If you look around at websites and social media profiles, some businesses, and the social media platforms themselves, seem to be bowing to the culture wars, especially here in the United States. They design their logos to highlight the cause, and use the hashtags everywhere, etc.
I think when they do this, they are not thinking how much more polarizing they become. Because, true inclusion and diversity is to appeal to their general audience and not cater to a smaller (controversial) audience unless it is their long-term business model.
Instead they should speak to this by showing how they live out what they believe, by not ruling out the individuals they are trying to highlight.
This is a refreshing take. Finally! This is exactly what I’m expecting to read from truly smart people.
I notice the same thing, where businesses and companies that one would expect to remain “neutral” have jumped on the bandwagon of “wokeness”. The companies and businesses who broadcast their “wokeness” from the rooftops are the ones I tend to avoid using because I don’t want to endorse their politicisation of business.
I take the view that to pander to the (usually unreasonable) demands of minority groups actually sends a message of exclusion to the majority, as if to render the majority less worthy than the minority.
I really dispair when I see football teams kneeling-down to support BLM, or businesses updating their pages with a BLM statement. It’s pure virtue-signalling and nothing else. It doesn’t help victims of discrimination, past present or future, one bit. It only serves the selfish interests of the business or interest doing the signalling (“see, look, I’m not a racist, don’t hurt me/buy my stuff!”). “Awareness” has already been “raised”. The message is out there. Everything now is just more noise.
It is unnecessary for a business or institution to issue a political statement. With few exceptions, they shouldn’t have a political stance in the first place. For instance, does a drainpipe manufacturer or a university really deem it necessary to issue a statement about equality and diversity? In my country (and probably many others), the law already prevents businesses from discriminating based on gender-identification, race, sexuality or religion. Do they want a medal for managing not to break the law?
Similarly, if someone is good at their job, and always acts professionally, their job and business should be irrelevant of their beliefs. I don’t care what an individual employee’s private views are, as long as in their job they treat all people fairly and equally. You don’t come to work to flaunt your personal beliefs, you come to work to work. What they do or believe in their private life is none of my business. If it affects their work, or I meet them in their private life, that’s a different matter, but until then, you have to know where to draw the line.
As I posted elsewhere, “evil is as evil does”. You should be judged by your general conduct, not by whether you’ve correctly shouted the latest groupthink party-line or hashtag from the rooftops.
As a registered Libertarian, the big issue I have with the “official” BLM movement is that the leaders admit to being “trained Marxists”. (As a libertarian, I wouldn’t mind “anarchists” nearly as much, as long as they subscribed to the principle of non-initiation of violence…)
As someone who has read Orwell, I read “Black Lives Matter” as “ONLY Black Lives Matter” – otherwise, “all lives matter” would not be nearly as triggering a statement. (Remember “All animals are equal…” “…but some animals are more equal than others…”) Sorry, but MY life matters, too. And yours does. And my friends, colleagues, and customers with names like Patel, Chang, Rodriguez, Whitecloud, Shah, Kantor…
I think the business issue is related to people choosing to not patronize businesses which deny or protest those people’s existence:
**Consider the hullaballoo when Hobby Lobby (a noted Christian-owned chain) said that it will NOT cover contraceptives or abortions.
**More recently (earlier this week), a new Chik-Fil-A opened a couple of miles away from me. Someone commented on a local social media group that the store had opened, but the lines were unacceptably long (requiring the local police to manage the lines – which poured out into the street – and the street traffic). The next ten comments were about how the company (another Christian-owned company) was anti-LBGTQIA+ and (1) therefore, nobody should ever patronize them no matter how good the food or how great the price, (2) the town should never have issued a building permit because they’re a “hate-based” company that supports conversion therapy (a controversial and damaging practice that tries to remake non-heterosexual and genderqueer individuals into cisgender heterosexuals), and (3) we should protest that they were allowed to build and open.
**Consider how much more traffic IKEA got when they aired their first commercial with two young men shopping for housewares (it was not obvious whether or not they were a gay couple, but they were accepted as such by the gay community because it was one of the few ads that, however obliquely, normalized their existence).
Now, the other questions that need to be asked when *black* lives are concerned are, at least in my mind, based on “Why is it that other targeted minorities – ethnic, national, or racial – have been so well integrated into the US community why blacks as a race are still outcast?” One need look no further than “No Irish Need Apply”, the Sacco-Vandetti case, and the stereotypical image of a successful Asian tech worker.* While stereotypes still exist, many are acknowledged AS stereotypes based on the living conditions of the impoverished, the resistance of some groups to complete-and-absolute assimilation, and family structures of new immigrants that may be several generations out of date.
If we can answer those questions, and address the issues they uncover, we may be much further along the route to black acceptance than any programs or protests that have come before.
*There are actually a few current articles online about how this “favored minority” stereotype hurts people of Asian phenotype, as obviously not everybody is ultra-smart or good in STEM disciplines – but my point is that Asians are largely ACCEPTED into our community in a way that blacks often are NOT.