You make it sound as if every other Western country with a tech footprint doesn't do the same thing. They do.
That wasn't the question, it was whether race bias plays any large role in hirings as in the US, which in UK, Canada, nordic countries etc it doesn't, as it doesn't in the societies in general.
Can't speak for South Africa, Australia or NZ, far enough from Western Europe to be what I meant.
1. It's rather convenient for your argument, isn't it, that some of the aforementioned countries (the Scandinavian ones) don't have any substantial black population. So no need to correct race bias there...there aren't many black workers there! Nice job.
2. The UK actually does have a significant black population, and if you look at UK tech companies I think you'll see that they have close to the same percentage of black programmers as in the US.
Subsidiary point: being smug about supposed Euro superiority re: race bias in tech hiring and engaging in America bashing is a weak reed to lean on.
Well, the US also didn't have any history (as US) before 1942 or so, so of course it got populated by "more racially diverse" population -- not because of the benevolence and multiculturalism of people already living there, but because people came in from all corners, grabbed land, and established a new country (in the process giving the real native population the short end of the stick).
And despite that, the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice, it had segregation long after Europe has done with it (which was rarely an issue here), and is still uptight about race in ways Europe isn't.
Let's not even get into how 25% of the world's prisoners are in the US that only has 4% of the world's total population -- and how many of them are black compared to the whites there.
That's what makes it "crazy about race as always".
>1. It's rather convenient for your argument, isn't it, that some of the aforementioned countries (the Scandinavian ones) don't have any substantial black population.
Well, sorry that Sweden didn't abduct and bought people from Africa so that it can now have more blacks... They do have a 5-7% of muslim immigrants, does that count?
That is incorrect. US history begins in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. And before it was a federation of States, people had been there homesteading when the territory was an English colony.
the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice
That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old. That's not even one full generation.
I dunno man, I think I'll take US "uptightness" any day over the English version of "uptight." And I say that as someone whose grandparents were British subjects!
Not even technically (although I did mean 1492). The fact that US history begins in 1776 doesn't make the fact that US doesn't have a history before 1492 untrue. If anything, it makes it even stronger: it not only didn't have a history, it didn't even exist for another 3 centuries or so.
In any case, I was referring to the whole history of the now-US settlements, no just the history of the US as a state.
>That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old.
I spoke of "other European countries". You only mentioned one, the British Empire, and even itself abolished slavery 30 years before the US. Others did it much earlier. So much for being some shining beacon of freedom. Besides, even 1833 is the date for the British Empire at large. In the UK slavery was abolished much earlier still.
And Europe is extremely uptight about Holocaust-related things in ways that America isn't. This isn't surprising; we should expect laws and norms to be directly affected by a country's history.
That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?
Germany perhaps. Most of Europe, not.
>That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?
Because the US still has a thing for race, in a degree and a way that western european countries don't.
Not just being "uptight" but active redlining, active huge overrepresentation of blacks in jail, active police open season on blacks, active open racism and much more.