Little Flickers Of Racism

Those little flickers of racism matter. To say they don't matter to a group dynamics guy like me is to suggest software bugs are just fine, and bad design is okay. No, it's not.

Race, Gender, Tech

I plot to go into the red circle in this diagram from the tech angle. And for someone of such ambitions the flickers of racism matter even more. They are bread and butter. That is extra true of flickers of sexism, the obvious kind and the internalized kind, both, especially the internalized kind. Women with advanced degrees of internalized sexism also tend to be the more racist kind.

My Web Diagram

When I meet early stage entrepreneurs in town, one way I gauge how far they might go is by trying to figure out how much of a post-ISMs individual they are.

Rudiments Of A Corporate Culture
Third World Guy
Web 5.0: Face Time

The world of physics felt pretty much complete and all set and done when Einstein showed up. But then he noticed light rays bent near the Sun, and based on that one flicker he turned the world of physics upside down. Innovation happens at the edges. The abandoned petri dish is where the magic is at. Little flickers of racism are fascinating like that.

Minority Majority Nation?

Image via WikipediaI was at an event last night, and one speaker said how America will have become a minority majority nation by 2050, as in the nonwhites will have become the majority by then. And this was not my first time hearing that. I actually might have read that for a course in college.

But I feel the need to respond. Having experienced ethnic prejudice in Nepal, and racism in America, and having gone through the deep convulsions of a political revolution in a Third World country, the poorest outside of Africa - Nepal - and having thought through the group dynamics elements of tech startups, that minority majority nation talk to me feels like seeing 2050 through 2010 lenses.

I give to you sushi and yoga and hip hop and salsa. I give to you the Spanish language. These are so mainstream in the white parts of America already. But then I grew up learning English where I grew up. My point is America will not have become a minority majority nation in 2050. I hope much sooner than 2050, maybe as early as 2020 - and a lot of that might be to do with globally universal broadband - we will start to see all of culture as belonging to all of humanity. If I am a white guy, and I like sushi, I like sushi, what are you going to do about that?