UKH

These last two week's have brought into sharp focus the real and perceived racism across the pond and it got me thinking about my own industry, the high tech sector, and the Indian takeover.  It also got me thinking of the difference in black vs other non-white nationals and why black people are finding it hard to shrug off the old shackles, particularly in the US.  

I work for an IT data protection/security company based from San Jose, silicon valley.  The founder is a multi hundred million dollar entrepreneur.  He is also Indian/brown skinned/non-white.  He also founded another business, the most successful tech company of its type, which is now a +$b plus revenue company and he is still a major shareholder.

Our major competitor, another tech startup, was founded by an Indian-born engineer.  The third ranked business in our little sphere is also run by its Indian founder.

My last company, a business which was acquired by tech giant HPE, was also founded by two Indians, and the CEO was Indian-born.  The CFO was also of Indian heritage, albeit from the UK.

The company I worked for before that was at the time run by a white man.  It is now run by another Indian, George Kurian.  It just so happens that his twin brother, Thomas Kurian, again born in India (Kerala) is the CEO of Google Cloud.

Microsoft, since 2014, has been run by Satya Nadella, a Hyderabad born engineer.

More recently we have seen the surge in people using Zoom.  Whilst not Indian this time, it's run by a Chinese-American individual.

There are many Indian created and run system integrators which have made massive advances over the last few years both here and in the US.

So looking at my small sample, it seems that there is no glass ceiling when it comes to the boardroom in the US for non-white, non-American born.  I could name many more.

Looking at history, India has had its fair share of issues around things such as slavery, colonialism, war etc and in the UK, Indian born people have suffered casual racism for a long time only stopping at my generation.  This casual racism against Indians was still evident in the US and was highlighted by the debate around Apu in the Simpsons - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2018/10/27/apu-dropped-simpsons-racism-row/

So with this in mind, how have the people from a non-white country been able to break through the glass ceiling, throw off the colonial shackles, thrive and be excluded by the recent events.  Why do we not see police beating on/killing Indian people?  Why are black people not more represented in the boardroom when Indian people are?  Both have non-white skin after all?

Probably the fact that science, maths and engineering are still respected and valued professions and education geared towards them. 

Rather than instant fame for doing nothing

Nikesh Arora? Ashar Aziz? I’m guessing the latter. The fact that I can come up with two candidates off the cuff very much supports your point.

Interesting question.  I think partly there isn't the fear of Indian people in America whereas there is fear of Black Americans.  Of course more recently there is fear of Muslim Americans.  

http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/the-bad-dude-syndrome-what-una...

Isn’t this basically what is being queried in the OP? As in “why is this so?” 

This goes back decades and for some reason seems to focus solely on those of Middle Eastern heritage. Look at the depictions of “Arab” bad guys in the movies and of course the live televising of the early 1990s Gulf War/Conflict, perceptions of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden etc. I am way out of my depth on all this but I imagine Israel/Palestine plays a part too, in how Joe Public in the USA perceives middle eastern Islam.

At risk of sounding as vague as a Timmd post, I would hazard that there are far fewer flashpoints involving the Indian sub-continent, that are fed into that same Joe Public’s awareness.

Aw that was uncalled for!

Slavery, Segregation, Jim Crow laws, idolisation of pro-slave Confederate figures like Gen. Lee, mass criminalisation of blacks directly and later indirectly, flooding the ghettos with drugs to fund the Contras, assassination of black leaders etc. Vs being economic migrants?

In simple terms, the difference between your ancestors arriving on a slave ship and being subject to hundreds of years of oppression and arriving on a 747 to take up a PhD at MIT is significant.

In my storage neck of the IT woods I too have been impressed with Indian entrepreneurs and senior execs. Eg; Nutanix -  Dheeraj Pandey, Cohesity- Mohit Aron, Rubrik - Bipul Sinha, Actifio - Ash Ashutosh, and the twin Kurian brothers. Common factors include relatively or literally poor upbringing, education up to and including secondary level in India an Roman Catholic schools with hard disciple and English language teaching, followed by college education in the USA with computer science or maths or electrical engineering degrees. These were all extremely bright, hard-working and visionary people who wanted to change the world with new technology and did it in the USA in Silicon Valley.

Oddly in the UK there has been much prejudice against Indians and Pakistanis. Notwithstanding that there are successful Indians in the UK, not least ones who came in from Uganda. It's not a simple situation. 

Different cultural groups perform massively differently,  despite this being blindingly obvious through observation or just by using a slither of common sense, it remains a fact that many people wish to deny.  People from the Gujarat area of India with the surname Patel  are seventy times as likely to be a millionaire than a uk born Smith, Sikhs do paticularly well in the U.k and Chinese are 25% more likely  to be in a managerial position than white British also their kids do much better in school,  when you compare these figures with immigration from neighbouring pakistan the contrast is glaring!   Is it because the U.K is racist towards pakistanis but gives unfair advantages to Indians, I think not!

I think the UK sees Hindus and Muslims differently for a number of reasons.  

This, and it is so blatantly obvoious that I wondered about the OP. Go back 150 years and the Chinese workers who built the railways across the West were treated almost as bad as the African slaves and later the "disposable" illegal immigrants from central America that keep the agrobusiness in California running. Employing them as illegals saved money for health and social insurance, and they were in no position to strike or otherwise fight back, seeing as they were one phone call away from deportation.

The paranoia over security actually helped cut down on that business model!

CB

err... yeah. do you have a point?

With a few exceptions from historic reasons people called Patel are Hindu

People from Pakistan are Muslim.  They were moved there when England decided to divide and rule.  

 > it because the U.K is racist towards pakistanis but gives unfair advantages to Indians, I think not!

It's not a simple as that of course but it does seem easier for Hindus to integrate than Pakistanis.  

Divide and stop ruling, surely?

jcm

Yes you are correct.  It was the last division after many years of divide and rule.  

What point are you trying to make? There could be any number of underlying reasons for these numbers. I presume you are trying to imply a theory of why these differences might exist - what is it?

Hindus are not hampered by the highly stultifying and regressive ideology of Islam.

Taking the risk of racist accusations ( Ironic since Pakistanis and most Indians are Caucasians like most Europeans) I have found that the 'difference' between Indians and Pakistanis is the religion how many of these Indian entrepreneurs are Musliims. I deal with a lot of Pakistani Muslims (albeit from the lower end of the social spectrum) but are quick to point out their differences from the rest of the non muslim world, not all are deeply religious but it sits like a heavy hand on their lives, they have to live by a set of moral obligations which are listed in the Koran they don't have a choice, 'The will of Allah' tells them that its not their fault its all preordained.

When having a recent conversation with a Pakistani young mother of two chjldren who was also a teaching asststant and obviously quite  educated remarked when I mentioned that there was quite a considerable number of young men that commit suicide she said 'its not allowed in our religion' as though they were an exception and it never happened. In my area there are lots of Pakistani phone shops so technology doesn't seem to be a problem but they are all small businesses, Perhaps the Indian education system encourages bigger thinking. As most of the Pakistanis here are products of our education system that also reflects on us.

I'm an atheist so you can accuse me of being a religionist. If an appropriate thread on christianity or other religions appears be prepared for me to 'have a go', Religion ts a human construct but you dont have a choice over the colour of your skin.

According to google it's down to the parenting.  Indian and Chinese pupils outperform (in the UK) White British, who appear to be on a par with Pakistani kids. 

That’s quite interesting.  I was thinking more trivial stuff, like it’s harder to integrate into a drinking culture when alcohol isn’t permitted.  

Any thoughts on the Caste system?  

It's appalling.  (From what I know about it, which isn't much to be honest.)

I see what you did there :o

That raises an interesting point. I'm sure attitudes to Muslims are in general more negative than to Hindus, largely as a result of Islamist terrorism. But in terms of how we see them I strongly suspect that a very large proportion of the white (and for all I know black, Chinese etc) UK population wouldn't have clue whether someone was Hindu or Muslim, or Sikh for that matter, nor whether they were of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladshi or Sri Lankan origin unless they were actually told and yet these groups have markedly different outcomes in education and the workplace.

This rather suggests to me that the outcomes are more to do with social factors within their communities than how white people see them even though they must all experience similar levels of racism basd on their skin colour.

You sound like you genuinely want to find answers, and it's a good question, so here is a summary of possible reasons (others have already made some of these and additional points):  

1) On boardroom numbers: there are many more Indian nationals and people of Indian descent than there are African Americans - 1.35 billion Indians (just in India) vs 37 million African Americans.  There are also 276 million Indians living below the poverty line, in constrast to a few hundred big CEOs, perhaps. All other things being equal you'd expect more Indians to rise through the system to achieve prominence than African Americans.  There are prominent, impressive African-american leaders in politics, law, science, business etc - just not as many of them as Indians.  

2) Many global business leaders from India are graduates of the Indian Institute of Management, which is more competitive to get into than Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, MIT etc - so you are picking the best people  from a very large pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Management.  Many of those will be from the elite and middle-class sectors of Indian society and got good schooling.   By contrast, the majority of African Americans do not start out in the middle classes and elites of American society and have to go through the worst of the underfunded US public school system and are not supported to achieve academic excellence to anything like the same degree. Comparatively few make it to good, competitive colleges - despite the protestations that 'affirmative action' is taking white (or Asian) jobs and college places.  

3) Recent South Asian (and other) Immigrants are a selection of people who often have more than the average talent, determination and qualifications of their populations in general.  They are not a random, statistically-representative sample of the variation in those attributes among the populations they came from.  Tech companies, multinationals, universities etc recruit and petition for visas for the best people they can get from all over the world - they pick the individuals who have already been well educated and already have skills.   African Americans arrived in slave ships and for hundreds of years, no one invested in their education or supported them to succeed - quite the opposite; they were deliberately held back and had almost no say in the governance of their own affairs until 50 years ago. 

4) There may be more successful African Americans than you know. In a racist society, black American achievements are forgotten or claimed by others.   There are attempts to correct for this... e.g. https://www.infoplease.com/history/black-history/famous-firsts-by-african-a... - and links on that page for more beyond the 'firsts'.  So even when there are contributions, you don't hear of them. Making these achievements visible is part of the 'decolonizing' project that a few of our Great White Scientists (GWS) of UKC are so skeptical of.  One may argue that Indians have successfully 'decolonized' some of the sciences, including reestablishing their historical leadership in mathematics, in which they were anyway a couple of centries ahead of their European contemporaries :  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics 

5) Arriving as a slave, having no idea where you came from, with no family or friends, enslaved, carrying the name of the person who owned your ancestors, and being legally denied access to all the basic rights of citizenship, and fearing you would be lynched if you displeased a white person - for hundreds of years - takes a toll on the collective psyche.  And if you don't believe that there remain persistent systematic disadvantages to African-Americans, take a look at this collection of empirical research that documents it, from economic historian Zach Ward: https://twitter.com/econzach/status/1267926101973700610?s=11 (its a long twitter thread). 

Indians of lower socio-economic status were indeed shipped around the world to build railways and harvest sugar for the British (East  and South Africa, West Indies, Fiji etc)  but they were not enslaved and stripped of their identity and connections with others - indeed those connections helped them establish themselves and get access to capital and markets to lead business and trade in the places they ended up in.  Remember also that 10-12 million Muslim indians were displaced by the India/Pakistan partition in 1947, creating a refugee crisis - check out that history, perhaps, before going too far into an ill-informed 'cultural determinist' speculation about Hindu/Muslim differences, as some in this discussion already have.

6) It would take too long to explain things like the US school-to-prison pipeline, the founding history of the police in the US as a force to return escaped slaves to their owners ( https://lawenforcementmuseum.org/2019/07/10/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-... ), the mythologizing of the Confederacy, the treatment of Black US servicemen in the world wars, the history of civil rights struggles - and so on. It's all easy to find if you are interested. 

7) Beware the 'model minority' argument  https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority...

These seven points - and others in the rest of this discussion - may help explain why the police shoot African-Americans in US streets and in their homes rather than picking off Indian software engineers on the sidewalks of the Microsoft campus. They also provide a series of potential reasons why there are more Indians in the OPs professional circle.  

I'm absolutely sure it's unintentional, but TheDrunkenBakers' question (and some of the responses to it) feed into a narrative that blames African Americans for not achieving more than they have. That narrative says: 'look how well these other brown people are doing, so it must be your fault for being so angry and aggressive, criminal, lazy, feckless, loud, materialistic, drug-addicted, unhealthy, or for wallowing in your own victimhood'.  To be clear, I'm sure no one here said any of that (well, I see a couple of possible exceptions), and I'm sure no one here really believes any of it, but some of your arguments will certainly resonate with those who do.  

Intentionally or unintentionally being complicit to this line of argument is saying it is up to African Americans - or Black British people - to fix themselves and be more like other brown people. This absolves us of any responsibility for the perpetuation of systemic racism. 'It isn't me, I didn't own slaves, I have some black friends...etc.' Easy and convenient but morally and empirically indefensible. Just like this week's anti-racist marchers, some people in Britain knew better than this more than 150 years ago: Manchester cotton mill workers who went on strike to protest slavery in the Americas and support abolition:  http://revealinghistories.org.uk/what-evidence-is-there-of-a-black-presence...

I'm encouraged that a largely white group of climbers are having these conversations; they matter in the outdoors: I ski, hike and climb in the US with people of different ethnicities and I see and hear what people who don't look like me experience out in the whiter parts of the US countryside and small towns - for an example, see this, from this week:

https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/crime/family-harassed-in-forks-after-bei...

If there are any responses, to this (long!) post, it might be a day or two before I get to them. Apologies for that. Posting and leaving probably makes me a troll, but I felt I should say something, as assumptions were going unchallenged and I felt I was in a position to suggest they might benefit from a little more critical scrutiny.

Hope you all got out climbing this weekend. 

What a thorough and thought provoking answer. And yes, I was genuinely interested in understanding this more and baffled at why I garnered more dislikes than likes for a question.

Perhaps, unwittingly, I was also guilty of feeding into the narrative of blaming black people for not doing better for themselves which, I can assure the readers, was not my intention. With respect to your considerable and considered response I will later take some time to read the links you have referenced.

Thank you and have a like.

Hmm. I'm genuinely intrigued if I know you.  I wont pry further to protect our mutual anonymity but it appears we inhabit very similar professional circles.

Surely a lot of this is due to the law of averages? India simply has so many tech people that some of them are going to get top jobs.  I also think you should eliminate founders from your list - being a founder doesn't make you better or smarter than the competition, it just means you wanted to found a company and it worked out.

Love it!