Being annoyed by a protest on your commute isn’t racism.
It’s certainly true that he could have heard other things which were racist and decided not to share any of them, but I don’t really know how to evaluate that. It’s not fair to demand ironclad proof from anyone sharing their personal experiences, but it’s also not fair to condemn Google based on a nonspecific claim with no details that racism happens there.
And there couldn't be anything more exaggerating than your comment here. If tomorrow a climate change protest (which I consider to be of greater importance, by the way) shuts down the whole city, knocking out roads and public transport and prevent me from going to work for a straight week I would be very annoyed. And it's not because my work for this week is greater than the climate change of Earth, it's because these two things are separate and not connected whatsoever. Say anything you want about a subject but never force that into other peoples life.
It's not racism to be annoyed by a protest it's the point of protests. The reason you obstruct traffic is to piss people off. You want to irritate them enough to take action to make it stop. It doesn't matter what they're mad at so long as they're mad enough to make the social change you're seeking.
If you didn't want to disturb anyone you'd protest in an open field out of sight -- but what good is that?
I think reasonable people can disagree about whether this is racist. I would be very cautious bandying around huge accusations about racism like this. Certainly it seems very different from actively going and taking actions against people in a class you believe are inferior.
Many of us who are reasonable and rational come to different conclusions- for example, while I fully support peaceful protests, I think any protest which blocks traffic is unwise and likely to generate negative responses in people who would otherwise be sympathetic.
One of the "funnier" pieces of spin and "revisionist history" that eaks of ignorance that came out during the BLM protests was assertions that the 60s civil rights movement "would have never shut down a freeway". The irony of this being said around the anniversary of the march from Selma to Birmingham is particularly loud.
> I think reasonable people can disagree about whether this is racist.
I disagree. Reasonable people recognize that being miffed that a protest is disrupting your commute isn't racist. It's only the unreasonable people who think it could be.
There's no point in debating what "reasonable" means here, since everyone usually thinks they are reasonable.
I think you've reframed the situation so that it no longer sounds racist. Obviously worrying about your commute isn't racist!
This is, of course, missing the point. I think the reason this bothered the memo's author is because their coworkers had a strong negative reaction to a hypothetical (and likely minor) change in their commute, but no reaction to a high-profile pattern of racially motivated murder by corrupt police officers.
Is ignoring racism racist? I think so. Is prioritizing something super trivial over racism racist? Seems close enough to me.
> Is ignoring racism racist? I think so. Is prioritizing something super trivial over racism racist? Seems close enough to me.
Assuming that silence represents malice is a classic example of totalitarian group think.
And fwiw, you don't know that the co-workers cared more about the commute - they could also be deeply concerned about racism and just not want to discuss it with OP.
I wasn’t talking about silence, I was talking about the person who was communicating their disapproval of the situation because of an extremely minor personal inconvenience.
And of course we don’t know what the person cared about, we just know what they said they cared about, which is all we can go on. They were happy to discuss their political views by saying they thought the protesters were an inconvenience, so it seems pretty unlikely that they did have deep concerns about racism because that response makes no sense for someone who feels that way.
I wouldn't have to try very hard to come up with what I consider to be reasonable opinions that this was a racist action (the opposite of my personal opinion). However reasonable, any of my arguments would be convoluted and probably have to use some sort of philosophical reasoning (such as moral imperative) and would have to resort to systemics, game theory, and probably even postmodern relativism.
Nobody can live those opinions in practice. If the imperative is so strong on this topic, then the imperative would be so strong on so many topics that you'd never be able to go to work.
