Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Note that linked study [0] uses too high white percentages for Facebook.

> As of 2020, the percentage of white employees at Facebook is 63.2%.

It links to this [1] document where if you click on "whites" in the "US ethnicity" section, there is indeed a 63.2% percentage. But that number corresponds to the green curve which concerns people in leadership roles. The number for all facebook employees (including the technical engineers, etc) is the blue one, which only has 41%. In the image, facebook would thus be closer to the other tech companies and further away from the journalists.

It's also interesting to note that the percentage of nonhispanic whites in the US population is 60.1% [2], so they are actually underrepresented in big tech companies (and overrepresented in tech journalism). Didn't know that!

[0]: https://tech-journalism-diversity-report.github.io/code/

[1]: https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/

[2]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

To add to that, that's counting Jews as white. When you don't, two very unfortunate things happen: first non Jewish whites are now the most underrepresented category, and two you end up sounding like Charlie Chaplin with a mustache.

I find in particularly hilarious that white men are most definitely bad, but Jews are definitely not bad and definitely not white. However Jews and Arabs can be interchangeably considered white, Arab or Jewish, or Asian depending on what story you’re trying to tell. An Indian can be counted as just generically brown or “of color” if they’re participating in the correct political narratives, but most certainly become Asian the moment they start to consider getting in on some of that affirmative action.

Isn’t it wonderful that ethnicity has once again become such a terribly important factor when it comes to passing judgements about people...

> ...but Jews are... definitely not white

To be fair, I don't think this is a common view anymore, least of all in polite society. "White" was extended from indicating strictly WASP settlers (excluding even the Irish) to Europeans in general as early as the late-19th to early-20th c. - and then further extended to include Middle-Eastern folks and the like sometime later. It's definitely weird though how these ethnical and even overtly race-based characterizations are used in the U.S.

I think AmericanChopper meant that in the sense that when someone complains about whites, they don't have Jews in mind.

How could you tell that they don't, though? And does it really matter, since they probably don't have Polish or $RANDOM_WHITE_SUBGROUP folks in mind either, but this doesn't make Polish folks non-white.

Because the kind of people that complain about whites don't like the kind of people that complain about jews.

Well, to accept the “tech is racist” narrative you would need to do the mental gymnastics required to believe that Jews, South Asians and East Asians are all white. Similar to the mental contortions that Harvard uses to justify its racist admissions policies.

Most Jews in America are Ashkenazi and are essentially German, Polish, Ukranian for them most part.

i.e. 'Zuckerberg' 'Sandberg' 'Goldman'.

They are genetically not different from other Europeans other than for some possibly some minor specific linkage way back. That wing of the diaspora has been in Europe for at least 1000 years, originating in the area from Netherlands down to Frankfurt and spreading Eastward towards Russia.

Even many Sephardi jews, from the Med (i.e. Spain, Greece, Turkey), are more European than they are Middle Eastern at least genetically.

So they are a sub-group of whites. they have distinct culture and also some distinct genetic make up (look for Ashkenazi Jewish Genetic Panel)

If this sub group has more privilege, don't we want equity for other sub groups?

Not necessarily, as historic rates of Jewish interfaith marriage were until recently extremely low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_marriage_in_Judaism:

Interfaith marriage in Judaism was historically looked upon with very strong disfavour by Jewish leaders, and it remains a controversial issue among them today. [..] In the early 19th century, in some less modernised regions of the world, exogamy was extremely rare—less than 0.1% of the Jews of Algeria, for example, practiced exogamy. In the early 20th century, even in most Germanic regions of central Europe there were still only a mere 5% of Jews marrying non-Jews.

To underscore how very disfavored mixed marriages were, Bernard S. Bachrach's Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe states (speaking about the 6th century, but it is unclear how wide-ranging this policy was):

According to Jewish custom a woman who willingly and openly went to live with a non-Jew was considered dead by her family and by the Jewish community. Legally it was the duty of the community to stone her to death if she could be found.

The point here is to show the silly consequences of categorizing people by "race", not to argue about the minutiæ of how to properly do race discrimination.

So I think that's a fair point, at the same time I don't think 'race' is quite a silly thing, just not a hugely important thing.

If race is silly, then is BLM a silly concept?

We could say the same thing about 'silly culture' or 'silly language' or 'silly attitudes' or 'silly politics' ... so that we can just all focus on the truly important things like our 'iPhones'.

At very least it's history, and interesting on that level, more controversially, it's part of our identities at least in a broad sense.

I find this [1] basically fascinating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews

It has been fixed. Thanks for pointing it out.

Thanks for the fix!

There are many examples of races/sexes/etc being over-represented or under-represented in certain contexts in the US. Unfortunately the fact doesn't get much discussion.

Example: Asians are 37% of software developers and 18% of surgeons[1] despite being 5.4% of the US population[2].

1) https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

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