Americans have really thin skin because they fought a civil war over whether people with one color of skin could own people with a different color of skin. And until very recently,[1] people with one color of skin had to go to different schools than everyone else, they couldn't get married to each other, etc.
[1] To put things into context, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and the other tech luminaries in their generation would have gone to segregated schools had they been born in the south instead of in California and Washington. If Ken Thompson had exercised his right to vote in his native Louisiana when he turned 18, he would have done so on ballots that, pursuant to state law, listed the race of each candidate.
The Voting Rights Act (which made it illegal to have "whites-only" hotels) and Loving v. Virginia (which ended laws banning interracial marriage) are roughly contemporaneous with UNIX--both being products of the late 1960s.
One more fun fact: Americans' approval for black-white marriage crossed the 50% mark sometime between the release of Windows 95 and Windows 98: http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh....
[1] To put things into context, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and the other tech luminaries in their generation would have gone to segregated schools had they been born in the south instead of in California and Washington. If Ken Thompson had exercised his right to vote in his native Louisiana when he turned 18, he would have done so on ballots that, pursuant to state law, listed the race of each candidate.
The Voting Rights Act (which made it illegal to have "whites-only" hotels) and Loving v. Virginia (which ended laws banning interracial marriage) are roughly contemporaneous with UNIX--both being products of the late 1960s.
One more fun fact: Americans' approval for black-white marriage crossed the 50% mark sometime between the release of Windows 95 and Windows 98: http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh....