Board members don't have the direct control that you think. Neither do all the C-level officers. It's a basic fact of organizations that people that make the key decisions aren't necessarily the ones with the titles.
It boggles my mind how we went from a google search result to white supremacy.
I'd like people to please exercise restraint, the world feels like it is falling apart where every conversation becomes political/racial. If this is going on HN, I wonder how it is elsewhere.
Yeah, it’s a bit much. The “extreme” reading is slowly becoming the only acceptable one. Partly because of comments like the one precipitating the thread: there’s no good reason to try to connect these items.
The 'white males are the enemy of the people' is such a leftist trope that it's almost hard for me to believe someone thinks it's an alt right dog whistle.
It's the old correlation/causation problem. Being white is at the present time in history correlated wih privilege. But being white isn't the problem. The problem is how the privileged use it to lock out everyone else from the benefits they enjoy. Race and such like are irrelevant distractions.
Here's some mic spam I heard the other day when gaming:
"There's all sorts of N*s - light brown, dark brown, even white ones. ...<other examples>... and even the homeless guy on the corner is a N"
It's not the first time I've heard this sentiment, and presumably not the last.
Perhaps race (and gender, sexuality, wealth, etc) are related to privilege. I mean they are used to justify why entire groups of people deserve more or less privilege. Maybe those things are aren't "just a confusing distraction" but their associated 'isms' drive the issue of privilege.
Or maybe they are divisions used to distract from the privileges as you say.
Either way, dismissing race as just a distraction, that is to treat different facets of a bigger problem as unrelated, seems like an attempt to quash any discussion of the whole.
> ...he can basically be considered white for purposes of discussing his privilege.
This is a distraction, and a confusing one. Calling that out is not an "attempt to quash any discussion". Let's discuss race when race is relevant, and the other 90% of the time let's discuss economic privilege.
I started my carreer with no debt for education. My family isn't rich but they aren't poor - just somewhere in the middle - above median income but not in the top tax bracket. They were able to provide help and I worked a bit to make up the difference. It's a pretty good leg-up for me, and I'm glad for it - it has made my adulthood much better than if I had to pay for loans and such.
This can directly be traced to the fact that my under-qualified father had a good job and worked hard. How did he have a good job if he was under-qualified? Well the labor pool was artificially kept small by disallowing women and people of color, and he went to college without debt. Why did he get to go to college without debt? Well his dad was able to own properties in neighborhoods where he could charge good rent, and he kept those properties nice. He was allowed to do this because he wasn't black and thus could legally own those properties, again artificially reducing his competition. He worked hard at keeping those properties nice, but he also hired a lot of people of color for low wages - they also worked hard.
So did my position happen in life because of economic privilege that my family built? Did my position in life happen because I'm white? The answer to both is the same: In part.
They worked hard. They spent wisely. They also didn't have to worry about a lot of potential competition because they weren't limited by racist rules and laws. Would they have done as well if they didn't get those protections? I doubt it though - they are good people but not top tier at thier chosen professions.
My point is, these things are really mixed together - my story here is pretty common - there's no denying that economic privilege I've enjoyed is in part because I come from a family with a bit of economic privilege - privilege gained in part due to their race.
It's better today, but it's not "fixed" by any stretch. There are still realtors that get in trouble for redlining or rejecting rental applicants for their race. There's plenty of examples, from this year even, of the same home being appraised at different values depending on if the photos around the house were of black or white families.
When something as fundamental to economic privilege as "ability to purchase things I can afford" and "ability to sell at market rates" are affected by race like that, is it really possible to say race isn't relevant to economic privilege?
The thread began when it was pointed out that it wasn't just any corporation to which we handed so much power over us, it was a corporation dominated by white men.
The reason I believe this is unhelpful, confusing, and irrelevant, is that I believe that Google is actually one of the least racist powerful institutions on Earth, throughout both time and space. Don't get me wrong, I hate Google as much as any other ad-powered information harvesting giant, but they're a company that literally won't shut up about Black voices and women in tech. Which, more power to them for that! I think it's basically cynical from an executive's perspective, but cynical people can do good, so whatever.
But anyway, the point is I don't think race is relevant at all in the conversation about how Google has too much power. They use that power for evil quite often, but when they use it for good, the good is often trying to solve racism. Is it really helpful to point out how white they are?
