The Facebook exchange captured above centers on this CNN Money article about diversity in Silicon Valley (SV).
It is troubling that the mere suggestion that SV is ordered at all by the forces that order the rest of American life, and social interactions more broadly, is greeted with such umbrage and incredulousness. SV is certainly a place of un-paralleled opportunity, but is it completely un-hinged from history and basic human bias towards the familiar?
It would be naive to believe that its winners and losers in SV, and even who enters the competition, are not arbitrated by the historical fact of who its winners have been, and who the winners have been more broadly in this rigged American experiment.
Here’s to a thread of white and Asian mostly males celebrating how well things have gone for them as if it obviates the need to examine how the world tends to work for others. This is what SV looks like.
It is the nature of privilege to be transparent and unreflective. Baldwin might say something here about a butterfly on a pin.
