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Comment by rainyMammoth | Hacker News Reader

edit: deleted to not start an unrelated discussion on HN

It's not helpful to delete the context of how a flamewar got started. More helpful would be not start flamewars in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's one line at which we ban accounts, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to them, we'd appreciate it.

It’s very related. It’s hard to go and decide to start a company unless you’ve got the economics to do so, either in the form of available capital or a fall-back security blanket. Those things, in America, trend disproportionately White.

Don’t ever forget: for as much as they will try to make it seem like Silicon Valley is a true meritocracy, the #1 most common thing that successful entrepreneurs have is that they grew up rich.

wait a second, I was told all I had to do was learn to meditate, read the stoics and take cold showers.

If we're going to highlight the founders' whiteness, can we also highlight their Jewishness?

From what I understand and there is good chance I misunderstood, Jews don't consider themselves to be "White".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeixtYS-P3s seems vaguely related

In the little box you check off to select your ethnicity, Jews are in fact expected to check off white.

edit - You can write in "Jewish" but there's no "Jewish" box. This is why I turned against affirmative action (or taking account of ethnicity in any way). Jews are disproportionately rich and successful but they are "white" for the purposes of admissions. Meanwhile Asians, also disproportionately rich and successful, are "Asian". Why? Who makes these rules? Should anyone be making rules like that?

You could improve the situation by only providing ethnicity options that help the application (i.e. remove "Asian" and "white" and just stick to "black," "latino," "pacific islander," etc). This is definitely better but it's still bad in my opinion.

Unless they are Hispanic. Jews, like all members of religions, are expected to check off the ethnicity and race that they identify with.

Latinos are white, why would you separate them ?

In my perfect world we wouldn't separate anyone.

My point was that it would be an improvement to only include ethnicity options that help the application, so Hispanic/Latino would be included.

Ethnicity options should NOT help applications (unless you are supposed to work in a very traditional community I guess?)

You know there are non-white Jews, right?

Yes. But the vast majority of American Jews are "white".

There's no consensus over whether Jewishness is an ethnicity or a religion either.

These are all reasons to stop asking these kinds of questions of people.

What is the proportion of white Jews vs semite Jews in the USA ?

Jewish guy here adding his 0.07 shekels.

There's no real consensus about it, though in the US it's fair to say that most Jews can be included under the "white" category.

I think it's evident that there is a genetic makeup that can be considered "Jewish", in that it ties back to the genetic make up of residents of Judea and Israel in 500bc, but 2500 years of exodus brings about a strong difference between the genetically Jewish, and the culturally/religiously Jewish. While we Jews were relatively good at keeping it in-the-tribe for those millenniums, a significant portion (maybe most) are mixed in with the genetics of their host nations. Even if they were always religiously and/or culturally Jewish, they might still appropriately identify as racially white, black, or other depending on their exodential* heritage.

*If there's already a word for this, please share with me.

"Every article" seems like hyperbole.

This language is also on-brand for The New Yorker, which is known for opinionated authors writing opinionated language.

There are more important things to worry about, to be honest.

Because the writers want to build support to expropriate that racial group. Just imagine if it was "mostly Jewish men and women" and it's easy to see. In this case the cofounders actually were both Jewish, so they are both racially white and ethnically Jewish. If they identified them by their ethnicity or religious identification in such a sentence, they'd get a call from the ADL. You can write or say anything you want about whites in the most incendiary Radio Rwanda type terms and keep your job while advancing your social standing in the United States.

It looks like race categories are unhelpful anyway. Ethnicity is helpful, and religion is the most important part of it. Just look at the ethnic conflicts between same-race ethnies like Muslim semites vs Jewish semites or Protestant whites vs Catholic whites (Irish, Latinos)...

The whole point is that it IS related. Country club settings are historically a bastion of racism, and there is a modern corollary here. I think the burden falls on you to prove its not related.

This kind of "racist until proven otherwise" thinking is really not helping anything

It's Kafka-esque

You cannot prove non-existence - the burden is in fact on proving it _is_ related.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Proving...

Stereotyping is prejudging someone.

Racism is prejudging someone.

Don't prejudge.

Btw, what do you call "ethnic prejudice" when it's not race-based : like Muslim semites vs Jewish semites or Protestant whites vs Catholic whites (Irish, Latinos)... and I'm not sure that religion is particularly important for the last two ones where the US is concerned?

Oh come on, you must have read the very next sentence in that paragraph and deliberately left it out so it looked like that phrase was tossed in there without making any kind of point. Shameful, incendiary posting on your part if you ask me. What did you hope to achieve by stirring up tired culture war drama on hackernews?

> These founders—mostly white men and women—wanted a place to work, but they also wanted membership in a club. Or was it a fraternity?

It's not unrelated until systemic racism is gone

Have we tried not bringing up race for unrelated reasons like articles about WeWork though? That might help a bit.

No, that would "solidify the status quo" and be a sign of white supremacy. You don't want to be a white supremacist, do you, citizen?

You may be confusing systemic racism with simple population density.

Systemic racism is an existing system in place that acts on racial data. Simple population density is you noticing that the majority of people around you are one color.

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