards to take effect no later than 1 January 2003 for data collection by all federal agencies. You can look up the detailed category definitions on the website of the United States Bureau of the Census. As the Census Bureau itself notes, "U.S. federal government agencies must adhere to standards issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in October 1997, which specify that race and Hispanic origin (also known as ethnicity) are two separate and distinct concepts. These standards generally reflect a social definition of race and ethnicity recognized in this country and they do not conform to any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. The standards include five minimum categories for data on race: "American Indian or Alaska Native," "Asian," "Black or African American," "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander," and "White." There are two minimum categories for data on ethnicity: "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not Hispanic or Latino." The concept of race reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables." https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=191 https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=191 It's politics all the way down. I'd be happy to see the United States move in the direction of treating individuals like individuals, equal before the law and all deserving full legal protection of civil rights, period.

Bahamut 12y ago

As a Korean, I don't think I've ever been called white - the article does mention some good points, but I don't think its mention about asians being mistaken for whites is well-articulated.

chetanahuja 12y ago
This was linked from the original article in lieu of listing such examples directly in the article: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1208147286.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1208147286.shtml
thkim 12y ago
Surely nobody's going to call an Asian a white -- I think he just meant to say that it's becoming less meaningful to group Asians among minorities in demographic analysis, perhaps because Asians are showing similar pattern as "whites".

fatjokes 12y ago

I doubt Asians have integrated into "white" society the way American Jews, Irish and Italians have. E.g., their example of interracial marriage is heavily imbalanced by gender.

dba7dba 12y ago
> their example of interracial marriage is heavily imbalanced by gender. I read somewhere Asian women is most desired by men of other races while Asian men is least desired by women of other races. Read that somewhere... No, Asian is not white.

Mangalor 12y ago

> My point is simply that, if one thinks that the problem is lack of “reflecti[on of] the demographics of the country,” “white[s]” aren’t the problem. I don't think anyone is saying that white men are a "problem". There's so much defensiveness in these counter-articles coming out as though this is some specific attack on white males. I don't think Google was trying to shame itself over its own white male percentages, it was just exposing its own racial breakdown data instead of previously keeping it a secret.

brighteyes 12y ago
In articles about the google diversity numbers, many people were "shocked by how overwhelmingly white and male they are" and similar things. The implication is clearly that overrepresentation of white males is a problem. Hence white males are part of the problem. It's obvious why this makes many people defensive, even though there is in fact a problem.
- bruceb 12y ago
  The term white male needs to stop being used as an epithet. Of course there is going to be a backlash from X when you say there are too many of X. Saying we need more Y, Z, etc makes the same point without needless turning X against the goal of a more balances company, school, gov't etc.
xienze 12y ago
People get defensive because the image presented is precisely that there's a problem with demographics being "too white" and "too male". For instance, today CNN presented this: http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-males/index.html?iid=EL http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-male... ("Google: Overwhelmingly white and male") > I don't think Google was trying to shame itself over its own white male percentages I'm not sure what other conclusion you can draw when Google says "we're not where we want to be" and the giant pie chart slices are 70% male, 61% white. They were apologizing and acting contrite about _something_, don't you think? The implicit message is "we did a bad thing hiring too many white males." It absolutely is an attack -- not by Google directly, but by our culture which strives to make whites feel ashamed about who they are. I don't blame Google, they're looking out for their best interests. They don't want to get slammed for having too many white dudes in their ranks.

hiroaki 12y ago

As a South Asian Indian, I am puzzled by ethnicity questionnaires which never have an option that seems appropriate. "White" seems wrong as does "Caucasian", even if we are supposedly anthropologically related. "Asian" seems to refer to Asians except for persons of the Indian sub-continent. And "Indian" refers to American Indians. Sigh...

enneff 12y ago
Woah woah! "Indian" should not be used refer to Native Americans in a questionnaire!
- harryh 12y ago
  Nah, you're Indians! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VMY8X9rU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VMY8X9rU8
- splintercell 12y ago
  That's not the point. The point is, its super confusing to me(and possibly to Native Americans too) if 'Indian' is meant for one group or the other.
- bignaj 12y ago
  Yeah man, big no-no there. Indian refers to the ones from Southeast Asia (i.e. you), not Native Americans.
- majika 12y ago
  Nor should "Indian" be used to refer to South Asians. Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalis are not Indians.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Likewise, Tibetans living in India and Nepal are not Indian or Nepali (if these are ethnicities). Nepalis living in Bhutan are not Bhutanese. South Asia is pretty colorful (at least compared to Han-dominated East Asia). I do think they have "South Asian" as an option on many query forms now.

rtpg 12y ago

This article seems to think that White will turn into the "winner's category", but historically this is what that meant. "White" as a racial definition only exists to allow opposition to the "colored" races (for things like slavery, colonialization,etc).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

noobermin 12y ago
The original sentence most likely contained the words "reflecting the demographics of the country."

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

Asians are in an interesting position from a sociological perspective. They're "white" in the sense that they're largely implicit and they mostly blend in, but they have the (misfortune?) of being largely ignored, even by those concerned with social justice, in favor of other minorities. This is also evident in discussions about diversity in tech. On the other hand, white people are white people. They're always at the center of controversy and just about everything else, as is usual for a majority.

bmmayer1 12y ago
Is it possible that Asians are so successful in America precisely because they have been largely ignored in the pursuance of social justice?
- thkim 12y ago
  Not in a passive sense. Majority of Asians chose to pursue personal development over fighting for social justice.
  - andrewfong 12y ago
    > Majority of Asians chose to pursue personal development over fighting for social justice. That might be technically true, but I'm pretty sure a majority of all ethnic groups spend most of their time engaged in things other than civil rights activism. Nor would I suggest that Asian civil rights activism is somehow less active than that of other ethnic groups. There's a pretty rich history of Asian-American civil rights activism dating back to the 1860s (e.g. Yick Wo v. Hopkins was a landmark civil rights case decided in the 1886) and dealing with issues ranging from internment in the 1940s (look up Fred Korematsu), hate crimes (look up Vincent Chin), and general xenophobia (the whole debacle around Wen Ho Lee). If Asian Americans seem less prevalent than, e.g., African Americans, I'd suggest it has more to do with making up a smaller portion of the population than any cultural distinction.
- hashbanged 12y ago
  Are you actually suggesting that other minorities might be more successful in America if they were less visible?

rayiner 12y ago

Asians account for 1.8% of Fortune 500 CEO's, despite being 6% of the overall population and 20-25% of the enrollment at places like Harvard or Stanford business schools. Not quite white yet by my estimation.

hellgas00 12y ago
Since the 1970s the Asian population as a percentage has grown more than 5x (greater multiple than all other demographics) You would expect that if the median age of a CEO is in the 50s the enrollment numbers of Asians back then (1970-80) weren't expressed nearly as significantly. So still sounds 'white' any estimation.
anologwintermut 12y ago
does that hold as well if you control for undergraduate/graduate major?
Steko 12y ago
Were they 20-25% 30 years ago when today's CEOs were in college?

chroem 12y ago

Why should this even matter in the first place? How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet have this level of scrutiny on the racial makeup of a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race? I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but this isn't far off from having political overseers at production facilities in the former Soviet Union.

Mangalor 12y ago
> a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race 1. There's no way to tell whether they are or aren't just from exposing this data. 2. Racism/Sexism is discussed a lot in American culture, but I fail to see how "ignoring" actual data (which Google is proactively choosing to share) would somehow fix these issues.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  2. The problem when you talk about the data is that you fix yourself on numbers, you try to set objectives and you end up with quota, instead of actually understanding that's the underlying problem. You don't and you shouldn't start addressing these issues with numbers.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Numbers allow us to identify problems. Without numbers, there are no problems, so there are no issues to address; I see how that would solve the problem!
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      > Numbers allow us to identify problems. The problem is in these sorts of cases the numbers are generally useless. Even if we eliminated 100% of all racial discrimination from society, fewer African Americans would attend college because fewer of their parents can afford to send them, and those type of consequences would carry down for generations completely regardless of continuing racism. So you say you want to stick with the numbers anyway and try to account for income level. OK boss, that will reduce your confidence interval by a good bit but we can do it. The trouble is poverty is not the only issue. The fertility rates are different. African Americans on average have more children than whites and Asians according to the most recent census (2.1 vs. 1.8), so for the same parental income level the money is split between more children, as is parental time and attention. African Americans are also significantly more likely to grow up in single parent families. That one's 65% for African Americans vs. 23% white and 16% Asian. Ouch. So we have to account for that stuff too. And those all interact. If you have three children being raised by one parent making $30,000/year as compared with two children being raised by two parents each making $50,000/year, expecting to get anything resembling the same results is bonkers.

bmmayer1 12y ago

Anyone interested in this topic should read "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter, who shows how in America the very definition of "white" has changed to include a widening circle of people. For example, in the 18th century, German Americans weren't considered white. In the 19th century, Irish Americans weren't considered white.

trustfundbaby 12y ago
Thanks for the recommendation and the information. I didn't know any of that, looking forward to getting through the book!

huherto 12y ago

Should there be a distinction between white Asians and colored Asians? The more we mix the harder is to make this classifications. Also, immigrants who come from far a way are usually better off. So may be they should not be considered a minority in the traditional sense.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
> Also, immigrants who come from far a way are usually better off. What!? There were plenty of Chinese and Vietnamese (+ Hmong and so on) who came over during the Vietnam and Chinese-Vietnam wars as refuges who, like most displaced peoples, had (and still have) many social and economic problems; e.g. gang violence that you normally wouldn't associate with upper class Asians.
- analyst74 12y ago
  Recent Chinese and Indian immigrants (probably true for other Asian countries too) tend to be either wealthy or highly educated, due to stability of the region and changes in immigration policy.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    We are still taking in Asian refugees from where there are still many conflicts and instability. According to [1], we took in 19,000 refugees from East Asia (I'm betting mostly southeast), 35,000 refugees from the Near East/South Asia, 2,000 from Europe and Central Asia (why they clump those together...weird). [1] http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_rfa_fr_2011.pdf http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/o...

scarmig 12y ago

"White has stopped meaning Caucasian, imprecise as this term has always been, and has started to mean “those racial groups that have made it.”" I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." Even Germans were once considered not-white: as recently as WW1, much of the anti-German propaganda up-played the idea that they were somehow more Asiatic than good Anglo-Saxons and Frenchmen. Before a strong sense of minority ethnicities was forged in the mid-20th century, whiteness was the word applied to the demographic categories that had made it; if they hadn't, they simply wouldn't be considered white. Now we feel it's pretty ridiculous to say that Asians are white, and for good reason. But it's silly for Volokh to pretend that whiteness-as-pale-skin is anything but a pretty recent innovation; in a way, pulling Asians (at least, the successful subgroups, the Chinese and Japanese, and to a lesser extent Koreans) into whiteness is the conservative, traditional approach, and his idea that there's a real "whiteness" that people either do or don't fall into is the kind of ethnic studies navel gazing he'd usually vociferously denounce.

icambron 12y ago
> I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." The title of his piece is almost certainly a reference to "How the Irish Became White" [1], so presumably not so much. I'm with you on the broader point, though, that the hand-wringing about who is and isn't white is silly, and that if it serves as shorthand for racially privileged people, that's pretty much fine. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095 http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/....
baddox 12y ago
> I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." Why would that shock him? That's perfectly in line with his claim.
- gavinpc 12y ago

brighteyes 12y ago

For me, the interesting thing is how this was overlooked by almost everyone that read the statistics. People just saw large amounts of white people and of men in the data, and jumped to the "obvious" usual conclusion about overrepresentation. The data vaguely fits the narrative, so people quickly moved past the data and fell into the usual talking points. Instead, the interesting thing in the data is the large amount of overrepresentation of Asian people. There's nothing wrong with that, but perhaps the sense that overrepresentation is a sign of wrongness that is the cause of people being afraid to mention it or focus on it. Overall, the group most overrepresented in tech (judging from google's numbers and others) are Asian men. Yet, because the overall political narrative is focused elsewhere, that will remain un-remarked upon.

chetanahuja 12y ago
As someone pointed out above, the hiring pool for google is global. Especially focused on the population of graduate students in CS and related courses in US colleges. If you look at the data from that perspective, you'd find that Asians are in fact under-represented in Google's (US) work-force :-)

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yen223 12y ago

You gotta think global. Han Chinese make up almost 20% of the world's population. Calling us the 'minorities' seems pretty laughable.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Well, disadvantaged minorities also exist in China; e.g. Uighurs in Guangzhou.
- yen223 12y ago
  I more surprised at the fact that people are touting the high number of Asians at Google as some sort of success story about us Asians and our culture. Google hires people from around the world, not just the US. I'm more inclined to believe that there are high number of Asians simply because there are more Asians in the world, period.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Well, I know plenty of poor Chinese...but then again I live in China. From that perspective, this discussion is all very American biased anyways.
- analyst74 12y ago
  I can't say the case for Uighurs, but in general minorities in China have either blended in, or taking minor advantages in some areas. i.e. minorities get a boost of score in university entry test; they are also not bound by one-child policy.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    The races that are obviously not Han (so the western side of the country) don't blend and have many problems. We are going through a bout of terrorism right now for this reason (coupled with Han paternalism, which makes the problems worse). The races in the east have mostly inter-married and integrated with Han culture, though there are still some tensions (the largest Zhuang minority has been very rebellious up until the 20th century).

alextgordon 12y ago

> Of course, it would be appalling for Google to fire Asians... > I think it would be equally appalling for it to fire, stop hiring, or hire fewer whites as well. You think it would be? How have we got to the point where racism has to be rhetorically hedged in? In the UK, not only is it illegal to hire on the basis of race, but it's also deeply taboo. I like to think that a UK company would not have the racial data on their employees to compile such statistics. I hear a lot about "white males" from supposed leftists, and frankly it disgusts me. There is a large amount of casual racism that oozes from the American left under the guise of "equality".

nylonpsycho 12y ago
I am bothered by the last line in this comment; I think would agree if we all grew up in the exact same conditions with the exact same stigma against each one of us and exact same social, educational, and capital resources at our disposal, but we do not. Here's a dissenting opinion, or at least something to think about. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/millennials_racism_and_mtv_poll_young_people_are_confused_about_bias_prejudice.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... It's worth considering that a workforce might be 90% "white male" because 90% of the time, the environment we live in nurtures "white males" to fit there better, not because intrinsically, 90% of the time "white males" are just better at it. That's not to say I disagree with the first part. Google isn't going to make people that don't fit in the job suddenly magical at it; however, I think it's important to recognize racial disparity as a problem that --will not fix itself if left alone--, instead of calling disgusting those who might consider an equalizing force somewhere in society to be important. These numbers clearly aren't so disparate because "no reason at all" or because "whites are just better," so why do you think they are? And also, how can we even have a discussion or make changes without paying specific attention to race?
- alextgordon 12y ago
  In Europe, there are many white people who are the subject of racism. In the UK there's racism towards Eastern Europeans and Irish Travellers. On a personal level, many of my (white) relatives were racially purged. That is why I find the term "white male" to be wholly disgusting. I can't speak for America's problems, only to say that if racism is your weapon to fight racism, then all you will achieve is to ensure its continuing existence.

neves 12y ago

This has a creepy precedence. During South Africa Apartheid, Japan was one of their main commercial partners. South Africa primary goods were essential for the japanese miracle. A law suddenly declared all Japanese white, giving them the same rights.

andrewfong 12y ago

I think his point is that "white" is becoming synonymous with "privileged", and that people are responding by grouping Asians with "whites" because they are increasingly enjoying the same systematic privilege that whites do. The whole privilege debate has always bothered me a bit. I don't doubt that having a particular ethnic background helps in certain situations, but "privilege" suggests a certain binary-ness that doesn't accurately capture all the nuances of race and ethnicity in America. For instance, there's a large amount of variation among different Asian groups. There is a world of difference between the socioeconomic status of the Hmong community in Michigan and the Taiwanese community in the Bay Area. Or even between the Chinese immigrants who came in the 1800s and the latter wave of immigration in the last few decades. And while it may be fair say that, all else equal, being to a particular ethnic group grants certain advantages relative to belonging to other groups, that advantage isn't uniform. For example, being Chinese or Indian is probably a net plus if you want to be a software engineer in the valley; it's probably a net minus if you want to be an actor in Hollywood. That said, I don't think the answer is to be color-blind. Race and ethnicity clearly matter in America -- it's just not as simple as privileged / not-privileged or majority / minority.

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adventured 12y ago
It's the escalation of an agenda of class warfare that some sides of the political spectrum push non-stop as their particular flavor of system abuse, power seeking, and greed. It's going to get a lot worse. We're in the early stages of a huge revival in populism, and a lot of it is targeting the rich.

contingencies 12y ago

Asia is goddamn massive, encompassing thousands of significant and distinct cultures. "Asian" is, to my mind, therefore a pretty pointless adjective when applied to migrants from this huge region who have moved in to western societies, and merely reflects the ignorance of the west toward the earth-shatteringly different cultures of Asia. Shame on the west.

cloudwizard 12y ago

I live in SV and my son competes in math and robotics competitions. I have never seen an African American at a competition. Robotics has more caucasians. Still below 50% but Bay Area skews Asian so hard to tell. Elementary School Math competitions are almost completely SE Asian and South Asian. Maybe 2% Caucasian. Girls/boys are about 50/50 across Asians. Fewer Caucasian girls than boys but small sample size. Just random observations.

chroma 12y ago

As horrible as it sounds, I think racism is a social problem in need of a technological solution. If people could change their physical appearance as easily and as cheaply as their clothes, this problem would disappear overnight. If everyone could choose their gender, race, height, etc, there would be no point in discriminating based on those traits. To quote Dr. Seuss, people could change their appearance... > until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew > whether this one was that one... or that one was this one > or which one was what one... or what one was who. (Minus being scammed by Mr. McBean.) Sadly, that sort of technology won't be around for centuries, if ever. But I think we can get most of the way there with present-day tech. More and more jobs allow remote work, and on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. With the right blinding in the hiring process, we could make discrimination impossible. Even if the job isn't remote, the hiring evaluation could be done without meeting in person. Once a person is shown to be intelligent, mindful, productive, kind, etc... it's very hard to maintain a prejudice against any trait they may have been born with. This wouldn't solve the problem of a bias in applicants, but it would eliminate any implicit or unconscious discrimination.

cottonseed 12y ago
> With the right blinding in the hiring process, we could make discrimination impossible. Even if the job isn't remote, the hiring evaluation could be done without meeting in person. I've been suggesting for a while someone build a blind hiring website. I'm imagining you'd have a service to help cleanse gender, race, age, etc. information from the application materials. Even if you have phone or in-person late-stage interviews, this could radically change the makeup of the candidate pool at the final step. I agree that meeting might never be necessary. I know an academic department that doesn't meet faculty candidates because they find the application materials are a better predictor of the kind of academic success they're looking for. I'm inclined to think this is true more often, but I have no data.

erikb 12y ago

Maybe this also comes to Europe one day. But from the current perspectives I don't know any German who considers the Asians here as white. Therefore it seems to be quite the US thing from my perspective.

uouv 12y ago

When is race going to be replaced by meaningful (more quantitative) properties for grouping people?

alexeisadeski3 12y ago

Google is pre-empting the coming Silicon Valley shakedown by civil rights groups.

jasg 12y ago

For those who insist on ignoring race, here's some racial food for thought that I hope you will take a moment to consider. Why is it that we can categorize people by age, sex, disability, income, etc., but when it comes to race, race is all of a sudden some sort of taboo, something "we need to finally move on from" in a supposed post-racial society? Sure all these categorizations of people are "human," regardless of race or income or any sort of background -- but their experiences and situations growing up are not all the same, and that's the key point. That statistical correlations exist with race across the spectrum in so many vital facets of American life means that it's a meaningful idea. To deny the existence of race as it affects people's everyday experience and situations denies that race is a factor that actually matters. And that's a problem, because it does matter. And it's more than just data, as meaningful as data is. You can simply ask a minority about their personal experiences growing up in America to learn about some of the things a minority may go through. Also consider that there is an inherent bias here in HN since it's reasonable to say that most of us come from privileged backgrounds, regardless of race. Always consider the background of any minority who dismisses race as an issue. They only speak to their personal experience and it may not be indicative of the mounds of minorities who organize and find common ground in their situations and experiences. And I'm not here to argue necessarily over what "race" means, its definition or its construction and meaning over time, because that's not the issue I'm trying to bring up. It's clear to anyone with common sense that this construction of "race" that we perceive still matters, and it has always mattered for centuries in countless civilizations and societies, though how it plays out may not be universal. I understand that it's not easy. If we could ignore race completely somehow, in theory, perhaps we really could whisk away many of the problems that it brings. In some sense, race is unique from other categorizations of people because of how fluid its definition is, how subjective race really is. Yet, it amazes me how with something as complex an issue as poverty or economic growth, we can take great measures to study it and analyze its history and come up with all sorts of policies to tackle its many dimensions... but when it comes to race or racism, we think we can solve the issue by dismissing it. "Let's just forget about race, it will go away!" Does that simple diagnosis really make sense for one of our oldest social ills? Many of us don't want big brother meddling with affairs they need not stick their noses in, but even if you hate the government, I think we could all agree that if the government were to disappear tomorrow, the world would collapse. I say this again to point to the complexity of race issues, that you simply just can't throw the idea away and expect the issues to fix themselves. At the very least, it's something that deserves to be treated with seriousness, whose intricacies need to be appreciated to be understood. The ability to simply ignore an issue or approach it shallowly because it may not affect you is what real privilege is, not the petty term that it is unfortunately so often thrown towards white males or whichever privileged group is in question. One last word, which truly applies to issues beyond race: If you feel uncomfortable talking about race in this post-racial world you envision, then I'm sorry but it's not about your personal feelings towards race, when there are people out there facing real problems that deal with race. And it's great if you "personally don't see race," but unfortunately that's not the experience of many others, or the people born into a situation that is a product of systematic racism. I encourage you to step away from those personal feelings and your worldview and to instead consider the lives of others, at least for a moment.