No, he's defining the meaning as you put it, or compatibly with it. And taking the claims in the article at face value -- not people's feelings, but the specific facts asserted -- it's clear Coinbase hasn't been persecuting black people.
No, this is exactly what he said, laid out in argument form:
Premise 1: Tech companies are often accused of racism (any, not coinbase, neither of us mentioned coinbase)
Premise 2: Tech companies often contain a much larger % of Asians, a minority
Premise 3: (implied) having a disproportionate % of any one minority makes you non-racist
Conclusion: Therefore Tech companies are not racist
The conclusion does not follow because premise 3 is wrong. You can be racist about other minorities even while enthusiastically supporting one minority group.
My definition of racism (which I did not share, despite it being the source of much debate) is discrimination against a particular group or groups on the basis of their heritage (ie, stuff outside their control).
So I was confused, because companies (like Coinbase) are being asked to discriminate by raising black employees to an especially high-status position vs, eg, Asians, then getting called racist when they do not.
But if the definition of racism was redefined to "unequal distribution of privileges between white people and people of color" then the accusations make sense.
The first paragraph is the OP saying that the company cannot [0] be racist since they (might) have a disproportionate number of one minority under their employment.
[0] - "cannot without causing the OP confusion", at least
> You can be racist about other minorities even while enthusiastically supporting one minority group
How do you in your mind construct a person with this kind of mindset? Historically, a lot of "racism" or other kinds of ethnic "othering" hatred was between very similar ethnicities - e.g. Nazis and Jews, or Japanese & Chinese & Korean. Even nowadays the "racist" far factions in the US are "white supremacist", and dislike pretty much everyone across the board - Jews, blacks, lations, ...
So my prior is that it would be highly unlikely to find a non-trivial number of people who are racist against blacks yet pro Asians, let alone a whole industry (in California, a generally left-wing state!).
I think you might be overlooking the fact that bias comes in different forms against different groups. E.g., a hypothetical racist might be comfortable around Asians because he thinks they're subservient and weak, whereas he might be uncomfortable around black people because he thinks they're angry and violent. If this hypothetical racist ran a company, it's plausible he'd hire Asians, but not hire black people at all.
