At this point in their view, Everything is 'institutionally racist'™
Being a victim is now cool again I suppose. The new 'blames the government for everything' rhetoric is now applied to tech companies.
Being a victim is now cool again I suppose. The new 'blames the government for everything' rhetoric is now applied to tech companies.
Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
(VI.1151–1154) [Virgil's Aeneid]
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We need more compassion in this world, not less; especially for the defeated. For Gebru, even for those at Google that have, in my view, erred; to do otherwise is to drown ourselves in misery; to race one another towards the bottom; to view the world merely as zero sum.
So it is with racism in our society and institutions. It starts with housing and education. Housing is still as racially segregated as it was in the 1970s, and that leads to massive differences in average opportunities. Which leads to familial wealth gaps, and which leads to further disparity, because families that can't help a member that has a broken car, for example, can set back a person early in their career when they get fired because of it. Which leads to further snowballing of opportunity and financial pain. It's like starting the game of Monopoly when a bunch of the players have had dozens of turns of head start. Even if the game is "fair" in that there are no explicit barriers to buying and selling a property or paying rent when landing on somebody else's, it's unfair because the staring financial position was quite different.
So this can't all fall on tech companies, of course, but as major pillars of modern society, they bear some responsibility of fixing the problems that persist.
How do you get from there to:
> racism creeps into all of our institutions. Instead of thinking of racism as a yes/no binary with intention, I think it's more useful to think of it as something like "fairness."
All? I think you should consider "I'm not racist, there are much better reasons to hate people." Even if you find unfairness somewhere, and even if it's intentional, how do you know a priori that it's because of skin color?
> It's like starting the game of Monopoly when a bunch of the players have had dozens of turns of head start.
Right. American Descendants of Slavery (ADoS) really have a shitty position. Worse off from the start and sometimes still facing the racism.
> So this can't all fall on tech companies, of course, but as major pillars of modern society, they bear some responsibility of fixing the problems that persist.
If it's our society's responsibility to fight slavery, have you hunted a pimp? Or do you expect your tax dollars to fund the police who do such things? I expect Google to not try to make things worse, but I'm fine if all the good they do comes from taxes.