[FT_intern]

> it's all "silicon valley white"

You don't consider the thousands of immigrants who grew up in completely different cultures with different primary languages in Asia and Europe as diversity?

Instead, you consider the American born Black person whose primary language is English and who grew up with American culture as "diversity"?

[tptacek]

Drive through the neighborhoods of Chicago, through enclaves of Irish, Polish, German, and Jewish people. You won't miss them: the signage will abruptly change to Polish, or the streets will be full of men in suits wearing their hair in payots. This is a form of diversity, to be sure. But it's not the kind we're concerned about.

The problem here is the word "diversity", which is very easily hijacked to distort discussions. I think we're all pretty much on the same page that the concern being addressed here is the exclusion of specific, prominent ethnicities from SFBA tech culture, not the absolute number of different ethnicities being represented.

[temp246810]

This is precisely a point that irks me as well.

It's fine if you want to lament the lack of black people in any given domain, but to generalize and say there is no diversity at all because a lack of black people is short changing not only the efforts of many people, but many people as well.

[entee]

Of course immigrants and different languages increase diversity. But it's also true that other people from within the US are critical to developing a balanced view of the world. A black person is going to have a very different experience that I will as a white dude, and we are all poorer for it when we don't know people with those experiences. The same goes for the white farmer who grew up on a ranch in Nebraska, I would love to know more of those people, they see the world differently than I do.