Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

Thank you . That was a very honest reply . As someone who is brown and worked for over a decade in Oregon - I used to be similar to the first guy in my 20s . I was laidback , felt in touch with the local culture and was easy to work with. All of that was great until I gained experience and did not get promotions and saw my white co-workers keep getting promoted to lead and managerial positions . This was despite me being more qualified and having excellent performance reviews. When I brought it up with my manager and I was shortly laid off.

Now I am more like your second guy - I am older and a little wary. I know I am being judged especially if management and coworkers are overwhelmingly white - which is very common in Oregon . I am more careful , wary and precise about how I am at work - which makes others and someone like you less comfortable. It’s anecdotal but this is where the rest of us come from .

I feel like we were doing fairly well moving towards a single 'human tribe' for the first part of my life, and that 'Racist' was such a powerful label because it was tantamount to putting the human tribe secondary to some sub-group.

I'm not sure how or why, but it feels as though a large swathe of the intellectual class betrayed the project by changing the definition of racism from something an individual did, and could thereby be considered a traitor to the 'human' tribe, to something one could be guilty of merely by benefiting from when someone else betrayed the human tribe. If one person is a racist, everyone he favours is also guilty of racism under the new definition. No tribe could hold together under such conditions.

Nope.

My parents were refugees and arrived in this country with just the clothes on their backs. They worked factory jobs their entire life and never made much more than minimum wage.

I scraped and saved to buy my first computer and teach myself about the internet. We were never given anything from anyone.

Not to be harsh but the only evidence he actually gives is: there weren't many other black developers...which isn't surprising given how few black people study CS.

Like getting offended when someone says: "I couldn't tell where you are from"...is odd. I get that...and I am white, I just have an accent that is dissimilar to the place where I live (I am from "here" but people think I am not...everytime I go into this shop, literally everytime, the guy asks me if I am on holiday...I don't think I know that he is a xenophobe because he asks me that). If you come from Guinea...yes, people are going to ask questions and say stuff about that.

A lot of it sounds like hypotheticals...him saying, if you are black then this will happen...which is a really negative way of thinking (it is like saying if you are fat, you will get abused in the street...maybe it will happen but that stuff happens to non-fat people too, and saying that being fat is the reason kind of disguises that).

Also, I think most people have experience of being the "only" something at their workplace. You will work some places and have nothing in common with anyone...it happens.

Irregardless of the above, I struggle to see what could be different for some people not to have a problem. Some people have a very unrealistic interpretation of how other people live their lives. Everyone always has more friends, more luck, more money, their boss is nicer, the air they breathe is cleaner, etc.

I think you have a point, but I think your point is about out-group exclusion more than in-group affiliation. Otherwise we'd just affiliate with "humankind."

Your feeling of obligation to learn French, I think, is about not wanting to be seen as an outsider, not wanting to be judged for your poor command of the language, etc., more than the positive aspect of fitting in. They're two sides of the same coin, yes, but it determines a bit where you end. You don't have to be immersed in French culture to avoid funny looks at stores, but you do have to be able to order food without people noticing anything strange. And you're not affiliating with the expats because you inherently want to define yourself as one, but because they won't judge you.

And so I think responding to the truth of human desire for affiliation by saying "Everyone needs an out-group" is bound to end poorly. Historically, the expansion of certain in-groups (e.g., "white" in the US encompassing the Irish, Italians, and for the most part light-skinned Jews, Arabs, etc.) has been tied to more firmly defining an out-group or responding to the presence of a new out-group.

I think we need to figure out how to make people comfortable with not having an out-group.

(And, to the article itself, we very much need people to make a conscious effort to get over their desires for in-groups or distaste for out-groups when making hiring or investment decisions.)