Can you give an example? I’m assuming you’re not referring to this Netflix competitor as an example of something equivalent to making it illegal for non-whites to eat at certain restaurants.
Subscribing to a service is not mandatory, so not comparable, but there are case of re-segregation in the US such as white-only race training sessions at work or the whole Evergreen hullabaloo.
> In short- the best way to help Black people in America isn't to perpetuate our separate identity, but to remove the power and significance of racial identifiers entirely.
And you think the source of this power and significance is...media streaming companies?
"divisiveness inherent in the title" seems wildly overblown to me. Isn't identifying an underserved audience and marketing to them like a cornerstone of business? Do you feel that hair products marketed toward Black people are divisive? Subscription boxes for millennials? Shoes for moms?
Because it’s encouraging separatism. I would much rather have a startup that promotes black creators to the broader culture than one exclusionary by design.
Looking at top musicians, artists, and other cultural figures, it seems to me like this is already largely the case. Hip hop sales come in large part from white people. I want more of this cultural sharing, not isolationism.
While I agree with "not wanting separatism," I find it infuriating that the burden of analyzing and debating "separatism" (or etc) always gets foisted on the minority or marginalized populations create a space for themselves. And relatively never the mainstream, dominant culture and institutions that have left out, pushed out, or outright exploited them in the first place.
I didn't really see anything in the design I saw as exclusionary!
> because we appreciate the HN community taking time to hear our story, for a short period of time, we’re making some of our original black TV shows available for free on our site
Like thousands of business before them they're marketing to an audience but it seems like they're more than happy to build a broader audience.
You seem to think there is a monolithic "culture" that needs to be augmented. This has never been the case. There are always a dominant culture that is not necessarily named and multiple subcultures per minority group. Why are folks more sensitive to black sub-culture manifestations in the US vs other minority groups?
America does have a relatively monolithic culture and this translates into its businesses, government, and everything else. This is easy to observe if you live outside of America.
Yes, by and large Americans have the same basic values and interests. The most popular entertainment figures, sports, musicians, and other cultural elements come from a very wide range of backgrounds. Values like individual freedom or the importance of voting are fairly universal among Americans.
As I said, this is easy to observe from abroad, where there is no space to differentiate between black Americans and white Americans. They’re all just Americans and they mostly act the same way.
Remember that twitter isn't real life. For every college freshmen tweeting about the sushi counter being cultural appropriation, 98% of people disagree.
Just because someone is loud and inflammatory does not mean their views are widely held.
Sufficiently advanced robots would leave a lot more of value behind than a nuke which makes deploying them much less costly to the person that wants to actually control the territory.
I think this is a good analysis and I think too few people consider it this way. I'm not convinced that changes in culture are driving this as much as changes in how information is shared and spread and I'm disappointed how few people, even on Hacker News, seem interested in this angle.
Consider that maybe people agree that being confronted with challenging ideas and perspectives is valuable but they don't find the same value in Jerry Seinfeld's comedy as they do in, say, a lecture by someone with radical beliefs.
I don't understand why Damore is the hill people are always trying to die on. He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas. He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time. Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.
Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever so I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
Have you read the Damore memo? It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity, given the data showing that most women are choosing to not go into engineering-like fields, rather than being forced out of them.
It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.
> It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity
Well, it was fundamentally about how Google should stop all efforts to recruit or promote women or non-white men, because Damore believed those efforts were "discrimination" against himself.
Huh? My description is completely accurate. I feel like a lot of people didn't actually read Damore's document, or perhaps read it and were shouting "YES! YES!" so loudly as they read about Google's supposed left-wing bias that they can't actually perceive the words written.
Damore says straight up and in so many words that Google should end all of its "diversity" hiring initiatives because he believes they're discriminatory against himself, this is just not an arguable issue.
I can see how you could get that Google should end "diversity" hiring initiatives as one of the core messages, but not "all" of them, and "he believes they're discriminatory against himself" is quite uncharitable. Having reread it just now after five years, the theme seems to be that he wants to find the intersection of Google being a good workplace for women and Google being successful as a company.
From the memo:
> Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap
> Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s
representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:...
He goes on to list interventions like more pair programming, changing performance evaluations to encourage collaboration over competition, allowing more part-time work, and reducing the stress of the job.
He says Google needs to reduce hiring initiatives which are not backed by evidence, and which are themselves likely illegally discriminatory, like hiring quotas (likely illegal) and implicit bias training (debunked).
It's because he published a memo pertinent to a hot topic at the company and rather than engage him on the merits of his ideas leadership decided to fire him. Is it unsettling that the employees at a company with a global monopoly on information retrieval seem to not tolerate dissent within their ranks?
It was very much within the scope of his job duties. Many of his colleagues were encouraged and rewarded for making presentations on the same topic using company resources on company time (with the opposite conclusions).
The idea that you can investigate something and present your good faith effort at the truth, with evidence, and be fired for that, is pretty scary. Like imagine several of your colleagues do comparisons of PostgreSQL and MongoDB on your internal blog, showing some benchmark results; you think that's not the whole picture and do your own comparison showing some other benchmarks. And then you get fired, not because your benchmarks were less rigorous or your writeup was poor, but because they don't like your answers. That's not an environment that's going to lead to good technology choices and an effective company.
> He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas.
If a forum isn't a "market place of ideas" than it's not a forum.
> He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time.
All of which were not reasons he got fired. And Google actually encourages its employees to do such things, by the way.
And those are all things we have done and is considered normal in most sane workplace. We all posted something not work related to your coworkers on internal forums, including politics.
> Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion.
Which was never the argument in the first place. Nobody is arguing that Google violated the 1st amendment by firing him. But let's not pretend that Google's size doesn't make it a major non-elected influence on our society. We have seen the consequences of that when it came to potential Covid-19 treatments and its origins. The "it's a private company", which hypocritically used by self-described socialists but I digress, doesn't negate the consequences of their actions or their responsibilities.
> Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever
That's just an appeal to tradition fallacy.
> I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
I'm the owner of a big corporations and me and my buddies form the largest group of employers in the country, I don't like your stance on free speech and who you support politically. Yeah but!? No, I'm a private company.
> I'm not sure which outcome is better for Canada, the USA, or the world. I'm pretty sure neither Obama, Trump, not Biden had any accurate idea either.
> Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines.
Or maybe Obama, Trump, and Biden had different ideas about what "better for the USA" meant that led to them making reasonably rational but different decisions? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.
> Or maybe Obama, Trump, and Biden had different ideas about what "better for the USA" meant that led to them making reasonably rational but different decisions?
Yes, that's basically what politics is about in a nutshell, making different tradeoffs based on values. I'm not sure any of them actually had a sufficiently detailed analysis or model to justify having any certainty in their decision.
> But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.
Don't get me wrong, I don't understand the issue either. I'm just honest about that fact and merely espoused why it's a complicated dilemma. This is all unintentional consequences and it's not clear which was the best call for the environment, the countries involved, or the world at large.
I would have liked to see an in-depth study of the tradeoffs and a rational decision based on that rather than a political decision, which seems to be what we got all three times.
