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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

Full disclosure: I'm not (totally) white.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Asia

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.

Buuuut this isn't China. It's America. Ethnic diversity is part of the DNA here.

Buuuut the implicit claim is that not being around diversity is somehow bad for you.

I think the claim is actually this: not being around sufficient levels of diversity is somehow bad for you.

Where are the "all" hispanic outreach programs in tech?

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/10/14/to-diversify-work-fo...

Fair to mention that Howard U does not discriminate on race in admissions.

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.

No, it isn't.

Sure, in some parts of the country, it is. But in other parts of the country, it isn't.

It's part of the DNA basically if you only look at big cities on the coasts.

big cities on the coasts, and the Southwest, and the Southeast, so, everywhere except the Plains states

Also, Palo Alto is a big city on the coast.

China may not be ethnically diverse but certainly it is culturally -- so I don't get the hypothetical born in China example.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

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?).

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.

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