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Comment by obblekk | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that Asians are discriminated against, perhaps in different ways? I've never been to the Valley and have been curious about its dynamics for some time.

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On the one hand, Asians don't count as "minorities" because there are too many successful Asians. Your startup isn't "diverse" because you have 30% Chinese engineers. On the other hand, their success isn't dismissed as the fruits of unfair privilege like white people (this accusation comes mostly from other white people). Part of the reason that writers ignore Asians is that they upset social justice narratives.

On the ground, there are few social barriers between whites and Asians. The exception is that I seldom saw an Asian man dating a white woman, as a commenter mentions below.

In the tech blogs, the large contributions of Asian people and culture to the Valley are just ignored. It is easier to find a noodle shop than a breakfast place. I think Cupertino had the first majority-Asian city council in the US.

Are there limits to how high Asian/Indian employees advance up the corporate ladder into management? Are there differences between foreign Asians and American Asians?

Asian CEOs and VCs do exist, but I would guess those demographics are underrepresented. I would guess this is due to the first few waves of entrepreneurs being mostly white (Fairchild and Microsoft company photos were much paler than a typical company today). Remember, the whole country was much whiter then, and the United States as a whole has over 5x the proportion of Asians today as compared to when SV was getting started[1]. Asian VCs I can think of made money off of late 90s companies and Facebook.

[1] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2013/05/Screen-Sh...

Asians and Indians are certainly discriminated against in the dating marketplace. This is often trivialized but it is a powerful force.

Are there differences between Asians from abroad and American Asians/Indians? I guess is this a culture/accent thing or is it just subconscious racism?

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