Could Atlanta Buy A Silicon Valley?

Man. I go off and work on something else for a couple hours, and I come back to find the bicycle shed on fire...

I have no idea about the situation in the US but could this be due to other factors? For instance, you mention that these minorities are under represented in certain colleges to begin with - a place where a lot of startups begin. Perhaps there is less internet exposure too, or at least to the startup community blogs etc.. And maybe it just comes down to a perpetuating loop situation. In any case, and I don't really know US attitudes, but I would doubt in this day and age there is a conscious effort among hackers, who are generally more liberty and equality focused anyway, to exclude people based on anything other than merit.

Don't forget that having UPS as an Atlanta based company has helped in creating logistics oriented companies here. That plus Memphis (home to FedEx) isn't that far either.

I'm Taiwanese and lived in the US since I was 5.

I've been living in Atlanta for a little over a year and hanged out mostly in the Cumberland area and the Decatur area. I've walked through the North Ave. / Varsity area for various things before.

I've lived in Auburn, AL for five years, and Columbus, OH for 17 years.

I also practice my martial arts regularly at Downtown Decatur, which often means bringing a wooden broadsword. The people who generally ask me about it are the African Americans hanging out around the MARTA stations. ("Look man, it really isn't that interesting. It is fake" "I just want to see it." "Yeah, here") I occasionally get riffed walking by, "Hey, its kung fu master!" while I'm walking to Decatur Square. It annoys me, yet never once had I felt it was racist. I chalk it up to cultural differences.

People have always been friendlier in Georgia and Alabama than they were in OH. If I make even the slightest eye contact, people will say "Hi" ... and that's how I interpret what those guys hanging around the station are doing. Strangers generally don't do that in Columbus, OH.

On my walking route to the station, I pass a lot of other pedestrians or joggers. I have my practice sword stuck into my backpack. I noticed the number of people who say "Hi" to me increase dramatically, particularly among the women who are jogging by themselves. Part of that, I know, is the baseline hospitality I generally get from strangers here in the South. The other part has got to be from thinking, "hey, who is this dude walking around with a sword handle sticking out of his back, maybe I should preempt anything by saying 'hi'". It doesn't always happen all the time, but that's the way things are.

And just to keep things on the level and honest, there were times when I talked to some of my Asian martial arts buddies here, and the conversation somehow gets into "white people." You have to realize that I do not imagine myself as particularly Asian when I close my eyes and visualize who I am. It simply isn't a strong part of my identity unless someone brings it up. When the conversation turns that way, it jolts me, "hey, wait a minute ..."

I remember being surprised from reading about racism in the local papers when I first moved out to Atlanta. I started watching people.

I think people here in Atlanta are no different than other places I've lived at, or encountered briefly in my (limited) travels: the racism comes from our xenophobic tendencies being great apes. We say things to each other about those people all the time -- those Californians, those Georgians, those VCs, those angel investors, those entrepreneurs, those nerds, those jocks, those preps, those ...

And that very same tendency to form packs also means that individuals gets exempt. You might find yourself talking to a neighbor who say things about one of your affliations, and when you bring it up, they may say, "Oh, but you are OK."

Racism is one of the manifestations of human primate tendency to form packs. It has resulted in some ugly things in our history. Trace it back through history, and no ... group ... has ever been left untainted by this. And besides, a lot of us develop software here. You should know by now how difficult it is to define software architecture, know when to divide things and when to generalize them. There are always some sort of special case. Human nature is even more irrational, even less amendable to be put into its proper Classes and Object Instantiations and whatever.

My business partner (who is not Asian) told me about this thread and how a discussion about the Atlanta startup scene gets derailed into talking about the racism here. I started laughing. I told him, yeah sure, I'll come here to gawk at the burning wreckage too.

Chicago has much more sprawl than San Jose. The latter is confined somewhat by geography and several open space preserves, while there is apparently nothing to stop the westward migration of Chicago's suburbs. After spending my university years in the Chicago area it was very bizarre to visit last week and realize that you can almost drive from the loop to Rockford without leaving suburbs/exurbs along I80. It is somewhat similar to how Austin and Round Rock used to actually be cities separated by open expanses of empty space and now the trip between the two cities can be navigated just by hopping from one strip mall parking lot to another...