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Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

“Most people of color working in tech know that there’s a diversity problem,”

Interesting. Are Asians or Indians not “people” or “of color” in this worldview?

The major problem with this "people of color" designation is that it sweeps specific discrimination against African Americans* under the rug. It is certainly possible to have 100% employees "of color" while consciously excluding African Americans, which I have witnessed at private companies (blue collar jobs mostly) in California (where I live). The result is that affirmative action for African Americans, which has been replaced with affirmative action for women and non-white men, does way more for non-African Americans than the originally intended recipients (collectively). Even black African/Caribbean immigrants are used for diversity accounting-- see the NYTimes article from 2004, "Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?".

Please note this is not a slight against women, immigrants, or anyone else. They obviously have valid discrimination claims. But if you work in a community where less than 1% of African-American students are scoring at grade level in mathematics, and your company claims it is "diverse" yet hires no local African-Americans, there is still a serious problem in your community that should be addressed. (It's OK if you don't care, as long as you don't pretend otherwise). So please do not conflate hiring "people of color" with hiring any specific group.

* By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.

> By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.

Interestingly, a growing number of activists prefer the term ADOS (American descendants of slavery) because it makes precisely this distinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...

Newspeak makes a distinction between "poc" and "non black poc"

It's not "newspeak" to suggest that Black people are treated differently than Asian people; in fact, it would be more surprising to hear that they aren't, since the two groups of people have wildly different histories in the United States.

And both face heavy discrimination and racism outside of the tech bubble of Silicon Valley, both historically and in the present day. To exclude Asians from the definition of POC is to disempower us because you consider one POC “more important” than another.

Indeed, we see this mentality in programs like affirmative action in which the suffering of Asian children is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for uplifting other minorities.

> Black people treated differently

different cultural groups also behave differently and make different choices based on familial affinities & social incentives

A new term I've seen used is "black & indigenous people of color" (BIPOC), which conspicuously leaves out Asians and is fuzzy on Hispanics.

Asians are pretty much banished from the minority club in an "I am storming off angrily with words failing me." fashion.

Ridiculously, people are starting to use this term in the UK too, even though white people are the indigenous ones here.

In the US, being "marginalized" means you are part of a cultural minority group that is politically useful to political corporatists - typically of the cultural coalition party.

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