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Comment by diebir | Hacker News Reader

Without getting into any details this: "Once in a group chat, team members referred to a new Asian American recruit as slanty eye joe" seems very strange to me. The Uber tech org is like 80%+ foreign born, this makes pretty much zero sense. Disclaimer: I work for Uber.

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Racism isn't limited to locals. Foreign born people can be just as racist as everyone else. For example, it's suprisingly common to hear immigrants complain that there is too much immigration now.

I don't know if you realize it, but you are conflating anti-immigration sentiments with racism.

I have seen groups of people where their internal culture stamps the OK on terms like that...even when members of the group are of that race. Some kind of thing where slinging insults of any type is "playful" and accepted. It's odd, but it happens.

it makes a lot of sense. Americans are taught PC behavior. It is incorrect to assume that our local fetish is considered a universal good. In my experience it is one of the peculiarities of US culture that foreign born, especially Asians, initially struggle with

You work for Uber but are you in the SV offices? The culture probably varies quite a bit depending on where you are.

I meant the San Francisco offices. I think this office is something like half (corrected) Asian American. I thought about this a bit more and it makes even less sense.

I have worked for a number of old generation US companies and some were a part of the military-industrial complex. The employee population in them was significantly biased to the right (white, male, middle aged), up to the point that it would be "Trump crowd" today. Yet, I have never heard anything like this. Uber as any other tech company is full of younger and more liberal people. So this particular allegation (open expressions of racism towards Asian Americans) just seems extremely unlikely.

Unless... Well, there are indeed some countries that are culturally very casually racist. Ex-USSR comes to mind. Yet, even ex-USSR crowd is not that stupid and by now there enough self awareness to not say things like this out loud.

This is fishy.

You lost me at that last paragraph. Slinging mud as one minority does not make a strong case for how little mud-slinging-at-minorities happens around you.

Yes, because casual racism by individuals makes sense.

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