Fb headquarters posted a "Black Lives Matter" sign packed with the names of black people killed by police. Google tweeted a public statement that it "stand[s] in solidarity with the battle for racial justice. inch
DeRay Mckesson, a visible activist and Campaign Nil co-founder, was arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Saturday while using Periscope and wearing a Shirt featuring the Twitter fowl and the hashtag #StayWoke. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted the viral image of Mckesson's arrest, applauding "tech as a vehicle for social change. inches
Benioff later apologized when another Twitter user falsely accused him of reappropriating Mckesson's act of civil disobedience. Still, his gaffe exemplified why some individuals think these acts of solidarity look more like branding opportunities and self-congratulation.
There isn't a hesitation that the tech industry shows great influence when it publicly affirms dark lives. But the confirmation is questionable when it comes from a market whose longstanding issues with diverse staffing don't automatically show they value African-american Americans beyond using their platform.
The tech industry needs to buy dark lives outside of law enforcement killings
The Black Dwells Matter movement has recently been focused largely on officer-involved shootings of black people, but the emphasis is not merely limited to Many racist criminal justice system. It also addresses the devaluing of men and women of color, particularly African Americans, in other facets of contemporary society, such as nation's burgeoning technical industry.
At Google, a company that has provided more than $5 , 000, 000 in grants to ethnicity justice organizations in the past year alone, just 2 percent of employees were black, as of this January. In 2015, only 2 percent of Facebook employees were Africa Americans. For both companies, black individuals were (slightly) better represented in non-tech careers, compared with tech and executive positions.
Although a 2014 Pew Research Centre study found that African-american Americans use Twitter at higher rates than any other internet users, the company's staff towards the end of 2015 was only 2 percent black.
"Beyond the tone-deaf tweets of the tech industry's very white workforce while Black Myspace has yet another psychological meltdown, one commences to wonder, where are the initiatives from Silicon Area heavyweights to make this stop? " Justin Edmund, a former Facebook manufacture, wrote on Medium the other day.
Edmund added: "Silicon Pit does not treat black color people like people, it treats them like a statistic. inch
This basically for lack of expertise: A 2014 report by USA Today showed that African Americans are graduation with computer science and computer engineering degrees at twice the rate they are being hired for corresponding tech positions.
The industry's embrace isn't completely arbitrary. Technology is one of the defining characteristics of the movement for black lives. The African american Lives Matter organization, which now boasts 37 chapters in the US exclusively, started as a simple 2013 Facebook post by co-founder Alicia Garza. Facebook has been integral to organizing efforts surrounding the country since the Ferguson violent uprising. And one of the sole reasons we know Castile's name is because his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, used Facebook Live to record the occasions immediately after he was filmed.
But the fight for racial justice does not commence and end with social media, in particular when sociable media companies do not spend in black lives themselves.
There is no hesitation that technology is a vehicle for change. Nevertheless technology companies refuse to rectify racial inequalities within their own organizations, they remain a fundamental element of the very problems black people use their platforms to fix.
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