It's a bit hyperbolic to compare the experience of a Reconstruction era sharecropper to the plight of a 21st century app developer.

Yes—the developer can simply move into a different line of business, that doesn't require having a mobile app.

The situations have more in common than you might think. In both cases, you accept the non-negotiated deal offered to you unilaterally by your owners, or you accept zero revenue.

They're very different scenarios, because throughout history sharecroppers have almost always been "stuck" in their situation with no hope of relief, whereas app developers can realistically just go do something else.

When I lived in Asia as a white guy I was regularly the target of "racism": inflated prices (I was earning local salary), you're automatically "in the wrong" in any conflict even when you did nothing wrong, being a target of theft and government corruption, sometimes just general hostility. But it's not really the same "racism" in the same sense that, say, a black person in the US experiences it, as I can just choose to leave, whereas a black person in the US can't really. In spite of the similarities, in the end the experiences are not the same at all.

This makes all the difference. I'm not saying that what Google is doing is right, but it's just not the same thing at all.

Any of us might or might not have obligations that make other options infeasible.

> a black person in the US can't really

Bigotry of low expectations.

My dads family were sharecroppers in the south.

The system definitely was not confined to Reconstruction