On “White Fragility”
I am amazed that I work at a company full of extremely intelligent individuals, some of whom are truly cream of the crop types given the work we do.<p>Yet, during the Floyd protests, our equity committee sent out an email with a recommended reading list including white fragility and other similar books.<p>Only books that had a similar premise were included, no smart, critical books (including some I can think of written by POC) with any other conclusions or arguments were included.<p>Everything in the company, from the big picture down to the smallest details, received critical scrutiny and thoughtful didcussion- from architecture to code style to customer experience to market position.<p>And yet, any topic that can end with -ism (racism, genderism, etc) can not ever be scrutinized. Words like &quot;blacklist&quot; are abolished, in spite of both prior art and POC employees being (privately) offended that they are thought of as being so fragile. The atmosphere is so thick on such topics that no-one speaks up for fear of being fired.