> “I realized that my team simply did not have much to say on the issue of police brutality. This was odd—mostly because I’d watched them debate countless other topics, newsworthy and not, with a proud deftness and alacrity,” the memo reads. “From disappearing Malaysian airplanes to the spread of Ebola to the marriages and divorces of celebrities I’d never heard of, my teammates always had something to say about everything. But when it came to the violent policing of black bodies, they were silent.”
I don't think it's reasonable to expect your co-workers to openly protest any issue. People have families to take care of, paychecks to earn and rent to pay. They for the most part, want to do their job with minimum of drama. I'm sure there are a million issues that the memo author was not openly protesting that other co-workers may have cared deeply about. I would hope they wouldn't hold that against the author.
I'm not questioning whether this person experienced racism at Google, as that seems likely in an organization of that size. I just don't think it's ok to be upset about your co-workers not being openly vocal in the workplace about a political issue you feel strongly about.
There seems to be a strong push to politicize silence that seems very unhealthy. You don't know how people feel and act outside of work and the public sphere. Silence on an issue is not a political statement.
>They for the most part, want to do their job with minimum of drama
I think this here is the point where the author would disagree. Google employees and the staff at many larger tech companies produces their fair share of drama on virtually any political topic, and that's what makes this more off-putting.
I'm not black but I come from a fairly poor background, and in the tech field obviously that is rather the exception than the norm and I've noticed a similar thing when it comes to class issues.
You have people who start political mailing lists on gender pronouns and technicalities that nobody on the street has ever thought about, but then that same person talks about homeless people in front of the office with a sort of callousness and elitism that is pretty breathtaking.
If we were just talking about your random corporate culture where everybody just sips their coffee and comments on nothing then in a way that'd make these things much less noticeable. But when you have workforces that are hyper-vigilant and politically correct show disregard on topics that touch a really wide population, like the African American community in the US in this case, that makes for a stark contrast.
I'm also from a poor background and agree with a lot of this. It was a huge mistake for Google (and other valley companies) to politicize the workplace. No one will be happy in the end. They should have stayed focused on being excited about making the best technology they can, background and politics aside.
Pandora's box is open now and I don't think they'll be able to reign it in. Thankfully, this leaves an opportunity for another generation of companies to return to a technology first message and eat the large, politically quagmired megacorp's lunch.
> It was a huge mistake for Google (and other valley companies) to politicize the workplace.
I wasn't aware this was a thing. Did Google openly support one candidate or party? How did they promote politics in the workplace?
> Pandora's box is open now and I don't think they'll be able to reign it in. Thankfully, this leaves an opportunity for another generation of companies to return to a technology first message and eat the large, politically quagmired megacorp's lunch.
How? What do new companies change or do differently? Are the FANGY companies doomed by a toxic culture they can't undo? And why can't they?
Some of the politicization at Google may have been born out of the "Bring your whole self to work" philosophy playing out on their internal Google+ network and "Coffee Beans" discussion forum. You can see many examples/screenshots of what was tolerated internally in the Damore lawsuit[1]. I've worked exclusively for large orgs (outside of the Bay Area) and it completely blows my mind.
Wow, just from briefly scrolling around I'm appalled by the sort of stuff that people are willing to put in writing and send to their coworkers at Google. e.g. managers admitting to having shit-lists of people that they won't let on their teams
What I dislike about conversations like this on HN, is that comments like the above don’t get downvoted because they are detrimental to the conversation, or because they are in some way a rules violation, but rather because people just don’t like them. It defeats the whole “moderation” purpose of self-moderation. And it happens every single time a political issue like racial bias in the tech industry is the topic at hand.
Maybe equating 'conservative views' to racism and sexism _is_ detrimental to this conversation?
We're talking on an article where an employee interpreted _silence_ as racism! There is a valid point that (non-bigoted) conservative opinions are being silenced.
i.e. Say you think that we should reduce the immigration rate, and wanted to discuss your reasons with your coworkers -- would you feel comfortable discussing that @ a SF tech company?
When racism and sexism are so disproportionately embraced by conservatives (e.g what views are espoused by white supremacists or proud boys or <insert recent alt-right mass shooter here>?) you must ask yourself what's _really_ detrimental to the conversation here.
> We're talking on an article where an employee interpreted _silence_ as racism! There is a valid point that (non-bigoted) conservative opinions are being silenced.
If you see a coworker being harassed and you do nothing, that's bad. Even if it doesn't make you a racist, if you see something and don't speak up you demonstrate lack of caring about your coworker. It's valid to point that out, is it not? How is pointing that out silencing conservative opinion?
It's not on people at work to be nice to you if your views are hurtful to those around you. The onus is on you to find out why most of the conscientious and smart people around you find your behavior and/or views abhorrent.
The problem is that your opinion doesn't exist in the a vacuum. If you talk about reducing immigration while saying little to nothing about the horrible treatment of people at our borders, then naturally people are going to take offense because you're ranking the value of reduced immigration over the value of treating people humanely.
I've had many discussions with coworkers with me taking up both stances as a steel man and/or devil's advocate and not once have I felt uncomfortable about the discussion. You should be concerned about certain actions of very powerful people in high offices poisoning the well of discourse before you consider what you're trying to debate because context is everything. I find that is something frequently ignored when people discuss why they feel like they can't speak about certain things.
> If you talk about reducing immigration while saying little to nothing about the horrible treatment of people at our borders, then naturally people are going to take offense because you're ranking the value of reduced immigration over the value of treating people humanely.
I don't care if people are offended. I don't think the topic about humane treatment is two-sided, so I have nothing to add. I think I have to figure out what I think about broader immigration issues, so I choose to talk about that.
I do not subscribe to the implicit ultimatum of "either you are interested in what I consider the most pressing issue, or you're implicitly supporting the opposition". You think it's an elephant in the room and I would say granted that's true, I don't think it's an argument that needs to be rehashed.
I think it will change toward the obvious resolution without additional fanfare (Trump will be gone within my lifetime), so I don't spend time on topics that I think are decided. Policy is always playing catch up. That's how this society works.
If you don't care if people are offended, then you're effectively saying that you give zero weight to their arguments and opinions. That's not a particularly good argumentative tactic and is a great way to ensure your argument is shut down from the get-go.
This isn't an implicit ultimatum either, this is about understanding and addressing the full context of a situation. If you're ignorant of certain aspects people aren't going to mind, but if you willingly try to ignore those aspects then people are going to wonder why.
It's like for example: Trying to talk about how to fix a large problem in a code base without understanding why code functions the way it does. If you just do a large scale refactor, then you break other portions of the system that expected certain behavior and now you have to do all sorts of retrofitting.
> If you don't care if people are offended, then you're effectively saying that you give zero weight to their arguments and opinions
That is only if their opinion is based on (or implied to be based on) their emotional state. Arguments based on emotion are basically zero weight for most philosophical issues (like what problems are more important than others). You have no right to know, what is more important to me, so I think the judgement is ignorant.
> That's not a particularly good argumentative tactic and is a great way to ensure your argument is shut down from the get-go.
My argument about what? My morality? I choose not to care about offending a specific group of people who have a specific interest. No apologies.
> Trying to talk about how to fix a large problem in a code base without understanding why code functions the way it does.
I'm not talking about the same project (or function) as you. One feeds into the other. Ultimately, there is a black-box assumption. I don't have to care about the later components doing their job, when looking at the function that is also complex. Someone should probably be looking at both, but it's not a moral imperative to look at all functions in the world.
What you care about is, by definition, dictated by your emotional state. I for example greatly care about issues that relate to poverty because I've experienced deep poverty before. What you effectively say by saying you don't care if you offend people is that you only care about things that are emotionally relevant to yourself. You touch upon this yourself:
>You have no right to know, what is more important to me, so I think the judgement is ignorant.
This is an argument made from emotion, not philosophically or logically. You're saying that X topic ranks higher emotionally than Y topic.
Which I mean, that's also going to vary based on the context and whom you're arguing with. There's nothing wrong with caring for certain topics than others but it's disengenuous to behave like you're above emotions while making an emotionally charged argument.
> What you care about is, by definition, dictated by your emotional state
I agree with that. Not sure how it's related to why someone else's state should influence my preferences.
> This is an argument made from emotion
It is not. You literally have no legal right. Without that information, you are literally ignorant and unable to make an argument about morality, from my perspective. Morality is personal, but it is a philosophy about maximizing the good across people and time, as I define it.
> There's nothing wrong with caring for certain topics than others but it's disengenuous to behave like you're above emotions while making an emotionally charged argument.
I disagree. I am going to assert that I am a human. I am not above emotion. I can and do, dismiss the arguments posed from an emotional basis. This is a little far away from where we started.
> you're ranking the value of reduced immigration over the value of treating people humanely
I don't rank it above. I just don't think there's anything left to discuss. The moral failure is practical, not philosophical. This is of no interest to me, as I already know what I believe about it. I can and do talk about immigration, without reference and feel that I am on solid moral footing.
That's great advice - but it amounts to 'be careful and qualify your opinion to show you're _not_ racist'. That's exactly what people are complaining about.
The migrant detention issue has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of _legal_ immigration. Bringing it up does nothing other than to distract and prevent discussion on the original topic!
If we could just discuss issues _in good faith_ and stop with the name calling we might actually be able to solve some of them -- together.
I mean, if you're talking about racially charged topics (of which immigration unavoidably is) you should expect to have to be careful. I'm not sure what else to tell you.
The migrant detention issue absolutely relates to legal immigration because if you talk about reducing the number of legal immigrants, depending on your proposal that means people will be reclassified as illegal immigrants and subject to being detained.
You can't talk about immigration while trying to ignore the elephant in the room. Because when people point out the elephant and you ignore it or don't have an answer, then your argument is a poor one.
Food for thought, something can be political without directly referencing domestic politics and political parties. Definition: "the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power."
Discussing structural inequality is inherently political because it is a discussion about power.
However, I disagree with parent. You cannot have a diverse workforce that numbers the thousands and expect there not to be a discussion about power structures and inequity. Imagine if you applied that lens of thinking to a company that employs both blacks and whites in the Jim Crow era-- who loses?
"Bring your whole self to work". Example of people bringing their whole selves to work: When Trump won the election we had executives crying on stage talking about the catastrophe. Not something you would see at a conventional company, I best most executives didn't even mention the election in front of their employees.
Note that I didn't say that Google promotes a specific political party, just that it promotes people bringing politics to work.
>Did Google openly support one candidate or party?
Serious? I mean, you can be right or left as much as you like, but to ignore that Google has been entirely sided with the DNC is to just ignore reality. This isn't even getting into the recent leaks of Google search blacklists that overwhelmingly target conservative outlets [0]. Or their internal documents that talk literally and explicitly about "preventing the next Trump situation". [1]
I'm no Trump fan... But it's tough to stick your head in the sand here.
Here is Google's Eric Schmidt wearing a STAFF badge at Hillary Clinton's election night headquarters. [2]
It's a video with a senior Google engineer explaining the documents he turned over to DOJ, how he retrieved them, and those documents clearly viewable.
It's pretty hard to say they selectively edited anything here.
You're right, those are the leaked docs from June. Here is the one I meant to link, August's. The interview is alright, a little self-congratulatory at the end, but the documents are pretty hard to argue.
Every person can support whatever candidate or party they like. Same goes for companies, especially in a democracy like the US where big donors and big money are an essential part of every election. Should be accepted by everyone or generally frowned upon. So yeah, Eric Schmidt supporting is OK. As much as I don't like it but it would be ok as well if he had supported Trump.
You cannot avoid a politicized workplace because companies don't exist in a vacuum and neither do the workers. You can do your best to ensure things remain respectful but you can't avoid certain topics unless you outright refuse to hire people of color or minorities, in which case you achieve a political monoculture which is in itself a politicized workplace.
There is no such thing as an apolitical workplace or company.
> But when you have workforces that are hyper-vigilant and politically correct show disregard on topics that touch a really wide population, like the African American community in the US in this case, that makes for a stark contrast.
The company has made unambiguous statements of support for BLM yeaaars ago (tweeting "we need racial justice now" after talking about Castile and Sterling IIRC), and a company-wide meeting was interrupted by BLM protestors sanctioned by the company taking the stage (after IIRC Trayvon's shooting).
The author's complaint isn't that Google or its employees overall are silent on BLM. It's that their their specific team isn't talking about it with the frequency that they've arbitrarily decided they should. It seems like a pretty typical case of thinking that everybody should prioritize the exact political issues in the exact order and degree that you yourself do. You could make the exact same complaint for "people don't talk about DAPL as much as I'd like", or Nestlé and water rights, or climate change, or Syria etc etc. The only difference is that it's be ludicrous to consider any of the latter complaints as implicit discrimination, and yet for some reason you don't think it's ridiculous in this case.
It's very easy for people to be 'woke' about these issues and voice support for groups like BLM, but there's a difference between someone talking and someone showing an emotional response to someone that ought to impact them if they genuinely cared.
If you talk to tech folks about poverty every single one of them will give you a great essay like answer about the injustices of the world and how they support the working class, but the very same people will treat the cantine staff when nobody is looking with lack of respect that I've not seen in many other places. And that matters personally because that to me says more than speech.
And I would say that at least from my personal experience this is not just because people in tech earn a lot. Before I worked for a stereotypical tech company my first gig was in finance, and altough bankers tend to have a bad reputation, I've rarely seen someone mind taking a train through a rough neighbourhood, or mingling with people from say a working background.
In tech on the other hand I have to say I know a lot of people who are so insular in how they live their lives while at the same time touting all kinds of inclusivity that it's honestly pretty angering. It's not that I'm surprised that rich people don't think about poverty a lot, or that the OP is surprised that predominantly affluent white coders don't have a personal connection to african-americans getting shot, it's that if they're going to voice support it better be more than just lip service.
Note that this team was not engineers, a lot of the drama you see from Google comes from their non-tech teams so blaming it all on ignorant techies doesn't hold.
Am I the only one completely unsurprised? This sort of thing has been the ideology of the American professional-managerial class for decades: that diversity in the identities and freedom in the lifestyles of professionals themselves are profoundly important, worthy of celebration and extension into infinite new domains, but that those who simply don't reach the material station (ie: income, wealth, and accreditation) of professionals (ie: Googlers) deserve only contempt. "Political correctness" to defend the ingroup, but with an explicit celebration of doing material damage (ie: homelessness, gentrification, regional depopulation) to the outgroup.
It's a classic instantiation of the California Ideology[1]. The only bizarre or disagreeable bit is how it ever got passed off as somehow altruistic or progressive.
No. I noticed the same thing hearing the drum of intersectionality beaten so often.
Crenshaw's foundational piece[1] on intersectionality lacks any meaningful analysis of class (except for the class who is party to a lawsuit)! The part about entry into the country club is revealing: it's not about equality in society, it's about equality in the professional-managerial class.
Adolph Reed, Jr (despite maybe going too far in wholly rejecting identity politics) really gets the point across[2]:
>...the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc.
Re:
>The only bizarre or disagreeable bit is how it ever got passed off as somehow altruistic or progressive.
My take is that the left holds similar liberal viewpoints, so there is just enough overlap to wear the progressive (and therefore altruistic) cloak.
I think it's unfair to make this association. It is both possible to be cognizant of gentrification and make valid critiques of political correctness.
It turns out that most people in the US decry PC[1]:
> 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness
There is a burgeoning movement on the left to be more lax about political correctness because the academic dialect (pedantry) required repels a lot of well-meaning people.
I see a lot of tech workers demonized for gentrifying neighborhoods in NYC, Chicago, Bay Area and Seattle, among other places. In my personal experience though, those people are buying the places they can afford as close to their work as possible. It's not that they're choose to displace people, it's that they're doing the best they can. They can't stay where they're from because there aren't actually good jobs for them there.
I think it's more about attitudes, like if you're cracking jokes about being a gentrifier as if it doesn't negatively affect other peoples' lives, then that's not good.
The other part is voting -- gentrifiers tend to vote for their own interests and may overlook or vote against efforts the people they're outclassing care about e.g affordable housing.
You have people who start political mailing lists on gender pronouns and technicalities that nobody on the street has ever thought about, but then that same person talks about homeless people in front of the office with a sort of callousness and elitism that is pretty breathtaking.
I can't agree with this more.
I sat through a discussion a few years ago that really opened my eyes... a group of younger artists - that normally discussed things like a lack of racial diversity in the company, transgender rights etc - passionately cheering on the owner of a trendy brunch spot who was on the news for tossing out parents with a crying infant. It struck me that their seemingly endless compassion for humanity might not actually be all that genuine after all.
I thought that being interested in social justice would at the very least require some basic human compassion and empathy, but perhaps that's where I was wrong.
Not sure if you are being downvoted but very much this. In my time at Google there has been very politically motivated engineering decisions (google scale code renaming to remove words like master-slave etc). While I totally agree that those should have been taken, but if a company is spending resources (which translates to money) to undertake projects that are inconsequential compared to other things (like being aware of the actual issues these communities face, as the memo points out) then it's fair to call out the company's blind spots.
Are the coworker he mentioned the people who start mailing list about gender issues? Maybe his coworker just doesn't want to start any domestic political discussion?
That is a very weird example for the article to lead with. He's talking about the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. What kind of "debate" can a primarily white and asian group of people have about those events? The whole fun of nerd debates is taking dueling positions on low-stakes issues--something that would be way out of line with respect to those issues.
>my teammates always had something to say about everything. But when it came to the violent policing of black bodies, they were silent
Debate is probably the wrong term, seems he was just looking for an acknowledgement of the problem. After one of those police shooting incidents I came into work and all of my coworkers, all white and asian, were talking about how bad the incident was. People at work come together and talk about major traumatic news stories all the time. A consistent absence of that when it relates to a specific topic might seem....strange.
Honestly, it sounds like even acknowledgement was not the problem. Their coworkers did speak up -- to criticize the protesters and claim they weren't accomplishing anything.
If I were in this person's position, silence would make me feel a little weird. My coworkers actively deriding the protest that I'm about to go join would make me feel a lot more weird.
I don't think people are lying when they say that tech employees have their own biases and blind spots, and it doesn't necessarily surprise me to learn that race is one of them.
I used to think that real estate prices/cost of living would drive companies to start looking to base operations outside of the bay area. I’m starting to think that a high maintenance workforce culture is going to beat prices to the punch.
> Silence on an issue is not a political statement.
At the very least, one should not make assumptions on someone's stance on a subject based on their silence. A lot of people lately seem quick to ascertain intent based on little or no context, and that's not a good way to deal with others.
> Silence on an issue is not a political statement.
Of course it is; it's merely an ambiguous one. It either means "I am happy with the status quo" or "I am too afraid to express opposition to the status quo."
It could also mean "I don't know enough about this topic to form an educated opinion so I'd rather not wade in". I'm not afraid to admit that I often find myself in this position when it comes to these contentious political issues. It doesn't mean I don't care and I'm usually happy to be educated.
Expecting everyone to comment on everything is how you get Twitter. People in general should be cautious about wading into contentious debates and more eager to just listen and hear what's what's being said.
Yes, this has a side effect of reducing the number of people who are actively challenging the status quo, and yes, there is an element of privilege in being able to say that. But artificially increasing the number of people in a debate can lead to fracturing and a lower quality of conversation. The negative side-effects outweigh the positives -- you risk drowning out the people that you're trying to support and adding misinformation that makes it easier to dismiss your side.
People also overestimate the amount of influence that places like Twitter have on policy. My strategy for a while now has been that when I see someone doing something hateful online, I try to avoid getting into an argument, and instead just donate $1-5 to a cause that opposes them. I think that's more helpful, and it comes with fewer negative side-effects. Obviously there's some privilege there as well; not everyone can afford to do that.
If that means I'm supporting structural racism... then :shrug:. I don't think telling people to be on 100% of the time is actually helping these movements in any appreciable way. We know from pretty much every other area that specialization and division of labor is more efficient and produces better results than having everyone try to do everything at once. It's not clear to me why social movements are different -- it seems completely obvious to me that specialization is necessary for progress.
Of course I'm willing to learn if there's a dimension to this I'm not seeing. My views on that have evolved in the past, and I expect they'll evolve in the future.
> Of course it is; it's merely an ambiguous one. It either means "I am happy with the status quo" or "I am too afraid to express opposition to the status quo."
No, silence often means “I’m not informed enough about this and don’t want to sound like a fool.” Heavens forbid people actually think before talking and not talk if they feel like they can’t say anything meaningful.
Even if we asked for more information, you are assuming, or mandating, that we process it in real time, which is really difficult for those of normal intelligence. Also, being told something is completely different from having the life experience as context. Eg I could guess what it’s like to be a Uighur living in Guangzhou, I could even ask some questions, but really I still wouldn’t know enough to talk meaningfully about it.
I would disagree with that. There are thousands of significant issues facing the US, and the world in general, you can't be vocal about them all. Just because I don't talk with people about what is happening in Hong Kong, or Yemen, or about gun control in the US, doesn't mean I think the status quo is OK. It just means there are other issues I am more focused on.
If I checked your comment history, would I see you fighting for fixing the outsized amount of suicides committed by men in the USA? If not, do you think it'd be reasonable to assume you're happy with the current state of affairs in that arena?
Or, they're passionate about change and doing what they can to push back against the status quo, but don't think that every battle needs to be fought in every arena. And in fact, doing so can be counterproductive.
You are indeed confused. I was simply replying to the very generic statement "silence on a matter means either "I am happy with the status quo" or "I am too afraid to express opposition to the status quo.""
This is simply not true. I never talk politics at work, simply because it's nobody's business. My silence is not motivated by fear, and I'm often not happy with the status quo. I just don't want to talk about these topics at work.
Right, but we're talking in the context of a specific action to be silent, in which the specific action of silence occurs when someone is willing to talk about any other seemingly sensitive matter.
I'm confused when we started to generalize to all silences. Sometimes I'm silent because I'm drinking water, or I'm asleep...
And debate isn’t what the author wants. How would the author feel about a debate about whether black people are statistically more likely or not to experience police brutality? People feel like they can debate what happened to MH17 or who Angelia Jolie will date. But for these issues there is only one sanctioned viewpoint. Forgive me for not standing in a circle while we all chant it.
- Police departments disproportionately killed black people, who were 41% of victims despite being only 20% of the population living in these cities.
- 41 of the 60 police departments disproportionately killed black people relative to the population of black people in their jurisdiction.
- 14 police departments killed black people exclusively in 2015, 100% of the people they killed were black. For only 5 police departments were 100% of those killed white.
Maybe that explains why they have more trouble with cops. It's easy to craft a simple narrative of good vs. evil when systematically ignore all the sins of one side.
Again, the statistics are about more the 'being black'. They are about neighborhood, economics, social norms. Resulting in altercations between mostly-white police and black citizens getting out of hand.
Its not right; I'm not arguing that. But until we understand the actual reasons behind the statistics, its just a shouting contest.
Thanks but it was just illustrative. I was not trying to start that debate. Only to highlight that the “conversations” that the author wants to see are largely just echoes of the same opinion, not an actual lively debate about who Sansa Stark will marry. I’d rather argue for an hour about whether Tom Brady or Joe Montana was better than sit in a drum circle and see who can say Black Lives Matter the loudest.
> "These protestors aren't going to solve anything ," she said. "Like, what are those people even trying to do? Seriously. What are they trying to do? Make people mad about getting stuck in traffic? Piss people off because they can't get to Grand Central? It's annoying . I just can't stand it."
> She rattled off a couple of other disparaging comments about the peaceful protestors I was preparing to join, repeatedly referring to them as those people before a chorus of my team’s nodding heads, each bobbing affirmingly behind their desk.
I agree that you shouldn't expect your co-workers to openly protest anything in particular, or anything at all. But I think it's just common sense to not shit on a bunch of people protesting police brutality committed on a black man... when one of your black co-workers is sitting a few feet away. At best it's insensitive.
> "These protestors aren't going to solve anything ," she said. "Like, what are those people even trying to do? Seriously. What are they trying to do? Make people mad about getting stuck in traffic? Piss people off because they can't get to Grand Central? It's annoying . I just can't stand it."
Yes. That's how protests work. You're trying piss people off enough to notice and take action. It doesn't matter what they're mad at so long as they're mad enough to take action. I don't care if they're pissed off that I'm wearing dark pants that they make the social change I'm after, so long as it gets made.
It's dangerous (and quite condescending) to assume that people are ignoring your plight out of ignorance or malice. Don't ask "why aren't they listening to me?" Ask instead "how am I making my point relatable and appealing to them?"
If you're pissing off the very people you're trying to win over to your side, then you have little reason to be surprised when they turn against you.
Truthfully you can either make them like you (by being relatable) or hate you (by annoying the crap out of them) -- just so long as you're not forgettable.
IMO we have an unlimited supply of problems we could focus our attention to, and as people, we don't have the capacity to address them all. We sort in order of pain, and protests cause pain, and pain causes action. It's less a question of morality and more of human physiology.
His co-workers were openly vocal about the impact of the Eric Garner-related protests (blocked traffic) but silent on the issue itself. I think that's worthy of criticism, even if it is human nature to avoid issues until they impact you directly.
If you have the ability to speak out for an oppressed class of people but do not you are de facto supporting the dominant regime. Silence is collaboration with the status quou. It's subtle but it IS racism. If you have the time to talk about social issued with your co workers, you have the ability and time to stand up for truth, justice, and freedom from oppression. If you don't get back to work. It's precisely the silence that is deafening.
>If you have the ability to speak out for an oppressed class of people but do not you are de facto supporting the dominant regime.
Shaming others into action isn't sustainable. At best, they'll join you begrudgingly but drag their feet doing so and not recruit the next set of allies on your behalf. At worst, you persuade them to join your opposition.
> If you have the ability to speak out for an oppressed class of people but do not you are de facto supporting the dominant regime.
Says you. What if I have an entirely third position on the issue that I'm afraid to speak out on?
> you have the ability and time to stand up for truth, justice, and freedom from oppression
I could do this, but what if my definition of what that is, is different than yours? What if I value, say, freedom of speech as the pinnacle value under the umbrella of "freedom from oppression", and you don't?
> It's precisely the silence that is deafening.
I usually wish there was more silence, to be honest. Maybe you should read the silence less as "unwillingness" and more as "people sitting aghast at what you've said, and wishing you'd just take it outside so we can go back to enjoying our breakfast".
I don't care what the issue is, but whenever someone makes this argument, it instantly makes me care that much less about whatever they are advocating. Everyone has a right to silence and non-involvement without having their motives questioned.
Can't this logic be spread to a bunch of other injustices in the world? If I interact with some party who is contributing some injustice to a group of people, whether in terms of work conditions, lack of political voice and so forth does that mean I'm collaborating/supporting their regime?
An example is the current situations happening in Hong Kong and Uyghur. And the fact that everything we buy on a day to day basis is "supporting" this oppression.
Where would we be today if people stayed silent about discrimination in the workplace and society at large (racial, gender, sexual orientation)? Silence is a privilege. Silence is what perpetuates power inequity.
Silence says to me: "My six figure paycheck is more important to me than having an opinion on something that is negatively impacting my colleague and their demographic."
Silence is something oppressed communities do not have the privilege of. Black people simply cannot be silent when they fear for their lives at every traffic stop. LGBTQ+ people cannot be silent when politicians are constantly trying to undermine their human rights in the name of religious freedom. Women cannot be silent when politicians do the same to their bodies, and the workplace constantly undermines their value.
One could easily argue that having the freedom to express an opinion on topics for which only one opinion is acceptable is much more privileged position to be in.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect your co-workers to openly protest any issue. People have families to take care of, paychecks to earn and rent to pay. They for the most part, want to do their job with minimum of drama. I'm sure there are a million issues that the memo author was not openly protesting that other co-workers may have cared deeply about. I would hope they wouldn't hold that against the author.
I'm not questioning whether this person experienced racism at Google, as that seems likely in an organization of that size. I just don't think it's ok to be upset about your co-workers not being openly vocal in the workplace about a political issue you feel strongly about.
There seems to be a strong push to politicize silence that seems very unhealthy. You don't know how people feel and act outside of work and the public sphere. Silence on an issue is not a political statement.