> However, even if it is, so what? Why exactly does that behavior get to be overlooked as though it doesn't have a real effect on people who suffer from it?

Many places employers are technically - though it's nearly impossible to police - in theory required to attempt to offer reasonable accommodation for physical or mental disabilities.

His behaviour does not "get to be overlooked", and certainly would pose substantial problems, but it is a reasonable question to ask if it is possible for someone to accommodate him in a way that does not put undue strain on other employees or clients.

As for your "while non-white people struggle to find work in tech", it is irrelevant to the question at hand: One injustice does not justify another.

In this case, furthermore, nobody is starting a campaign to get racist bigots jobs in tech, nor do I see any serious attempts at providing him assistance to find a job. People are exchanging a few messages expressing sympathy for a specific person with a known mental illness who has been a visible and at times admired part of the tech community for the last two decades.

I wonder if it's a similar deal to the conspiracies and finding patterns that aren't there. Mentally healthy people already have trouble with cause and effect with race issues, so instead of going "Lots of black people in jail -> The war on drugs is absurd and our justice system has problems" he connects "Lots of black people in jail -> black people are bad."

/ Not a psychologist. unless internet armchair psychology counts

"while non-white people struggle to find work in tech?", said nobody who has ever been in Silicon Valley.

What happens if you send two identical resumes to a gajillion different jobs - the resumes are identical except one has the name "James Smith" and the other has the name "Jamal Jackson".

Luckily, other people have done this for us:

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-jo...

Not to discredit your point, as I do believe it's still has some validity, but that study is 12 years old and I'd like to think there has been some progress since then... You know like maybe having a president with the name Barack Obama.

You figure a black person being elected President makes racists stop being racist?

'Cause I know some racists, and I can tell you that the opposite is true.

I have no doubt there are children today that are not growing up to become racist because of him. And I have no doubt there is less racism occurring, amongst todays' adults, because of him.

Hence the word "progress" and the reason why relying on decade old social studies is not the best idea.

To me, the best demonstration of continued racism, is that there's no way Obama - being half-black, half-white - would have been able to get away with self-identifying as white.

That's not really an aspect of racism. It's the way races are (poorly) defined. He qualifies as black unless we can kill the meme of races entirely, even in a world that had no prejudice.

The way races are defined is racist to begin with - that is the point - and the way it is being used to label people is explicitly used to put people down. Obama is "black" and not "white" solely because for a lot of people it is very important to label him black to be able to dismiss him. If people were not racist, nobody would e.g. care if people referred to him as white. Try referring to him even as mixed race, or half-white, and see the racists quickly come crawling out of the woodwork to make sure it is made clear how black he is.

It's a description of someone's skin color and facial features for the most part. It's not fundamentally racist, that's just the main use.

Yeah yeah, that rule of thumb is in the racist area but you can discount it and he's still obviously 'black' as much as the term 'black' has any meaning.

Anyone qualified is not struggling to find tech work right now, especially in the bay area. My company is dominated by people from China and India. White makes up ~20%.

The definition of "whiteness" in discrimination actually isn't very well correlated to skin color; e.g. Irish people until recently were considered to be "black", and in the UK, still kind of are. Some non-white people like Asians are often considered white in many contexts (like tech hiring in the USA). Try applying for a job in Beijing as a Uighur and even though your skin is whiter than Han, you are still going to have lots problems.

It is basically bias of ethnicity that transcends skin color.

> Irish people until recently were considered to be "black", and in the UK, still kind of are.

Is this from personal experience? If not, can you link me somewhere?

Do you mean sounds Irish / looks Irish / is Irish / is Catholic / something else or a mix of these?

I don't disagree with you (not sure either way tbh) but do have a personal interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment#21st_cent... provides some good starting points.

Thank you. Now convinced. I think I just found 'black' a bit jarring as a generic 'not-white' descriptor but now I see the use.

If 'white' doesn't refer to skin color, then you are just babbling worthless information and making racism worse. You are essentially making 'white' mean 'qualified potential employees'.

I'm only stating the obvious that racial bias has historically transcended skin color even if the terms "white" and "non-white" are still used. References:

http://professorwhatif.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/what-if-your...

> Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Eastern Europeans with light/white skin have at various historical periods not been considered white. The changing rules and requirements regarding who gets to be in the white club are related to systems of power and privilege. This is why whiteness is defined by exclusion rather than inclusion.

> While US history quite clearly excluded Asians, Indigenous Peoples, and African Americans from the white category, Europeans have been excluded, included, or partially included in the white club depending on religious belief, economic climate, labor skills, etc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...

http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/asian.htm

> The racial divisions between white and Asian, once so stark and to many almost unbridgeable, are quickly fading away. Marriages between Asians and whites are increasingly common; while anti-Asian bigotry exists, it is (at least among whites) much rarer than it was only one or two generations ago. As with the experience of the American Irish, Italians, Jews, and many other groups, the Asian experience shows that racial divisions and hostilities can subside over time.

Askhistorians has a bunch of good discussions on the issue:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s62iy/europe...

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cg6e0/when_a...

E.g.:

> I attended a lecture on this. Essentially, whiteness is a malleable concept that includes or excludes different races over time. While we perhaps naively think that "white" is based on the color of skin or continent of origin, Mexicans, for example, of entirely Spanish (i.e. European) descent are considered non-white. But they didn't use to - other than the Census of 1930, they were considered white in the early 20th Century. On the most recent census, 49% of Latinos checked "White" as their race. (Most of the rest checked "other".)

> Jews, Italians, Irish, etc., are all races that were considered non-white (which meant English in the most restrictive use of the word) to begin with, but "became white" over time. In the case of the Irish, this happened when Irish people started appearing in prominent places - sports athletes, police commissioners (the Philadelphia police department had a lot of Irish in it), politicians, and so forth. With the Jews, it happened when they too moved up the social ladder, becoming one of the most educated subgroups in America (Jews have about 5 times the average number of academic professors). I'm not familiar with the Italian story.

He apparently knows a thing or two and gets stuff done. I'd hire him.

What would you do when your black employees object to what he would say to them? The words "hostile work environment" come to mind.

I worked with an administrative assistant with Tourette's syndrome who would routinely blurt out observations about the sexual/physical characteristics of female co-workers, provoking "managers" passing by to take the opportunity to assert their inclination to be the strong gentleman and challenge this poor fellow to a fight for m'lady's honor.

It only took a moment of explanation and de-escalation to clue them in to what was going on, and the situation was defused, no matter how many more "nice tits" the administrator busted out in public.

The same mob that is going after his explicit racism here, knows that it can't handle being incited to anger. That it can't trust itself.

Who knows better than the mob?