For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

This is an interesting and in-depth article that was inappropriately flagged. I've turned off the flags.

I understand the impulse to flag follow-up stories [1], especially on the hottest controversies of the moment, which always produce a flood of articles, most of which aren't very good. Curiosity and repetition don't go together [2]. But it's important to recognize the articles that are higher than median quality and not simply flag an entire category mechanically. Curiosity isn't mechanical either.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> This is an interesting and in-depth article that was inappropriately flagged. I've switched off the flags.

Consider that people are not flagging it because "it's a follow up article", but because a) it's Bloomberg, ergo hard to believe b) it's the seven billionth "minorities in tech" story in the past month c) it's not going to create an interesting comment section d) they don't find it as interesting as you do.

It's your site of course, but if "moderators build the front page" is the new modus operandi, I'll be disappointed.

> b) it's the seven billionth "minorities in tech" story in the past month

I would urge people to stop and question that if they are tired of the "billion"s of stories about BIPOC, what must BIPOC be feeling about their systemic erasure from many facets of our society, including journalism and entrepreneurship. This article allows us to think about and discuss those issues.

The article is not hard to believe, is one of substance that I find interesting, and the content of the comment section is not the only arbiter of what should go on Hacker News.

I would suggest that Occam's Razor is a better tool here; a small number of people who want to silence the idea the article presents are trying to silence it.

What's BIPOC?

As a less rhetorical answer, that might help some people if not the OP – as an Asian man in America, I have to worry about people making stupid jokes about my perceived culture, but usually not about getting the police called on me and being shot dead because I'm examining a BB gun that is on sale at Walmart [1] (sometimes, there are exceptions [2]).

BIPOC puts this group of people (Black and Indigenous) as a separate group before POC, since they face these challenges of simply surviving in society while doing what most of the "rest of us" consider normal activities. At first I was puzzled about why indigenous people were included, but then realized, for example, that Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other ethnic group [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_Crawford_III

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sureshbhai_Patel (it's sobering to note that even in this case, Patel had the police called on him because someone thought he was Black)

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/10/us/native-lives-matter/index....

Doesn't the "POC" term promote the idea that "people of color" have some sort of shared interests? Yet, is that always true?

Person A is an upper-middle class Indian. They study software engineering at university in India. They immigrate to the United States and get a job working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley.

Person B is a working class African-American. Nobody in their family has ever been to university. They work in a service job and live in the suburbs of Atlanta.

What do A and B actually have in common? It seems to me, probably not very much. Their life experiences are very different. A lives a much more privileged life than B. Probably, A actually has more in common with, and more commonality of interests, with their Caucasian American colleagues than with B. Given that, doesn't labelling them both as "POC" obscure more than it reveals?

It also completely ignores the problem that India has with anti-African racism and violence, see e.g – https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/24/the-harsh-reality-of-be... – something of which person A may of course be personally entirely innocent, but then again maybe not. If anything, I think the term "POC" is deeply Western-centric (and even US-centric), and presumes that racism and racial conflict is always whites-against-everyone else, when in the wider world it often isn't. (Africans in India, Uighurs and Tibetans in China–and, I think the case of China shows, trying to blame European colonialism for non-Western racism doesn't always work. Or, again, consider how Japan treated Koreans.)

I think the term BIPOC is potentially problematic in that it presents African-American and Native American interests as being more aligned than maybe they actually are. What is the foundational story of US history? The New York Times' 1619 Project presents it as being the Atlantic slave trade. Why that, and not the dispossession of Native Americans? Many African-Americans (and even many Caucasian Americans) seem to want to privilege the African-American narrative over the Native American narrative. Are Native Americans okay with that? I'm sure at least some are not. But lumping them together as "BIPOC" serves to obscure, even erase, these tensions.

(Throwaway because, I hope people can appreciate my comments are an attempt to approach these issues thoughtfully, but in today's climate one has to be very careful what one says.)