Now I'm happy to agree that the retention rate of black people at Coinbase raises some questions. But the NYT, having asked those questions, came up with no particular evidence of racism.
The major piece of evidence that these issues are substantially due to race is that the NYT felt it warranted a hit piece. That is weak evidence. Being passed over for promotion and feeling unappreciated - which they lead with - isn't evidence. Most of us have been passed over for promotion plenty of times. Most people are unappreciated too.
Starting with the assumption it is a pretty normal company, that is a list mostly of stuff that nobody should care about.
If someone can articulate what the HR complaints are about then that might be evidence. But complaints to HR are expected - that is why HR gets hired. They are there to deal with HR complaints. And read resumes.
> including an instance where the Black members of a team were required to relocate while a non-Black member wasn't
This one is stupid. Am I meant to believe they are revealing their racist ways by hiring black people then asking them to relocate, racistly? This is bog standard sucks-to-work-in-support activity. Miserable working conditions, but nothing to do with skin colour. A similar thing happened to my father back in the day. He certainly wasn't black.
The existence of slavery in the past isn’t driving the current race issues in the US so much as fallout from much more recent segregation policies. Nobody alive today was a (or was born to) a slave and the majority of the states that make up the United States were not even part of the country during the civil war.
To claim racism is endemic now because of slavery is lazy. Racism is endemic because segregation didn’t end until approximately the same time as TCP/IP was being invented!
The existence of slavery and the view that Black people could be treated as livestock are why we had segregation policies.
The existence of slavery fueled white anger towards the idea that the "livestock" were suddenly being allowed to go to the same places and use the same services as white people. The generations of people who owned slaves raised the generations of people that enforced segregation, and those generations raised the people today who enforce racial discrimination and oppose racial justice.
And like you said, this isn't far-back history, segregation in the US was recent. People have this flowery view that racism just went away and that slavery just suddenly stopped mattering. But the effects are still very much with us today. A few generations isn't enough to eliminate a culturally pervasive, harmful ideology.
It's important to keep in mind that Black communities (and a lot of other marginalized communities) as a group don't really have these debates as much, because it's completely obvious to them that they aren't being treated equally.
If you'd like to better understand that, I'd suggest you read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", who gives an intellectual history of America's racist ideas. I also think you're mistaken to lay the current troubles at the feet of formal segregation policies, which were only active in one part on the US. Maybe go read "Sundown Towns", which shows that all across America we had towns with de-facto segregation without formal policies. And it takes only a glance at modern maps showing race to see we haven't solved the problem.
One could plausibly debate the level of it. But to sweepingly declare there's absolutely no evidence isn't so much a claim of fact as a declaration of willful ignorance. Which, unfortunately, is part of why racism is still endemic. See, for example, Loewen's "Sundown Towns", where the later chapters show how America's ongoing de-facto segregation, which was born out of the Nadir, both depends on and creates the sort of refusal to see the obvious that you engage in here.
That also isn't the strongest evidence. It's just one of the easiest to understand. But given that you're going to strain at gnats and swallow camels even with the pretty basic ones, I'll leave finding the rest as an exercise to the reader.
You ignore the evidence showing unarmed black Americans are 25 times less likely to be shot by police than unarmed white Americans in a given interaction with similar circumstances, because it doesn't fit your victimhood narrative.
You've done nothing but lob ad hominem at me for not agreeing with your completely baseless and unscientific quackery/dogma.
In none of those examples is there proof of racial bias.
I don't think that he would have taken that public stance if he didn't feel that the company was being distracted internally by racial justice issues. It being a fair response is highly dependent on those internal conversations.
And the NY Times reports that prior to this conversation there was a public meeting where Black employees brought up difficult experiences at Coinbase. Being told that people should leave politics at home or leave the company is a horrible response to complaints about discrimination.