I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.
But the Indians passed through a strong selection filter from the billion Indians in India, which is both restrictive toward people with low economic potential and permissive to people with high economic potential.
Blacks in the US are like the so-called "backwards" castes in India, with much less opportunity and who aren't coming to the US for grad school and careers.
In light of that, it’s not at all surprising to me that people of Indian descent in America are disproportionately successful.
I am happy with where Indians are but I'm just trying to understand, in the light of recent situations, how deeply Black Americans feel they don't have any chance at success within their own country.
I think that they are over-represented in all these subjects compared to their demographic weight in the general population.
On top of that, there is a significant migration of Indian engineers to the US/UK/etc.
Here in the UK Indians 'succeed' because, as I mentioned, they invest massively in education. If you look at the grammar schools (selective state schools) exam, quite often the majority of children in the room are Asians.
The same route is open to black people, to white people, to anyone. The issue is much more complex than claiming that a specific group is victimised.
People are, in the vast majority, hired on merit. If you have an opening for a software engineer you can only hire someone who applied for that job. Few black people in tech starts at 6 years old.
It’s clear that Blacks are less likely to succeed in the US than Whites. One can phrase that as “Blacks are disadvantaged” or “Whites are advantaged”. Both are true statements, but one leads to positive actions and the other to negative.
As a society, our goal should not be to eliminate the advantages of one group above another. We should be trying to provide more advantages to everyone, both as a population and individual groups.
Then, people take the opportunity, or their don't.
Race should not be relevant. My problem with current climate is that it perpetuates race as something to notice and to treat specifically when we should aim for the opposite.
But we are fighting close to 400 years of systematic oppression to turn those opportunities into tangible results. That history requires some type of direct action to advance the current state of Black Americans.