Posted on September 10, 2021

Don’t Be Evil

Christopher Rufo, City Journal, September 8, 2021

Technology giant Google has launched an “antiracism” initiative that presents speakers and materials claiming that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

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The program presents a series of video conversations promoting the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy. In one video, Google’s former global lead for diversity strategy, Kamau Bobb—who was later reassigned to a non-diversity-related role at the company after being exposed for writing that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing”—discussed America’s founding with 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones. Jones claimed that “the first Africans being sold on the White Lion [slave ship in 1619] is more foundational to the American story” than “the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock.” She claimed that she led the New York Times’s 1619 Project—a revisionist historical account of the American founding—to verify her “lifelong theory” that everything in the modern-day United States can be traced back to slavery. {snip}

Next, Sherice Torres, Google’s then-global inclusion director (now a vice president of marketing at Facebook Financial), hosted a video discussion with Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi about racism in American life. Kendi argues that all Americans, including children as young as three months old, are fundamentally racist. {snip} The solution, Kendi claimed, is for all Americans to admit their complicity in racism and “respond in the same way that they respond when they are diagnosed with a serious illness.” Denying one’s complicity in racism, Kendi argued, is only further proof of a person’s racism. {snip}

Finally, employees at Google created an internal document called “Anti-racism resources,” which contains reading lists, graphics, and racial-consciousness exercises. The document contains a disclaimer that it was “not legally reviewed” and, therefore, not to be considered official company policy—but it was created by Google diversity, equity, and inclusion lead Beth Foster, hosted on Google’s internal-resources server, and made available across the company. One graphic in the document claims that “colorblindness,” “[American] exceptionalism,” “Columbus Day,” “weaponized whiteness,” and “Make America Great Again” are all expressions of “covert white supremacy.” Another graphic, titled “The White Supremacy Pyramid,” advances the idea that conservative commentator Ben Shapiro represents a foundation of “white supremacy” and that Donald Trump is moving society on a path toward “mass murder” and “genocide.”

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