Controversial author on a controversial topic
That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up with a particular religious group behaving like X, even if X didn't come from the religion itself.
One could easily apply the same reasoning to visible ethnic groups: they don't behave similarly because of their ethnicity, but the ethnicity defines a grouping where the people within tend to converge on shared cultural norms regardless. Ergo, you would indeed end up with people within said grouping behaving similarly, and then it follows that increasing diversity of which groups you hire from would increase diversity of cultural norms or thought/behavior.
I do think there's something to 'shared experiences' across ethnic groups to an extent, though it probably won't have as strong an effect as sharing a religion, given that religion is at least nominally a choice, and has an explicit ideology backing it. Nevertheless, you see this effect when you see viral memes with captions like "only asian american kids get this" -- obviously these don't apply universally, but there's enough of something there to drive their virality. Hell, sometimes it may be as simple as shared experiences dealing with racism.
> Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.
I don't really see how you got this from what I said.
He said ethnicity, not skin colour. Ethnicity is a quite broad and fluid concept which you could assign to any distinguishable cultural group which has some shared history, shared norms or values etc.
As such, it's entirely valid to say that if you belong to a certain ethnicity, statistically you're quite likely to converge personally on many of its norms and values. That doesn't mean all muslims are alike, but two muslims are more alike, ceteris paribus, than a muslim and a non-muslim.
That also doesn't exclude that there can be many different ethnicities at play at the same time, e.g. there are asian (e.g. Indonesian) muslims and african (e.g. Moroccan) muslims. And again, a muslim moroccan is more alike a Moroccan jew than perhaps an Indonesian muslim. Because Morocco has a culture, and Moroccans as an ethnicity converge to many of its norms and values, just like Indonesians in Indonesia.
And so indeed, Black Americans are a distinct ethnicity from African Americans (for lack of better terminology), agreed. And within those ethnicities its willing or unwilling members converge on the norms/values in those groups. I don't see how that's controversial. That doesn't mean they're all copies or mindless drones. Nor does it mean the members cannot have other ethnicities which they also converge on.
I'd say the fact members of group A statistically tend to be more likely to exhibit than outside members, the characteristics of group A (i.e., converging weakly or strongly to norms/values of group A), is so obvious that it is almost a truism that isn't worth stating, and hardly controversial or thinly veiled racism.
This combined with new laws proposals from Germany could soon have a substantial impact on Tech by mandating various regulations on such platforms.
The effect of such regulations that could be endorsed by the two biggest and most influential members of the EU and could lead to a drastic change in the tech world in Europe.
>In France right now the topic is extremely controversial due to recent events
For those not aware last week a teacher was decapitated : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/world/europe/france-teach...
>Social networks which are blamed openly by the public opinion for their amplifying effect.
What are your source for public opinion here? Yes, mainstream media are bold on the social networks. The same mainstream media which are all owned by the wealthiest people of the country and still abundantly financed by the State to survive.
Mainstream media message is not "the public opinion", which is understandably diverse.
Actually, you don’t have to dig much into what penetrate even in the mainstream media to see opinions going from "well, if our proposal to harden the political system as we wish is unconstitutional, we just have to edit the constitution first" to "the same incompetent political class that led our country to the current wave of terrorism is now willing to burn the few remaining public liberty we can enjoy".
The question is not whether a topic is controversial or not. I can make a controversy on the color of your socket – or on endianness[1]. The question is whether we can treat a subject properly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#History_...