While I agree that a hacker being from country $FOO should bear no negative association with everyone else from the country, this doesn't appear to be racism, which is a label that already get applied too often.

You can make disparaging remarks about a nation without it having any racist intent. The people on HN and elsewhere who disparage the USA, for instance, could hardly be singling out a single race.

If you choose to correlate two generally unrelated negative events based on race and imply they are a symptom of an underlying failing of character of the culture, that is very much racism.

Just try replacing Turkish with gay, which is about equally as arbitrary of a relationship to pick, and see how the parent's statement sounds to you.

In that case it would sound homophobic, not racist.

Exactly ...

There's nothing "Exactly" about it, unless you're trying to claim that cultural norms are the same as races now.

Ah OK. If we're talking definitions then indeed; as far as I'm concerned discriminating based on cultural norms of a specific country is still racism.

I can imagine that in the US racism more commonly concerns the traditional notion of race but in Europe, where race and nationality are usually synonymous for all intents and purposes, a workable definition needs to be a bit broader.

I double checked it on Wikipedia just to get a second opinion and this is what they have to say about it:

> Some definitions of racism also include discriminatory behaviors and beliefs based on cultural, national, ethnic, caste, or religious stereotypes