A new report shows that black Americans constitute a vanishingly small percentage of employees at top social media and tech companies. But if this means that the white powers-that-be are gaming the system, they’re doing so in favor of Asians.
As the AP reports, “African-Americans are among the top owners of mobile devices, but aren’t being considered when it’s time for social media and technology companies to hire.” This line itself reflects media bias. After all, is it possible that blacks are being “considered,” but are “underrepresented” for reasons having nothing to do with bigotry?
The AP continues:
The National Urban League is highlighting this new technology gap in its 2018 State of Black America report released Thursday, and pushing social media and technology companies to put in place safeguards and corporation solutions to make sure minorities don’t get left behind in the digital revolution.”
[Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League,] said that the latest Equal Employment Opportunity reports filed by Google, Facebook and Twitter showed that only 758, or 1.8 percent, of their combined workforce of 41,000 employees, were black. And their own research showed that in the majority of tech companies, fewer than five percent of the workforce is black, while at least half of the workforce is white.
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Left unsaid is that if approximately half the workforce is white, whites are underrepresented since they constitute 62 percent of the general population. How could this be? Well, the claim that minorities are being “left behind in the digital revolution” is deceptive — for Asians are dominating.
Despite being only 5.6 percent of the U.S. population, Asians constitute 15 percent of Twitter hires, 35 percent of Google employees, and 49 percent of Facebook’s tech workers. In fact, as the Mercury News reported in 2016, “Asian-Americans make up half of the Bay Area’s technology workforce, and their [recent] double-digit employment gains came from jobs lost among white tech workers, according to an analysis by this newspaper of Census Bureau data.”
So why does the National Urban League and mainstream media contrast blacks with another “underrepresented” racial group (and one losing job share), whites, and not with the only “overrepresented” one, Asians?
Because it’s hard to make the case that Asians control the system and tilt it to their advantage or that whites are gaming it in favor of Asians. The facts here don’t align with the leftist white-discrimination-oppressor narrative — so some facts need to be ignored.
This spin is especially offensive considering that the whites losing tech jobs in recent years are generally Americans who’ve sometimes been replaced with cheaper foreign Asian labor (by mercenary tech companies that encourage immigration for this very reason). Not only that, Asian-descent Americans now have a higher average income than do whites. White privilege, anyone?
The larger issue, however, is that group bean-counting is a fool’s errand. For you’ll have a better chance finding a unicorn than a time or place in history where all groups were proportionally represented in worldly endeavor. (Professor Walter E. Williams has often expounded upon this phenomenon — see here, here, and here.)
Of course, a degree of superficial diversity occurs naturally, but where is the evidence that it ever made anything better? And is “proportionality” really an imperative of fairness?
Consider: “Jews are not even 1 percent of the world’s population, but they constitute 20 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners,” reported Dr. Williams in 2013. Is this the result of a Zionist conspiracy?
Relative to women, men are six times as likely to be struck by lightning and nine times as likely to be bitten by sharks, and they constitute 92 percent of all workplace deaths. Will justice not prevail until these numbers are equalized?
Moving on, the NBA “was 74.3 percent black during the 2015-16 season and 81.7 percent were people of color,” reported the Undefeated. It also is completely male. Would instituting quotas ensuring that its racial and ethnic composition matched our nation’s and that it was 50 percent female improve quality of play?
The same point could be made regarding any sport, and people don’t question such disparities in athletics. Why would we think that such disparities, caused by differences in proclivity and interest (and the two are related), wouldn’t manifest themselves beyond the athletic arena?
Almost by definition, members of a given field will not represent an accurate cross-section of America. For example, surgeons, lawyers, and architects /engineers comprise people with IQs high enough to facilitate their endeavors — average IQ, 130 — placing them in the top two percent of the population. Brickmasons, blockmasons, and stonemasons are 99.5 percent male, no doubt because the very physical labor doesn’t appeal to women.
The point? If nothing else, those in a given field reflect a unique group in that they have a proclivity for, or at least an interest in, that particular field. Professional bowlers not only possess game-specific talent, but they’re unique in having a strong interest in bowling — most people don’t.
Inclinations and interests have much to do with culture. For example, would one expect a Hawaiian or an Alaskan to have more of an inclination toward surfing? Then, consider this interesting phenomenon: Women are more likely to choose traditionally masculine fields (e.g., STEM) in patriarchal countries, such as India, than in “egalitarian,” feminist nations such as Norway. Explanation?
Women must follow the money to survive in poor nations, leading them into more lucrative “male oriented” careers. In wealthy Western nations, women can follow their hearts — and female hearts lead to feminine endeavors (as the excellent documentary below explains).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
And how committed to their cause are the Diversity Police, anyway? Bill Clinton said in the ’90s that we needed a government that looked like America; this philosophy has long guided, for example, Supreme Court appointments. Yet the Court now comprises three Jews, six Catholics, and zero Protestants in a nation 2.5 percent Jewish, 22 percent Catholic, and 53 percent Protestant. Diversity? Just as how anti-discrimination law simply makes government the arbiter of discrimination, Diversity™ doctrine doesn’t really enforce diversity — only a biased conception of it advanced by a group not at all ideologically diverse: leftists.
Speaking of bias, when seeing that group dominance in endeavors is never attributed to discrimination except when whites are dominant, what should be concluded? Are whites the only ones who can’t have a characteristic talent in a given field except, apparently, a talent for discriminating against others?
But then what can be said about whites falling behind Asians? If they really are trying to game the system for their group, they’re the most incompetent racists in world history.
Photo: Yongyuan Dai/E+/Getty Images
