[0zymandias]

It seems like people from other ethnicities/countries have done well in Silicon Valley, e.g. India, China, Iran. Notably, CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Uber and others are brown-skinned.

Would they have done even better without the racism? Or what accounts for the difference?

[charlesu]

The difference is hundreds of years of slavery and institutional discrimination specifically target toward blacks and all the accompanying cultural baggage. Part of that baggage is a deeply ingrained suggestion that black people are intellectually inferior but innately athletic.

That isn't to say that other ethnic groups don't deal with racism too. But it's different. An African American executive in a suit may be mistaken for being a waiter, but he's unlikely to be asked where he's "really from" like an Asian American.

[sfj]

> The difference is hundreds of years of slavery and institutional discrimination specifically target toward blacks and all the accompanying cultural baggage. Part of that baggage is a deeply ingrained suggestion that black people are intellectually inferior but innately athletic.

How can you say this with complete certainty? How could you ever be sure?

[charlesu]

My argument is that history matters. You're welcome to argue otherwise.

[nitwit005]

That's kind of a non-response isn't it? The way things are is always determined by the events that came before. It doesn't mean you've correctly identified the right events.

I think it's easy to point at something like slavery as the underlying cause, but Europeans had no issue looking down on blacks before they had the idea to import them to the new world as slaves, and Europe adopted similar attitudes toward blacks with no slaves present.

[charlesu]

> That's kind of a non-response isn't it? The way things are is always determined by the events that came before. It doesn't mean you've correctly identified the right events.

Then name the events.

I happen to think that slavery shaped American culture and American history. I find it improbable that a country would have race-based chattel slavery for several centuries but no significant cultural baggage. If that were the case, why then did the South fight Reconstruction? What was the purpose of Jim Crow? Those were concerted efforts to undermine the freedom of black people in particular. If there were no baggage, why didn't everyone just let bygones be bygones?

> Europeans had no issue looking down on blacks before they had the idea to import them to the new world as slaves

Even if that were true, it would not negate my claim. Europeans could have generally "looked down on blacks" before and then created specific slavery-justifying stereotypes about blacks as slavery became profitable.

> Europe adopted similar attitudes toward blacks with no slaves present

There were slaves in Europe. In fact, the British empire didn't abolish slavery until 1833. But even if there weren't slaves in Europe, that would not have precluded intercultural transmission of negative stereotypes about black people. There was little black slavery in Asia, but you'll find many of the same stereotypes about black people there. Countries don't exist in a vacuum.

[nitwit005]

> Then name the events.

I didn't claim to know the answer, just that your claims lacked support.

Of course slavery shaped American history, and thus its culture, but step back and imagine it never happened. Let's say the first blacks arrived in the US in 1990.

I'd still expect a similar level of racism toward blacks, because that's true globally. Even people in somewhere like rural China who have never met a black person are likely to look down on them.

Some of the Southern goofiness would be gone like you point out, but overall I'd unfortunately expect a remarkable similar situation.

[sfj]

Where is your evidence? I think the null hypotheses, i.e. we don't know, is more probable then what a appears to be an unsubstantiated conclusion that you wrote.

[azernik]

Bias studies tend to prove that this, as does a quick perusal of the specific statements in openly-racist literature.

[sumedh]

The groups which you mention, most of those Indians, Chinese and others who come to US go through a filtering process in terms of student or work visa. So you get educated, successful and highly motivated people who also have higher incomes compared to the average income in their native countries.

The US is is literally getting "good" immigrants from those countries. You are not getting the poor unmotivated individuals.

These motivated individuals will pass on those characteristics and their wealth to their kids.

The current African American's ancestors had no such filtering process, combine that with systematic racism and poverty its not too hard to imagine why they fall behind.

[gowld]

Asian immigrants largely pass through a selection filter of wealth and education before they can immigrate (in tech at least, thanks to H1-B), so the ones you see have largely been preselected and show up in a large peer group.

The Chinese or Indian person next to you at work who came to US on an H1B or education visa was much more elite in their home country than you are in yours, on average.

[FilterSweep]

Anecdotal but this is what I have seen across multiple companies and startups.