Re:Welcome, ACLU
by dragonwriter on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @12:25PM
(#13532821)
> This does not happen mostly through planned racial injustice
Yes, it does, as all your examples that don't address positive change away from the problem clearly indicate.
Sometimes people do plan things, although a lot of the stuff I mention was relatively spontaneous. But what sustains it isn't careful planning. It's most people going along with systems they don't understand, impulses they've never considered.
E.g., the impulse where they protect people like them and people familiar to them before people unfamiliar to them. That very rarely comes from a considered plan of "let's screw over black people". But that's often the effect.
Thank you. You captured the essence of what I meant to say, just written with a bit more eloquence and thought.
Re:Welcome, ACLU
by seanmcdirmid on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @12:23PM
(#13532788)
Nice. You should throw in some Pete Wilson to put the current struggle into context.
Please do!
A bit of historical context: America was founded in white supremacy. [1] It did better after the Civil War in the Reconstruction [2], and then things got worse again, with Jim Crow [3] in the south and ethnic cleansing everywhere else [4]. The Civil Rights Act [5] marked an era of improvement (sometimes called the Second Reconstruction [6]), but things have recently gotten worse, to the extent that many see us as needing a third Reconstruction [7].
This does not happen mostly through planned racial injustice. It mainly happens through ignorance and a convenient blindness to uncomfortable facts. We help people familiar and dear to us, and ignore the ones who aren't.
I think it's great that Silicon Valley came out strongly in favor of immigrants. They're familiar to us, and we'd be monsters to ignore our neighbors, our co-workers, our ancestors. But muninn_'s right, we have been ignoring some other pretty big injustices. And the ones muninn_ mentioned are groups historically underrepresented in tech. It's no coincidence that we started here.
As we boldly support immigrants, it's a good time to ask, "Oh, who might we have forgotten?" Companies are communities, embedded in a society. This week, we are stepping up to that responsibility. There's nothing wrong with thinking a little about what that really means.
[1] e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reconstruction
[7] https://thinkprogress.org/rev-barber-moral-change-1ad2776df7...