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Google, the most influential and powerful search engine in America, which most Americans use when searching for product information, released a propaganda music video advising everyone to only buy from black people. Buy what, only from black people? Everything. During a specific day as a kind of protest? No, every single day of the year. This follows Google’s decision to artificially boost black-owned businesses on their Maps app, giving these businesses a special eye-catching symbol.
Buying All Black - Ludacris feat. Flo Milli (A Google #BlackOwnedFriday Anthem)
The music video goes on to tell the audience to “buy black” thirty times, while the Google-funded music video showcases individuals searching for black-owned businesses of every variety, from restaurants to salons.
I for one, am less than enthusiastic about the hegemonic consumer search engine producing propaganda advising consumers to never shop at a white-owned business. I’m less concerned with the music video, which received 15 million impressions on YouTube alone (a Google product), than with the underlying sentiment that clearly permeates through the business. I’m afraid of what Google is doing behind the scenes in terms of showing services, and whether they are going to artificially reduce exposure to a business owned by the ancestor of an Irish slave, in favor of a wealthy and privileged Nigerian immigrant whose ancestors owned many slaves.
Remember the "AI ethicist" Timnit Gebru? Her being a woman and black working in tech, where that combination is very rare, I was shocked, distraught and frankly terrified over Google's firing of her when she started calling them racist and irresponsible.
It almost appears as if Google prefers these PR stunts for optics but when it actually matters, their policies are diametrically opposite. (For the record, I have zero issues with Google firing her, my sarcasm aside. She should've never been hired in the first place. All I'm asking is for Google's messaging to be consistent with their actual behaviour).
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Is there a black owned search engine we can switch to instead of Google?
MS CEO is not white, does that count?
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It’s worth noting that if the goal of affirmative action is genuinely to help black people, then encouraging traffic at black owned businesses is probably the most bang for your buck way to do that, even after accounting for that many, eg, beauty salons are segregated for normal and natural reasons. Black communities do have an actual problem where Koreans, Arabs, and Indians own most of the businesses in them, and the profits generated are exported from the community.
Google’s method might be dumb here- and probably is- but the basic thought isn’t.
For this specific case, this is almost certainly true. Google most certainly has the ability to track if this leads to an increase in traffic to black owned businesses(after all, the majority of people who navigate through google maps do so by clicking on an icon, and it's pretty easy to track traffic to a particular place that way, or at least I'd think so). They also probably don't want to, because that opens up the possibility that they could be wrong about it, and these kinds of woke initiative usually don't want to entertain the idea that they don't work.
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Maps has a reasonably large footprint if only because of android install base. Many people use default apps so for iPhone users the data'd mostly be from TomTom and for android users it'd be mostly Google. Waze is amusingly a google subsidiary so people using that are also using Google maps data. Google maps used to be more common in third party applications but they changed something in the licensing so in the past five years or so I've more often seen Bing (which is also powered by TomTom). (And by "often seen" I mean the small time developers using their dev licenses in their production applications then getting cut-off by whatever service they failed to pay for and instead of a map you see tiled images of "Pay for a license, signed by $Company". Google just overlays the nag notice over low-resolution maps, Bing makes it white squares.)
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Ironically, highlighting black owned businesses also makes it easy for racists to avoid black owned businesses.
"I've been saying we need this feature for years. Google: please flag the homos next."
-David Duke
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Thus proving that (at least in the eyes of Google) the median person is more likely to be biased in favor of blacks than against them. So this initiative is not meant to correct an imbalance but to further reward an already favored group.
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Forget racist. If your main claim is “buy from me because I’m black” that signals to me other stores have more quality etc.
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Sort of ancillary to the point you're making, it's kind of weird that we have to treat "15 million impressions" reported by YouTube as one of the facts of matter, when we have no way to confirm (and increasingly no reason to believe) those are the actual numbers.
The message would be bad whether it was 5 views or 5 billion, but it's something to keep in mind when these stories come up where something is considered inherently newsworthy based on social engagement which may be entirely bunk (and obviously, the threat of malfeasance is much higher with something internally- produced and explicitly propagandistic.
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I believe white women are both the biggest US consumers and the most progressive group in the US. Could argue that part of companies going overly woke is just to sell more things to their biggest demographic.
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14M views, 126 comments. They are favoring comments with black avatars too. This is just weird, man.
YouTube allows you to delete comments from your videos. They probably have someone doing that.
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2.4% of US businesses are black owned, even accounting for significant fibbing on those surveys by businesses trying to claim to be black owned.
This just doesn't matter. It isn't going to hurt anyone, it probably won't really help anyone either. It is not at all comparable to a boycott of white owned businesses, let alone a boycott of Jewish owned businesses.
Yes and furthermore 95 percent of black owned businesses are non employer firms. In other words they have no employees. I imagine the 5 percent That do are things like restaurants, clothing stores, music stories, maybe convenience, barber shops etc
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On one side of the Overton window, a thing is unthinkable, and only crazy people would worry about it.
On the other side of the Overton window, a thing is unquestionable, and only crazy people would try to oppose it.
If the definers of the Overton window narrow it enough, a thing can jump from unthinkable to unquestionable without debate about it ever being permitted. Sometimes the Overton window can even be shrunk past zero width, so that a thing can be unthinkable and unquestionable at once for a time. (You can notice this when a side argues that something could never happen and also that only monsters could oppose it. Of course, it's rarely the same individuals, but often they hold arbitrarily-similar views otherwise.)
So there is very little that gets my hackles up more than hearing somebody say that something someone brings up as worth worrying about is too unimportant. To me, it sounds very much like being told that "there's nothing to see here, go about your business, this is too unthinkable to lead to anything, the bounds of the Overton window will protect you! We'll let you know when you're allowed to think for yourself." Because I strongly suspect that time will be "never," (for why should important matters of basic human decency ever be subjected to the vagaries of public debate?)
The bounds of the Overton window will not, in fact, keep their shape unless people actually do care about maintaining them. And if caring makes me a crazy, well then, so be it.
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Why? They're only 2% of the population, according to your logic it just wouldn't matter either.
Majority boycotting a minority is very different from a minority boycotting a majority.
Your claim was that this doesn't matter, because only a small portion of the population would be affected. This would still be the case if a majority boycotts a minority. It sounds like the original reason you gave for this being ok is not the actual reason you find it ok.
Also this ad did not encourage a minority to only buy at black owned business, it encouraged everyone to do so.
No, my original claim was that the number of black owned businesses is small. Try all you want, you can't shop at only black owned businesses. Making it irrelevant, and not a constructive boycott of other businesses. Let's not pretend we live in a different world than the one we live in.
That it isn't a racial boycott of all e.g. (white) Jewish businesses doesn't mean that it isn't a partial boycott, e.g. a Jew-owned grocers in an area of a city with a black-owned grocers. Maybe "constructive" is doing a lot of opaque work in your assertion?
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It probably won't amount to a full "boycott of other businesses", but you can absolutely make the argument that it redirects business that would've otherwise gone to white/Asian/etc businesses towards black-owned businesses. To claim that this is not going to hurt anyone (like you claimed in your initial comment) and is irrelevant (like you claimed in this one) because people will still shop at businesses owned by people of other races is frankly missing the point to an impressive degree, just because it is impractical to do a full boycott doesn't mean it isn't essentially encouraging people to discriminate and doesn't mean it won't have real world effects.
It's probably intended to redirect business from Korean or Indian owned businesses to African-American owned businesses, if it's intended to have an effect and not just virtue signal.
Okay, but I'm wondering on what basis you believe that this specifically is the intent. Do you have data on, say, any unique overlaps between the markets served by Korean/Indian owned businesses and black-owned businesses?
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I understand where you're coming from. Pragmatically speaking, you're correct that this will have zero impact. But I think people get angry over the principle. Just because something cannot harm me directly or indirectly, doesn't mean that it's right.
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This seems to say “sure it’s wrong but the effect is small so who cares.”
Maybe. But 1 wrong is wrong and 2 Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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Sure, but out of your 4 listed categories the barbershops and salons are already de facto segregated for very good natural reasons, and the restaurants and clothiers probably aren't that far behind. A Black barber would have no idea how to cut my hair, and my barber has no idea how to cut 4c hair. Even worse for women!
And a restaurant owned by your Nigerian slave owner is unlikely to be a local pizza joint* that I'd get confused by to begin with. Idk about clothing, I feel like there are distinct markets there as well but I don't want to overstep my argument.
This is meaningless happy claptrap.
*Though I might be wrong here on second thought, tbf my favorite Italian deli is owned and operated by Koreans. They bought the place, kept the Italian name and concept, improved the menu and offerings. Best meatball Parm I've ever had. Diversity is our strength.
A white guy walks into a barber shop in Compton, where he is greeted by the proprietor
"Hello there sir, and welcome to my barber shop! Who is getting their hair cut today?"
White guy looks around, confused, at the otherwise empty store
"Uh hi, I am? I'm getting my hair cut, I'd like a short back and sides please - 4 blade if you can."
"You?! You want me to cut your hair? But how!? I only have scissors for black hair sir, I don't have even one pair of white scissors! How do white people even start a short back and sides, do you do it in order of colour shade? Should I start on a diagonal? Nope, I'm sorry sir but without extensive training I think this is probably only going to endanger the both of us."
What reasons exist for good and natural segregation of hair dressing services that don't exist for schools, public transport, restaurants etc?
This, but unironically. If most of your clients have kinky hair and the rest have curly hair, you might have problems with styling straight hair. How the hell do you style hair that tends to lie flat into a 90s curtained hair or into an undercut? Even if's the short back and sides, how do you combine that with the longer hair left up top without leaving the customer looking like a Ukrainian blacksmith?
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Your confident ignorance is highly amusing.
White and Black hair really are just physically different. A barber that primarily works with black customers isn't going to have a clue how to layer fine straight blonde hair to produce texture in a side part. He's going to be used to doing the opposite, trying to tame overly thick and textured hair into something respectable. Most frequently the issue is seen in reverse, Black women in small towns unable to find anyone who knows how to work with textured hair.
So you are correct in the claim about hair being different but overstating the impact practically. I've been to a number of black barber shops none of which had any issue with my red/blonde hair. Short back and sides with a side part isn't the most challenging of haircuts after all.
They would perhaps lack the experience to deal with complicated or long hair, but for short lengths it's not as much of an issue. For hairstylists for women, your point becomes a little stronger, but even there given the numbers of black women who relax or straighten their hair, most black salons will have experience in dealing with straight hair as well or indeed given extensions/weaves are often put in and then styled, dealing with straight fine hair (often from Indian women).
It's not a symmetric issue in other words. A black woman may struggle in a white suburb to find someone but a white man in a black area is much less likely to have an issue. If they are hipsterish, a rocker or similar with long hair that calculus will change again, but a lot of black stylists are used to dealing with fine straight hair (albeit it is not their clients own natural hair).
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I am aware different races have different types of hair. They also have different metabolisms, but nobody considers that a good and natural reason for segregating restaurants. Because that was and is my point - your good and natural reason for segregating barber shops is a lack of interest and experience. The same reasons separatists gave for segregating schools and restaurants (because they couldn't politely mention their feelings of discomfort, which I also suspect is the case with some hair stylists.)
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This dialog is kind of funny in its over-the-topness but do you really not understand that the black people and white people have very different hair? Try a google image search for "black men's hairstyles"
What is over the top is suggesting a barber would have "no idea" how to cut hair of someone from a different race. And then going on to suggest that this is a good reason for segregation, effectively resurrecting one of the most popular reasons racists had in the past for segregating schools and restaurants.
Edit: ignore this post, I'll delete it in half a day - I thought I had dreamed posting the other reply I wrote.
Edit 2: Actually, on second thought, I'm going to leave it here. I like how it illustrates my confident ignorance, lol.
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Given that a call to buy only from PoC is equivalent to a call to boycott non-PoC, I wonder if ADL will notice the, to me, obvious parallel with the nazi Jewish boycott. Especially as in both cases Jews are the non-favoured demographic.
ADL can't notice anything DNC didn't tell them to notice. This has been the case for a while now.
Avoid low-effort weakmanning like this.
I agree that wasn't exactly effortpost, but I disagree about weekmanning. My opinion is that ADL have turned completely political, and has converted from a principled institution fighting anti-semitism and bigotry to a partisan reputation laundering outlet that cynically cashes in on these sentiments for partisan reasons. Thus it is useless to mention it as a trustworthy arbiter in cases like this. This is not a random throwaway boo, this is a result of long (and rather painful, for me, as a Jewish person) observation of their (de-)evolution.
I really wish people would pay attention to the rules we have here about how to argue your points, and not just whether or not they agree with the sentiment of the post in question. Very often someone will snarl something about their ideological opponents, and after being warned for the snarl, they or someone else will come back with "But what I said is true!"
Maybe it is true. And written as an effortful post explaining why you think that, it would be fine. But low-effort sneers, even if expressing an opinion that could be defended, are just low-effort sneers.
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the more obvious parallel is affirmative action.
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My gut reaction is that the ADL prioritizes being a sword over being a shield. They are more motivated by malice towards the outgroup, than affinity towards their ingroup. So I doubt they'll have a problem with this, since PoC are presently part of their coalition, and thus not a hated outgroup.
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It has the same energies as a rapping German teacher of whatever in a 80s edutainment public television series.
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It continues to be darkly amusing that progressives are reinventing and advocating segregation.
Where would one find a business owned by a former Irish slave? To my knowledge, there are very few enslaved Irish in the past few decades.
I don't think segregation is the right term for this unless the call to patronize black-owned businesses is only intended only for black people. It's simple racial discrimination.
I think the reasoning is that blacks are already discriminated against so the only way to even the balance is to go out of your way to favor them. Of course, this implies that all differences between races is purely a function of discrimination, which isn't my view and probably not of many others here. But in the wider cultural discourse, questioning this assumption would be a fringe if not suspect act. What goes unsaid ultimately goes unthought.
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OP currently reads the ancestor of an Irish slave, so OP presumably thinks the Irish will be re-enslaved in the future. To which the civilized races can only say, thank God, of course.
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There are also very few enslaved black people in the past few decades.
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I agree re Irish slave comment being silly. However, one thing to note is that increasing one group necessarily artificially decreases visibility of not that group.
What Google is doing is wrong.
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