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

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...

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.

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.

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....

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.)

Think highlight rather than promote. Think shared experience rather than shared interest. No, not identical experience, but think overlapping parts of a venn diagram. A relevant example in that overlap, assumed criminality, is mentioned in the very comment you are replying to.

And sure, it's probably very Western-centric and doesn't encapsulate the complicated relations amongst many different races, nationalities, and ethnicities. Not sure why one would expect a single phrase to accomplish such.

> 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.

Do you have a similar issue with the LGBT framing?

How much shared experience does a professional class recent immigrant from Asia actually have with a working class African-American? For very many of the former, the "assumed criminality" is largely a non-issue. (Even the example mentioned in quadrifoliate's comment was presented as an exception rather than the norm.)

And, might not recent immigrants from Asian countries have shared experiences in common with immigrants from Europe? quadrifoliate mentioned experiencing stupid jokes about his perceived culture, but dumb ethnic jokes and stereotypes are something that European-descended ethnic minorities have to put up with too. At school, my half-Italian friend had to put up with jokes about his dad being in the mafia; there is a long tradition of jokes presenting Irish people as stupid; etc. Yet the Italians/Irish/Greeks/etc who have to put up with these dumb jokes and stereotypes are not classified as "people of color", while the same experience had by an Asian person is put forward as justification for classifying them as such.

> Do you have a similar issue with the LGBT framing?

Yes. To give just one example, a number of lesbian feminists have criticised that framing as over-emphasising the commonality of interests between gay men and lesbian women and under-emphasising the extent to which their interests conflict with each other. see e.g. https://we.riseup.net/assets/168538/Sheila%20Jeffreys%20The%...

Not much, but the shared experience they have is as a basis of the color of their skin is what is visualized when calling them a person of color. And historically, that has been a big deal (e.g. anti-miscegnation laws in the US and huge amounts of racial discrimination in India's colonized past) – big enough that a lot of people think it's important enough to have a shared label.

> And, might not recent immigrants from Asian countries have shared experiences in common with immigrants from Europe?

Sure! And using the term "immigrant", we would classify their shared experience as such. A recent "professional class immigrant" could be a person of color having something in common with a working class African American, and something in common with the Italian immigrant.

It's like Gmail v/s traditional mailboxes with folders. An email can have multiple labels in Gmail. So can a person in real life.