Well, this “white dude” is shaking his head, if not pumping his fist, and saying “right on, katie zhu!”

I was raised to have at most zero tolerance for racism, sexism, and all the other exclusivisms that poison our species. As I progressed in my craft (software development) in experience and responsibility, I grew to understand just how badly, and deliberately, most software teams are shooting themselves in the gonads by hiring brogrammers when they need developers. I’ve lived in various places in Asia off and on for half my adult life, so being a minority who had to work twice as hard to integrate was something I understood, and generally didn’t have much of a problem with.

Then I lived as a local in the (Democratic People’s) Republic of Singapore, where race and overt, self-celebratory racism permeates absolutely everything in life here. I can’t buy housing without fitting into a quota, because I’m not the right ethnicity. My children can’t grow up and serve the armed service of their choice because they’re not the right ethnicity. We’ve gone in just over one generation from making a real stab at universally-shared language (and hence, culture) to an apartheid system where language is explicitly tied to ethnicity, and the officially-designated “mother tongue” of the majority was spoken by a fraction of a percent of people at independence.

I doubt that Mr Spiegel and the other Snapchat honchos would find life here very pleasant, without inexhaustible cash (as too many “true blue” people are taught to presume any white skin has free access to) and the willingness to “invest” it into the right, properly-Connected places and people.

The irony is that the Government is now back-handedly, oh-so-softly recognising that our greatest threat is from the “mother country” to whose colonists we’ve thrown the doors wide open, and who still is a source of carefully-stoked ethnic pride — yet has shown herself to be openly contemptuous of other nations’ sovereignty, very likely including ours.

Racism kills. People, cultures, and nations. We each have a moral and ethical obligation to kill it instead.