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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> ... an “all star” culture, with mostly young white and Asian men.

Up until yesterday I was very confused at how a tech company could be accused of racism while simultaneously having a (presumably) vast over-representation of Asians who - to the surprise of some - are a minority.

I have since learned [0] that there are literally a large group of people who have redefined "racism" to "unequal distribution of privileges between white people and people of color".

I think it would be necessary for the NYT to be using that definition here to distinguish this from an ordinary labour dispute. I've seen non-black teams where half or more the people quit.

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/white-fragility-de...

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You can be accepting of one race and still be racist against another. Racism means discrimination against a particular group or groups. It's not mutually exclusive, you don't get a free pass for thinking Asians are great while still persecuting Black people.

So you're the one redefining the meaning of the word.

No, he's defining the meaning as you put it, or compatibly with it. And taking the claims in the article at face value -- not people's feelings, but the specific facts asserted -- it's clear Coinbase hasn't been persecuting black people.

No, this is exactly what he said, laid out in argument form:

Premise 1: Tech companies are often accused of racism (any, not coinbase, neither of us mentioned coinbase)

Premise 2: Tech companies often contain a much larger % of Asians, a minority

Premise 3: (implied) having a disproportionate % of any one minority makes you non-racist

Conclusion: Therefore Tech companies are not racist

The conclusion does not follow because premise 3 is wrong. You can be racist about other minorities even while enthusiastically supporting one minority group.

Premise 3 was not implied.

Then why is he "very confused at how a tech company could be accused of racism"?

My definition of racism (which I did not share, despite it being the source of much debate) is discrimination against a particular group or groups on the basis of their heritage (ie, stuff outside their control).

So I was confused, because companies (like Coinbase) are being asked to discriminate by raising black employees to an especially high-status position vs, eg, Asians, then getting called racist when they do not.

But if the definition of racism was redefined to "unequal distribution of privileges between white people and people of color" then the accusations make sense.

You're right, it wasn't implied: it was explicitly stated.

It wasn't explicitly stated, either.

I think mattmanser has argued the point well.

The first paragraph is the OP saying that the company cannot [0] be racist since they (might) have a disproportionate number of one minority under their employment.

[0] - "cannot without causing the OP confusion", at least

OP just said it seems [my words here:] not grounded in observations of their behavior, not some definitional impossibility.

> You can be racist about other minorities even while enthusiastically supporting one minority group

How do you in your mind construct a person with this kind of mindset? Historically, a lot of "racism" or other kinds of ethnic "othering" hatred was between very similar ethnicities - e.g. Nazis and Jews, or Japanese & Chinese & Korean. Even nowadays the "racist" far factions in the US are "white supremacist", and dislike pretty much everyone across the board - Jews, blacks, lations, ...

So my prior is that it would be highly unlikely to find a non-trivial number of people who are racist against blacks yet pro Asians, let alone a whole industry (in California, a generally left-wing state!).

I think you might be overlooking the fact that bias comes in different forms against different groups. E.g., a hypothetical racist might be comfortable around Asians because he thinks they're subservient and weak, whereas he might be uncomfortable around black people because he thinks they're angry and violent. If this hypothetical racist ran a company, it's plausible he'd hire Asians, but not hire black people at all.

Asian who spent a decade in Texas - numerous occassions where blatantly racist people would consider me as "one of the good ones" and ask questions like "why are Indians so smart?"; There are the good races and then there are the bad ones you see! In fact the racist ones were especially nice to Asians to try to emphasize they're not blindly racist, just against the criminals and illegals!

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