In what will be an entirely self-serving, "everything is evidence for my existing worldview" claim...

...I would promote race-blindness as the solution to this. The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become.

People confuse cultural power with economic power...just because many powerful people/businesses support black enterprise right now, doesn't mean the wider society will just blindly follow with fists full of cash.

Racism is terrible. "Antiracism", with no regard to the actual outcomes, is hardly better. These businesses were not being harassed by awful people until Google tried to leverage them over their non-black-owned competitors.

> The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become.

My dad was telling me this yesterday. He saw sectarian conflict growing up in Bangladesh, and working in international public health, he’s been to 70 countries and has had a chance to see ethnic conflict first hand. In his observation, emphasizing differences will increase rather than decrease conflict.

Oddly, this is very similar to how colonial powers divided and conquered countries. They would emphasize differences between groups and treat them differently based on group membership, fueling animosity between them. Obviously the motivation for doing those things here in the US is different. But if you’re telling some kids they can go back to school and others have to stay in remote learning, based on the color of their skin, I’m not sure why would expect the result to be different. Measures like kids getting back to in person learning at different times based on skin color should worry people: see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-....

The rather old viewpoint of content of character over skin color is the only good way forward in my opinion. I find it to be a real tragedy that skin color has come under hyper focus in the last decade.

I think it stems from a tragic mixture of deep desire to make things better (a good thing) and youthful impatience. Combined with the accelerated ability to disseminate ideas via the internet ... we are in an ongoing flame war that I never would have imagined. It makes me feel sick, sad, and frustrated.

> ...I would promote race-blindness as the solution to this.

Don't you know that colorblindness is white supremacy? So good luck with arguing that.

https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1267529522041282563

For those who don't know, this is the author of Code of Conduct and Hippocratic License.

"All lives matter" is white supremacy?

That is the most tepid, centrist, mainstream view you could have. Literally the view of MLK

For fucks sake, the US is lost if this continues, and I don't say that lightly.

See, I could probably get on board with being passively opposed to about half the stuff on that triangle. The other half is either outright bs or stuff I've never heard of.

Yes, antiracism must be measured by its effects. Google's campaign had antiracist intentions, and racist effects.

That doesn't mean we should all give up on effective antiracism, though. This tactic/campaign/etc. was not antiracist. Others can be. It's not clear at all why this should be taken to mean that "the more we talk about race...the worse the racial tensions and competition will become." The conversation around race in the US has been ongoing for decades, and there are many objective metrics whereby things have not become worse.

I could have been clearer but I meant to stress "in zero-sum contexts". Not all race discussion is necessarily bad/harmful in outcomes.

However it sure does appear to me that in the last five or ten years, the manner of the conversation has degraded so much that very very little progress is made per unit of "increasing tensions". That is entirely subjective, but it is how it appears to me.

Racism must absolutely be measured by intention, not effects. The very definition of racism is somebody actively discriminating against another race. Any other definition just ends up discussing Marxist ideas like "systems of oppression" which go nowhere and actively harm the conversation.

No, you'd like to define racism narrowly. Not that I can get in your head, but doing so sure makes it easier to imagine ourselves as not complicit. But evil is all too often banal, and passive.

I'm not complicit. I've never been in a position of authority over hiring or loans, etc... nor have I ever treated anybody differently for their skin colour. Racism is about intent and your definition expands it well beyond what figures like MLK understood it to be.

To do anything else is evil.

That's still incorrect. I'm happy for there to be disruptions in order to get justice. What I don't agree with is that I'm somehow complicit for society's problems be virtue of being born into it. Or would you be prepared to charge your children with that burden too?

If they are born into society, grow up, look around, and do nothing? Yes. It isn't enough to not actively hate other people.

I refuse to be told I'm complicit in evil without a clear and definite example.

Here's one guess, off the top of my head: what actions have you taken to reduce the likelihood that police in your community will kill a black person unnecessarily?

Cause as much as I care about that issue, I never reached out to leaders in my community to encourage hiring more police and reducing overtime, for example. I didn't join any protest. I have been completely passive, standing by, waiting for someone else to solve the problem.

I could save a lot more lives per dollar/hour by working on antimalarial treatments in Africa. There's countless things we're not doing so save lives. That does not mean we're relentlessly evil.

If you aren't working to save every life, you're basically Godwin's Law.

You're strawmanning. I didn't call anyone relentlessly evil—the whole point is that complicity is woven into our daily lives in a way that's banal and easily ignored.

You could direct more resources this way or that. Do you? What about your time? Do you invite others in your life to do so as well?

> We need to ask: is it always a good idea to make marginalized groups more visible? Whom does it benefit?

No it doesn’t. And I wish people would stop experimenting with this sort of thing and treating it as some sort of fad.

I grew up, as an immigrant from a Muslim country, in a white Republican suburb in the 1990s. And it was great. I can’t imagine what life would have been like today - constant reminders of the fact that you’re different, white teachers admitting they’re “gatekeepers of white supremacy,” using “whiteness” as a pejorative, etc. I’m fully developed and fluent in the language so I can tolerate it. But I’ve got kids and this is not the culture I want my kids to grow up in.

Leaving aside whether this stuff is right on the merits. There is a limited number of white people who will put up with a constant drone of being called “racist” and being blamed for things that happened before they were born. As these confrontational tactics continue, people’s patience will wear thin. And if it becomes more prevalent to treat kids different based in their skin color, such as Evanston’s proposal to keep white and Asian kids behind in remote learning while letting other kids go back in person, people’s patience will evaporate in an instant. And overstepping that tolerance will have real consequences for people of color.

When white people amplify this hyper-activist, in-you-face approach, they aren’t just drawing attention to a problem, they’re picking a particular solution. And because they comprise a majority and control the culture, they can impose an approach that people of color (who have to live with the consequences) don’t necessarily want. When you jump on board this bandwagon, you’re not just changing the culture for yourself. You’re not just changing the culture for activist POC you went to grad school with. You’re changing it for the blue collar worker who happens to be a POC. And you can bet that what kind of culture he wants to live in is not well represented in the academic and activist circles that dream up these approaches.

> And if it becomes more prevalent to treat kids different based in their skin color, such as Evanston’s proposal to keep white and Asian kids behind in remote learning while letting other kids go back in person, people’s patience will evaporate in an instant.

Woah. The accelerationism here is truly scary. If our kids grow up in an environment with this rhetoric then it's not inconceivable we end up back in a segregationist hell-hole. Only needs to be normalized for one generation before the damage is done.

You think your kids won't be white? My father wasn't white when he came here 30 years ago. Somehow magically I am. The same thing will happen to you too.

I call it Schrodinger's whiteness. You are white enough to be blamed for right wing racism yet not white enough to not be the target of it.

It's hilarious to me that the "diversity in tech" movement scrupulously avoids noticing that all kinds of asian people exist in our industry.

Acknowledging them would undercut narratives about white supremacy, but you can't get away with calling them white either... so they're invisible! Good for them, frankly, I'm jealous.

> My father wasn't white when he came here 30 years ago. Somehow magically I am.

This is interesting. Can I ask what your ethnic background is?

I really didn't understand why they were doing that. It seemed very strange. I couldn't quite put my finger on why it didn't seem appropriate... just that it seemed wholly irrelevant to how I would decide where to shop. I freely admit, however, that as I middle aged white male I may have some blind spots.

I would very much like to know how much testing Google did on the “Black-owned businesses near you” feature. I know they extensively test algorithm changes to their search engine before rolling them out to everyone. It would be really disturbing if they didn’t do due diligence on this feature, to make sure it has a positive impact for businesses using it.

When will corporate America learn?

Keeping lists of people who have special traits should be kept to an absolute minimum. Just ask the Dutch (good people got punished and killed trying to destroy the official registers of Dutch jews as it became clear the Nazis sought them.)

Pointing out the differences between people isn't going to help!

In the place I grew up in Europe there were almost no foreigners. But in summer holidays we lived next to a really black family at a camp site for years. Their dad were friends with my dad and well, that was it. They were humans like the rest of us.

Today it is almost like it is scarier to meet people from other cultures.

is "black-owned business" not an opt-in flag?

And if it is opt-in, and happened to boost business instead of attracting racist reviews, I would fully expect non-black owned businesses to capitalize on that and opt-in as well.

Yes, it's opt-in: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/black-owned.pdf