While a wonderful gesture, something about this feels a bit... tangential to the real issue to me in a way that's distracting. Am I off base here? It feels like it's leaning toward opportunistic.
It's virtue signaling 100% from a corporation. But w/e.
I won't consider Uber to be "good corporate citizen" for it. But it helps a bunch of small restaurants in a time period where margins are tight so net positive maybe?
At least they're putting money down on it vs just issuing some statement.
Killer Mike had a documentary on Netflix (?) about black life in America, and mentioned that money flows out of the black community far faster than any other minority in America. If we assume that Uber is acting in good faith, which I have no reason not to believe, then what else can they do?
I can only say - be very careful in how you approach these issues. Similar actions in india resulted in not so great outcomes from the government and corporations. And we are still stuck with the prejudice and discrimination - for some even greater than before.
Our political establishment has no interest in ending racism; each "side" benefits from dividing Americans into identity-based groups and pitting them against other Americans on wedge issues. The hypocritical irony now is of promoting these identity-based groups for the purposes of some vague "justice" when doing so will necessarily widen the divides and propagate hatred further. It's a cynical distraction from the reality that the actual institutionalized racism predominantly occurs under the watchful leadership of the same politicians decrying it, and then you have hangers on like Uber trying to seize an issue for their own profit. It's as transparently self-serving as all the companies changing their logo avatars to rainbows for "Pride Month" a year ago, once it was politically risk-free to do so.
As one party to an interracial gay marriage I say "no thanks."
Hear hear. Racism and other forms of idpol have been critical tools of the political establishment in oppressing the working classes throughout American history (see 1700s Virginia Slave Codes for an early example).
While bashing "bad" racism is politically correct, bashing "good" racism is almost universally seen as taboo. Hence racism is immortal in America.
There is an economic justice part of US racism that is not addressed enough if at all... Black people have been literally robbed of their income/wealth regularly and often for a few centuries now. If companies want to stand up and try to help repair this lack of justice that we all inadvertantly benefitted from, this is one way to do it.
Just because the government (for at least 100 years) continues to drag its feet when it comes to reparations doesn't mean individual companies can't step up.
I don't respect what they're going for here since what they're actually doing is trying to put a shine on their decrepit corporate image by virtue signalling.
Management just doesn't have any particular skill at not generating flagrantly illegal ideas. I once saw a guy announce in a company-wide email that he was leading an initiative to help the recruiting team bucket incoming applications by gender. I strongly suspect that whoever approved this program is currently being yelled at by their legal department.
And responsible managers do. Unfortunately, many others conceptualize legal as a department to help them fight the law rather than a department to help them follow it.
I don't think their move here is illegal. I think it's ill-advised, bad PR, will backfire and probably predatory on the group they are ostensibly trying to help. (Maybe even without them even understanding why.)
That all said, I was almost going to downvote your comment, but it made remember how much Uber actually has made a business model out of breaking the law in every country they are active in. Move fast and break things became move fast and break the law.
Can you go into more detail? I've seen other people hint at that perspective elsewhere in the thread, and I want to understand it, because right now it's just completely mystifying to me. Uber Eats is now charging people extra to order from some restaurants depending on the race of their owners; how is that not a straightforward violation of antidiscrimination law?
It can be viewed as a kind of affirmative action. It’s a contested area but I don’t see Uber convicted over it but even if they were, I wouldn’t call it straightforward, but rather unclear.
All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.
At a previous employer I once received a company-wide email from their operations manager about "fixing" their TrustPilot score (which was low and totally justified) and how he was encouraging us to leave reviews with our opinions "as a user" despite us being employees (I raised concerns but those fell on deaf ears).
I don't understand how an e-mail like that can even be written. Even if they don't follow through with the action, if that email were to leak it will become a (justified) PR disaster for the company (said company already had a PR disaster a few months before). I might expect a clueless intern to send it out, but not an experienced operations manager. Worse, none of the CS & marketing employees saw anything wrong with that and actually went ahead and posted reviews in their name.
The only surprising thing here is that the Twitter thread is (rightly) against this move.
Twitter's algorithm seems to foster single opinion threads - I have a feeling it has to do with how they select suggested comments for users. I wonder if this only means that the first few people to comment had negative opinions, and things snowballed there?
What a terrible social system - designed to exclusively foster single opinion "discussions" that serve to do nothing but masturbate egos and create a false illusion consensus....yet this seems to be the direction that most social media has taken and I can't help but wonder if this isn't seriously contributing to the breakdown of discourse in this country.
A more useful definition from So you want to talk about race:
Racism is any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power.
This definition is useful in the sense that it helps focus efforts on what needs to be addressed - systemic racism - vs trying to convince 100% of individuals to stop being racists in their day-to-day.
This feels a bit too vague still though, because from all we know about the restaurant/delivery ecosystem it'd be fair to describe Uber Eats as a system of power over all involved restaurants, right?
> Racism is any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power.
The addition of "systems of power" to the definition of racism is a recent one, and it blurs the lines between "racism" and "systemic racism" as separate concepts by introducing power dynamics.
Having clear definitions for abstract concepts is essential for people to understand each other and (hopefully) reach consensus. Redefining words so that they better suit certain ideological perspectives does not help that cause.
It also casually implies that being prejudiced and discriminatory based on skin tone is fine, as long as you're discriminating "up", not "down".
Here’s the argument from the book: how we define racism also determines how we battle it. If we have cancer and it makes us vomit, we can commit to battling nausea and say we’re fighting for our lives, even though the tumor will likely still kill us. When we look at racism simply as “any racial prejudice,” we are entered into a battle to win over the hearts and minds of everyone we encounter—fighting only the symptoms of the cancerous system, not the cancer itself. This is not only an impossible task, it’s a pretty useless one. Getting my neighbor to love people of color might make it easier to hang around him, but it won’t do anything to combat police brutality, racial income inequality, food deserts, or the prison industrial complex.
So using “systems of power” in the definition enables more effective action to address it.
It seems like you are finding it hard to understand what makes racism systemic, white restaurant owners are not an oppressed group, nobody is being racist against them.
Being a person of color in the US absolutely means you are confronting systemic racism throughout your life. So absolutely, yes, compared to white restaurant owners. Example: If you are black, you are less likely to get a small business loan, and if so you are likely to get worse rates [1]. They also are encountering more resistance to accessing COVID-19 bailout funds [2]. These are just two examples specific to being a business owner, not to mention the systemic racism they face as individuals.
People still seem unaware of these basic facts... And we've had black history month for how many years?
The education system in America is truly lacking and it shows when it comes to the topic of race/racism which is a key part of our economic history and inextricably tied to the history and development of US capitalism.
Black people are the least rewarded early investors in the startup we call the USA.
They have more right to be in this country than any group other than Native Americans, a large % are in fact descendants of native Americans but are not recognized as such due to a paper genocide and deportation program carried out by the govt of the US in the early 20th century.
No other minority group is in this position. Anyone who has studied the history knows the country still owes a tremendous outstanding debt to this group of people.
Black households have about $5000 in wealth. When considering the fact that they are owed 40 acres and a mule in reparations, remember that each black household should be worth upwards of $800,000 (~$20k per acre).
Ask yourself if education, poverty, healthcare, loans, housing, etc... would be an issue if they were actually paid what we all collectively owed them. I expect some portions of the racism would still exist but economic empowerment is always a potential gamechanger.
Seems uber is trying to help fix that gap themselves. I commend them for at least trying something novel.
Why do you assume only impact is on white restaurant owners?what about Asian, Mexican, Iranian, etc restaurant owners who are being charged a fee for delivery based only on their skin color?
The definition of racism is not treating a race different from others. Racism is a belief that one race is better or worse than others, and the politics that arise from that belief. Recognizing that a group has been treated unfairly and compensating for it is not racism.
I think the point Scarblac was trying to make is that by the biological definition of race, there is only one human race, and all human belong to it. We have historically said that Black people, White people, Asian people, whatever, belong to different races, but that's not accurate and it is that error that lets racist ideas (in the discriminatory sense) to exist. Those "race" categorizations have no basis in biology and have shown to be flexible over time. A hundred years a go, an Irish person would not have been considered white, and a Spanish person might have. Today the Irish man is white, and the Spaniard might be called a Latin.
I think it's better to say that race exists, but it's a cultural construct, not a biological reality. It's clear that in the USA the largest part of people with black or dark brown skin color have a shared history and culture that comes from the capture of native African population. They clearly have something in common, and they exist as a group. The term "race" is problematic, but it's the best one we have.
Please don't write inflammatory comments that spread misunderstanding and disinformation.
I'm very skeptical of this move, its sustainability in the medium term, and I overall really dislike Uber as a business, but equality is NOT the point.
Society is already unequal, you cannot wish it away with a magic wand.
The way to address inequality, is to think in terms of equity:
Also, this is obviously not an example of racism. Racism can be defined as:
"prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior."
The term that you're looking for is Affirmative action, defined as:
"Affirmative action is a policy in which an individual's color, race, sex, religion or national origin are taken into account to increase opportunities provided to an underrepresented part of society"
Seems like Uber is thinks black businesses are not capable of competing in a free market without a handout. Based on your definition, it is explicit racism.
Treated equally in a food ordering service? Show me where it says “restaurant owned by a black person” in the Uber app allowing people to discriminate when ordering food.
> If you are black, you are less likely to get a small business loan, and if so you are likely to get worse rates [1]. They also are encountering more resistance to accessing COVID-19 bailout funds [2]. These are just two examples specific to being a business owner, not to mention the systemic racism they face as individuals.
Its a form of economic reparations. When it comes to all the forms of racism blacks have experienced over the past few centuries I find it funny that this is what offends people, "subsidized deliveries".
Take one simple example: urban redlining. Urban redlining wasn't that long ago. Many white boomers (and hence their children) so clearly benefited from it at the expense of black people. So it's a bit rich to put in place blatantly racist policies, which allowed enormous wealth accumulation at the expense of another group, and then quite literally within the same lifetime when those policies have been banned, and the wealth accumulation has already happened, shout "Why is it so hard to fathom we all deserve to be treated as equal??"
I think this Uber Eats policy is both bad policy and dumb, but I also think that pretending legal racism that only ended in my parents' (still alive) lifetime doesn't have a huge effect on society, not to mention ongoing institutionalized racism the current protests are meant to address.
This is disgusting virtue-signaling from an awful company.
If Uber really wanted to help the Black community (and other minorities) how about actually treating their delivery drivers (a lot of which come from low-class backgrounds and part of minorities) fairly with decent wages and benefits?
How about a fair, transparent fee structure? As others have pointed out, the delivery fee is just one of many fees, the rest of which are conveniently hidden from the user and passed onto the restaurants which have no choice but to pay them because Uber Eats is one of a handful of delivery services and they're all equally scummy.
How about decent customer service that plays fair when things go wrong instead of fobbing the customer off and hope they don't do a chargeback? (not many people do which is why they get away with it)
Uber has been sending me invalid coupons through SMS for over a year now. A couple months ago I got fed up with it and decided to contact support, and they refused to even engage with the subject. I think it takes a lot to provide customer service worse than Google's, and they somehow managed to do it.
I recommend all users of Uber eats and co read some of the large subreddits for gig economy and uber eats workers on reddit. It’s pretty telling just how awful these companies are... and though it’s still relatively new these announcements for affirmative action are leading to a lot of pushback that some would identify as hurting the cause rather then helping it.
"My country club allows anyone to join regardless of race. Just $100 a year for the membership and a one time fee of one billion dollars for the delivery of your membership card. Since white people tend to get sunburn on our course, the membership card delivery fee is waved for them."
If anyone is interested, here's an interview with a human rights lawyer Robert Barnes, a man that has litigated wrongful death cases against police, and supreme court cases.
Very pertinent, internal take on the courts, BLM, Antifa, police, Covid, and current cases before the supreme court.
He litigate a case of 8 1/2 month jailed pregnant women put in isolation. The without monitoring her. She woke up with a dead baby. Then the jailed doctored the records, pretending the baby died in the hospital.
Source? His website certainly doesn't mention it. When I search for Shaye Marie Bear, the woman in the case you're talking about, Barnes does not show up.
Also, talks about his other case he settled, where a jailed prisoner wasn't given epilepsy medication, defecated on himself, was mistreated by the guards and died.
[41-44 minute mark]
A version of this is used in india to reduce wages. When you divide people into two big groups and compensate one - you create unequal net wage - and if there is not enough employment, one group hogs all the jobs while others have to significantly reduce their wages to compete.
Setting aside the obvious PR opportunism, how would something like this actually work? Does Uber currently collect data on the race of the people who own restaurants they deliver from? Is data like this publicly available somehow? Is this data something they're going to start collecting to facilitate this feature? Does that sound like data it would be good for Uber to have?
Knowing what we know about Uber this all seems highly problematic.
I wonder how this will work from a legal point of view. This is a blatant, obvious example of racism, they aren't even attempting to be subtle about it.
It's effectively affirmative action, and there's a long history of legal apologia for it.
In the final analysis, the law is interpreted by humans, and if a class of violation (like racism) is popular enough, the system finds a way to excuse it with hand-waving.
Maybe, assuming that the lawsuits didn't get dismissed. Small companies don't have that much legal clout, and large companies are even more subject to the whims of the mob (through PR) as the justice system.
That's just for small businesses in general. When you look at purchasing entities such as the DoD and state governments, there are many such ways to identify ownership as belonging to a disadvantaged population.
1. At least in the US, this is quite blatantly illegal. Uber Eats is not stupid, they know this. Whether you take the charitable view (Uber knows this but they wish to push back against historical and systemic racism) or the uncharitable view (this is a bare virtue signaling ploy), Uber Eats is betting they what they get from doing this is worth more than eventually having to stop or get sued.
2. Personally, as someone who strongly supports the BLM movement, I find this beyond stupid. It doesn't solve the problem at hand, and it just plays into the further division of society that the right wing has played so masterfully into fomenting.
I know it's just an expression, but that has always bugged me. Fighting fire with fire is a legitimate firefighting technique (controlled burns.) Red Adair even fought fire with explosions.
How do companies find out personal details like race about who runs a business (and actually do it accurately)?
Can they also find out things like religion or ethnicity?
Whether it’s corporate data collection or users checking a box, it seems like a good intention that is primed for manipulation - which I guess some companies might gloss over as long as it benefits them.
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[ 13.6 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI won't consider Uber to be "good corporate citizen" for it. But it helps a bunch of small restaurants in a time period where margins are tight so net positive maybe?
At least they're putting money down on it vs just issuing some statement.
And we can enjoy the bright side of it, while not being naive.
This is a corporate PR stunt that has nothing to do with anything and that perpetuates racial discrimination.
This is awful.
As one party to an interracial gay marriage I say "no thanks."
While bashing "bad" racism is politically correct, bashing "good" racism is almost universally seen as taboo. Hence racism is immortal in America.
There is an economic justice part of US racism that is not addressed enough if at all... Black people have been literally robbed of their income/wealth regularly and often for a few centuries now. If companies want to stand up and try to help repair this lack of justice that we all inadvertantly benefitted from, this is one way to do it.
Just because the government (for at least 100 years) continues to drag its feet when it comes to reparations doesn't mean individual companies can't step up.
And, will they do this for other minorities when they suffer discrimination at the hands of the state? How about poor people?
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
That all said, I was almost going to downvote your comment, but it made remember how much Uber actually has made a business model out of breaking the law in every country they are active in. Move fast and break things became move fast and break the law.
This seems illegal to me, but I really don't know. What are the laws surrounding race-based company promotions/discounts?
All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.
I don't understand how an e-mail like that can even be written. Even if they don't follow through with the action, if that email were to leak it will become a (justified) PR disaster for the company (said company already had a PR disaster a few months before). I might expect a clueless intern to send it out, but not an experienced operations manager. Worse, none of the CS & marketing employees saw anything wrong with that and actually went ahead and posted reviews in their name.
Twitter's algorithm seems to foster single opinion threads - I have a feeling it has to do with how they select suggested comments for users. I wonder if this only means that the first few people to comment had negative opinions, and things snowballed there?
What a terrible social system - designed to exclusively foster single opinion "discussions" that serve to do nothing but masturbate egos and create a false illusion consensus....yet this seems to be the direction that most social media has taken and I can't help but wonder if this isn't seriously contributing to the breakdown of discourse in this country.
Racism is any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power.
This definition is useful in the sense that it helps focus efforts on what needs to be addressed - systemic racism - vs trying to convince 100% of individuals to stop being racists in their day-to-day.
The addition of "systems of power" to the definition of racism is a recent one, and it blurs the lines between "racism" and "systemic racism" as separate concepts by introducing power dynamics.
Having clear definitions for abstract concepts is essential for people to understand each other and (hopefully) reach consensus. Redefining words so that they better suit certain ideological perspectives does not help that cause.
It also casually implies that being prejudiced and discriminatory based on skin tone is fine, as long as you're discriminating "up", not "down".
So using “systems of power” in the definition enables more effective action to address it.
People don't need or DESERVE special treatment, be it negative or positive, people deserve to be treated as equal.
I don't understand why is it so hard to fathom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/16/black-owned... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/business/minority-busines...
The education system in America is truly lacking and it shows when it comes to the topic of race/racism which is a key part of our economic history and inextricably tied to the history and development of US capitalism.
A lot of minorities are running restaurants.
Black people are the least rewarded early investors in the startup we call the USA.
They have more right to be in this country than any group other than Native Americans, a large % are in fact descendants of native Americans but are not recognized as such due to a paper genocide and deportation program carried out by the govt of the US in the early 20th century.
No other minority group is in this position. Anyone who has studied the history knows the country still owes a tremendous outstanding debt to this group of people.
Ask yourself if education, poverty, healthcare, loans, housing, etc... would be an issue if they were actually paid what we all collectively owed them. I expect some portions of the racism would still exist but economic empowerment is always a potential gamechanger.
Seems uber is trying to help fix that gap themselves. I commend them for at least trying something novel.
I think it's better to say that race exists, but it's a cultural construct, not a biological reality. It's clear that in the USA the largest part of people with black or dark brown skin color have a shared history and culture that comes from the capture of native African population. They clearly have something in common, and they exist as a group. The term "race" is problematic, but it's the best one we have.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/gq2n31/inequali...
I'm very skeptical of this move, its sustainability in the medium term, and I overall really dislike Uber as a business, but equality is NOT the point.
Society is already unequal, you cannot wish it away with a magic wand.
The way to address inequality, is to think in terms of equity:
http://betterbikeshare.org/2019/10/24/equity-vs-equality/
Also, this is obviously not an example of racism. Racism can be defined as:
"prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior."
The term that you're looking for is Affirmative action, defined as:
"Affirmative action is a policy in which an individual's color, race, sex, religion or national origin are taken into account to increase opportunities provided to an underrepresented part of society"
> If you are black, you are less likely to get a small business loan, and if so you are likely to get worse rates [1]. They also are encountering more resistance to accessing COVID-19 bailout funds [2]. These are just two examples specific to being a business owner, not to mention the systemic racism they face as individuals.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/16/black-owned.... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/business/minority-busines....
I think this Uber Eats policy is both bad policy and dumb, but I also think that pretending legal racism that only ended in my parents' (still alive) lifetime doesn't have a huge effect on society, not to mention ongoing institutionalized racism the current protests are meant to address.
If Uber really wanted to help the Black community (and other minorities) how about actually treating their delivery drivers (a lot of which come from low-class backgrounds and part of minorities) fairly with decent wages and benefits?
How about a fair, transparent fee structure? As others have pointed out, the delivery fee is just one of many fees, the rest of which are conveniently hidden from the user and passed onto the restaurants which have no choice but to pay them because Uber Eats is one of a handful of delivery services and they're all equally scummy.
How about decent customer service that plays fair when things go wrong instead of fobbing the customer off and hope they don't do a chargeback? (not many people do which is why they get away with it)
Very pertinent, internal take on the courts, BLM, Antifa, police, Covid, and current cases before the supreme court.
https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4021
I think this qualifies.
Also, talks about his other case he settled, where a jailed prisoner wasn't given epilepsy medication, defecated on himself, was mistreated by the guards and died. [41-44 minute mark]
https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=2460
This is just capitalism in action.
Knowing what we know about Uber this all seems highly problematic.
In the final analysis, the law is interpreted by humans, and if a class of violation (like racism) is popular enough, the system finds a way to excuse it with hand-waving.
That's just for small businesses in general. When you look at purchasing entities such as the DoD and state governments, there are many such ways to identify ownership as belonging to a disadvantaged population.
1. At least in the US, this is quite blatantly illegal. Uber Eats is not stupid, they know this. Whether you take the charitable view (Uber knows this but they wish to push back against historical and systemic racism) or the uncharitable view (this is a bare virtue signaling ploy), Uber Eats is betting they what they get from doing this is worth more than eventually having to stop or get sued.
2. Personally, as someone who strongly supports the BLM movement, I find this beyond stupid. It doesn't solve the problem at hand, and it just plays into the further division of society that the right wing has played so masterfully into fomenting.
White Europeans stole their land and killed many millions (often unintentionally with Smallpox).
Manhattan where I live for example, if the Native American tribes retained ownership they would be very wealthy from the leases.
Nice move, Uber!
Can they also find out things like religion or ethnicity?
Whether it’s corporate data collection or users checking a box, it seems like a good intention that is primed for manipulation - which I guess some companies might gloss over as long as it benefits them.