I'm very happy to see this. I grew up in a town that, before I was born, decided to actively integrate (from being an historically all white, wealthy suburb) and I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community. I'm in mountain view now and it's all "silicon valley white", and something actively needs to be done. I worry when I realize my kid can go a week or more without seeing a black person, and I'm disappointed in myself when I realize I have no black friends (when as a kid they were my neighbors).
You don't consider the thousands of immigrants who grew up in completely different cultures with different primary languages in Asia and Europe as diversity?
Instead, you consider the American born Black person whose primary language is English and who grew up with American culture as "diversity"?
Drive through the neighborhoods of Chicago, through enclaves of Irish, Polish, German, and Jewish people. You won't miss them: the signage will abruptly change to Polish, or the streets will be full of men in suits wearing their hair in payots. This is a form of diversity, to be sure. But it's not the kind we're concerned about.
The problem here is the word "diversity", which is very easily hijacked to distort discussions. I think we're all pretty much on the same page that the concern being addressed here is the exclusion of specific, prominent ethnicities from SFBA tech culture, not the absolute number of different ethnicities being represented.
It's fine if you want to lament the lack of black people in any given domain, but to generalize and say there is no diversity at all because a lack of black people is short changing not only the efforts of many people, but many people as well.
Of course immigrants and different languages increase diversity. But it's also true that other people from within the US are critical to developing a balanced view of the world. A black person is going to have a very different experience that I will as a white dude, and we are all poorer for it when we don't know people with those experiences. The same goes for the white farmer who grew up on a ranch in Nebraska, I would love to know more of those people, they see the world differently than I do.
What would an optimal diversity level be in your opinion? Should your child see a black person on a daily basis? Should the black people your child sees be from a diverse socioeconomic range? Should the black people be a mixture of African Americans and literal Africans?
My prediction is in 20 years Asian will be considered part of white. Maybe it's just being in the Silicon Valley bubble, but it already feels much of the way there.
(Not trying to offend anyone, but feel safer with throwaway account.)
This isn't a crazy prediction. "White" means a lot less than people pretend it does. Before the 20th Century, it excluded many European ethnicities. At various points, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jewish people have been "non-white". Solidarity among the relatively fair-skinned only became a thing during the fight to perpetuate Jim Crow, and as a response to the Great Migration.
It's hard to pin this down because there's a powerful cultural normalization effect around "whiteness"; we accept the notion that there are "white", "black", "latino", and "Asian" people, in part due to history and in part because breaking "white" down further would be cumbersome.
But it's worth remembering that while there really is a sui generis "black" culture (the US African American culture, a product of displacing millions of Africans and stripping them of their original culture), there isn't "white culture". Irish and German people don't have that much in common culturally: they don't share a language, they don't eat the same food, they don't listen to the same music, they don't have the same folklore.
Since one important sense of the concept of "whiteness" is "membership in favored ethnicity", it's not unreasonable to predict that it will eventually expand to include non-European ethnicities, too.
First, don't address me or anyone else on HN that way.
Second: this post is playing a sneaky lawyer trick. It acknowledges --- ferociously --- that there's historically been a hierarchy among European ethnicities in the US, then frames "whiteness" exclusively in terms of the early 20th century, when --- as I said --- Jim Crow and the Great Migration forced a measure of solidarity among European ethnicities against encroachment from blacks. Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
> Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
Family lore has it that my great-grandparents (German descent, first generation born here) were concerned when their only son, my grandfather, married an Irish girl, my grandmother (also first generation born here).
> I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community.
I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that.
That plus living in a city like most young people are starting to do today, I find exposure to different cultures to be highly accessible with little investment. This is not really the result of forced integration policies but simply through technology, market options (restaurants, entertainment, etc) and proximity in dense housing areas.
It's interesting that not long after the Civil Rights act passed (which included legislation to make mandatory increases in housing and school integration) that there was a big migration from cities to suburbanization starting in the 1970s - reducing integration in both schools and housing. Most people falsely believed 'white flight' to be a cultural thing when if fact it was largely the result of regulatory policy making. There's a great book about how local government policies was the largest cause of this shift towards suburbia: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933115157/
I've read that statistically today's schools in the US are even more segregated than even before the civil rights act. Yet one could argue that despite this the young generation is the most open and accepting to other cultures than ever before.
So I'm not sure that (mandatory) integration policies are a necessary construct in order to improve social conditions and relationships between communities/races - as much as it used to be. The solution may simply be to reverse a lot of the existing legislation that pushed so many communities away from dense naturally integrated urban areas to small towns and suburbs.
Trying to improve economic and quality of education via integration is another question (I'm mostly looking at cultural considerations). Although I've also heard of mostly black charter schools in poor communities doing as well as public schools in upper class neighbourhoods. So, again, on the surface that seems to be more about access to quality services rather than racial integration.
You have to be careful not to mistake the chicken for the egg.
It's true that schools are more segregated. It's also true that there's abundant evidence that bussing programs had strong positive effects for the students who used them. These programs were systematically dismantled in the nineties, though, largely because of racist policies in the communities receiving the bussed students.
Desegregation works. Saying that the issue is access to quality resources reduces to separate but equal policy, doesn't it?
I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that.
In my opinion the internet makes it just as easy to be culturally homogeneous if you want to. There are many people that, due to interest or necessity will be exposed to a variety of cultures, but you can just as easily filter your internet usage so you engage mostly with people that are like you. It doesn't help that on the internet, in text discussions, you don't know what someone's background is without research due to anonymity. For example, by default I assume everyone on HN is an upper middle class or wealthy white male in his mid-20s to early 40s, unless otherwise stated in the context of the comments, even though I know this isn't true. This creates the problem of, instead of viewing internet communities as diverse collections of people, they are viewed as stereotypical hive minds, further enforcing discrimination and stereotyped views of large groups of people.
So, let's say you were born in China. Would you have a similar level of anxiety about never seeing anyone outside of your ethnic group? I find it very odd how white people are seemingly the only ethnic group so hung up on seeing people of different races one day-to-day basis.
On a related note, if being around so many white people bothers you so much, why aren't you living in, say, East Palo Alto or Richmond?
I think this is part of the implicit contract of the American 'melting pot'. A vanishing percentage of Americans are actually descended from America, and for better or worse, integrating or failing to integrate people has been a major part of our history-- from slavery and genocide to New York being arguably the most important city in the world.
So, what could be seen as white people seeming to have a pathological need to observe those with different melanin is, I'd argue, a representation of our awareness of that compact. If we're all living here, and they're all living there, is it possible that they're not too happy, or that they're being forced to live with substandard lives or living situations? If that's the case, that could potentially breed societal instability and rupture, as happened in the '60's and '70's.
From my personal perspective, I don't necessarily want to live in Compton or Camden, but it's certainly the case that I want people who live there to be able to move to where they want in America-- "not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character".
Edit: You can't just replace White with Chinese: unless Chinese people enslaved and murdered a race of people for hundreds of years, then segregated them in tiny ghettos while charging higher rents than other 'Chinese' had to pay, to finally - allow - them to leave the ghetto only to "redline" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) any community that crossed the color line, outlaw discrimination - after - poverty had set in... (not to mention Chinese-flight, I mean, white-flight from communities that reached a tipping point of racial integration.)
The issues of race in American are legacy issues that won't just dissolve in time. And full dissolution cannot take place if the underlying issues of poverty are not corrected (read: aggressively attacked). This is but a small step in that direction.
I don't understand this line of thinking for a couple of reasons:
1) Framing diversity as being about white people avoiding anxiety by surrounding themselves with people from other ethnic groups is egocentric and weird. Pushing for diversity is ideally about expanding access to lucrative careers, not bringing in people-as-window-dressing.
2) On the note of lucrative careers, comparing membership in a well-paid, prestigious career field within (say) the United States with being born in a more ethnically homogeneous country is disingenuous. It's the very fact that we don't live in a mono-culture that should make us wonder about the high correlation between being white and male and being in our field.
Only in some areas. I grew up in one of those flyover states, according to wikipedia the demographics of my town were 97% white while I was a teenager (~94% white now).
I much prefer being in more diverse areas, but I don't think where I grew up was somehow bad or wrong. It is a very middle class place, so it's not like the minorities were being pushed out, there just weren't many non-white people that wanted/want to live there! ...but to be fair, a lot of white people don't want to live there either, it's quite boring.
The history of housing discrimination in the US would challenge the notion that a middle class suburb would not push out minorities. This practice was rampant in the period after WW2 and continued into the 70s and 80s. It has little to do with notional affordability.
Interesting. I suppose that could have some effect, but I was not even born until housing discrimination was over with and when I moved into my small town it was largely farmland and not much of a suburb until a decade later.
Further, if housing discrimination was still going on in the 90's and 00's, I have no idea where these people were being "pushed out" to. The closest towns/cities with significant racial minority populations were at least 250 miles away...the city I grew up outside of was 90% white (currently 82% white) and there were/are plenty of undesirable locations there. It's middle America, there are just a ton of white people (sorry?).
I think the appropriate dig is "where are the Hispanics in tech" and "where are the Hispanics in tech building explicit bridges to their communities." HBCUs are the result of affluent blacks fighting for land grants at the turn of the 20th century since many states refused to grant land for the formation of integrated colleges and universities. This program, love it or hate it, is 100+ years in the making.
It's more telling than you might realize that you took their complaint to mean "I'm upset I'm around so many white people" and not "I'm upset a part of the population isn't included in my area / culture". It certainly makes the rest of your comments less surprising.
Eh, considering that much of the social pressure of Chinese society presumably stem from a lack of cultural diversity, I would very much be bothered never seeing anyone outside my ethnic group if I'd grown up in China. I'd probably want to move anywhere else just for that fact.
"Better off" seems subjective, especially when looking at the particulars.
I didn't grow up in a diverse community, and living in one now I certainly feel the lack. How do you quantify a cultural divide? How do you quantify what it means to you?
Given your comment, I can guess, but that would be rude.
I'm sure there are awesome monocultures and ideologies one can wrap themselves in permanently, but every one I've been in for an extended period looks like a prison in hindsight.
