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Comment by mirceal | Hacker News Reader

dude (not an indian btw), you can be racist no matter what you are. identifying as an indian does not make what you’re saying less offensive

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Being racist would be discriminating someone based on their race without actually looking into the circumstances. Pointing out cultural roots of a very real problem and openly taking about it is a totally different thing.

Pretending that “Indian” describes a single culture composed of more than a billion people is the defintion of racism. India is an incredibly diverse place full of people who have less in common in terms of culture (not to mention language) than a Californian does with a New Yorker.

It does not describe every single person in a country. However, if you deny that certain countries have certain cultural identities you are lying to yourself.

I would argue that reducing more than a billion people who don’t even speak the same language, eat the same food, listen to the same music, worship the same gods... to a single stereotype is the sweaty face of ingorance, no matter how you try to dress it up or defend it. The fact that “arguments” such as yours always seem to be devoid of a grounding in reality and exist as appeals to emotion or common sense speaks for itself too. In short, ignorance and heuristics combine to produce bullshit every time.

Yet if you compare a Californian and a New Yorker to a Russian like myself, you can safely bet that both will smile more and be less direct in conversations due to the cultural differences.

You haven’t met many New Yorkers have you?

You haven't met many Russians, have you? :)

I’m half Russian, so yeah I have.

if you reread my comment was that the parent was offensive. saying that you’re from X does not give you a free pass to talk shit about people from X.

He's talking about a country of birth, not a race. It's better not to go around worrying about whether somebody will call you racist.

It would be nice if I could read an HN thread without people bitching about Indians though.

depending on how you define race (if you look at it in the broader trrm of ethnicity) you can definitely talk about racism.

It's not about ethnicity because these stereotypes completely exclude Indians that grew up in America. Whether you classify it as racist or not, going around classifying stuff as racist is a total non-contribution to the world. Opinions being "racist" per your view does not imply they are incorrect or morally wrong to hold, or express.

(There is something ambitious about remotely diagnosing some guy (by association) to be a cookie-cutter Indian manager, but I'm having a hard time figuring out a way it's more than just unfashionable.)

i did not see the clause that excluded people that did not grew in India.

Every time you take one label and you apply it to a large group of people that have something in common you have the potential to be labeled yourself as racist. IMHO that’s the definition of racism: you take a negative attribute and you map it to a class of people. usually you also imply that you/we are better than them.

here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

“prejudice against people based on their ethnicity”

i may have an idiosyncratic definition of racism or we may have different understandings but this definitely crosses the line.

if the claim was made that the guy’s manager is so and so, we would have left it at that. but the claim was targeted at all managers that are indian. that’s fucked up.

Well, There is nothing racist about my observations.

I love India and Indians, not fond of Indian bosses.. most of them

How is making negative generalizations about people from a specific country not racist?

Americans are loud, obnoxious tourists. Is that racist?

yes

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