This Week's Opening Thought: March 27, 2023

This week's opening thought: white supremacy in action is when elected officials decide the best way to handle their unfounded fears and insecurities about a popular phone app is to hold public hearings around banning its use.

White supremacy is when the popular phone app you claim you're scared of does the same data collecting that other apps do, yet it is somehow "more dangerous" because it's a Chinese-owned company.

White supremacy is attacking the app company's Singaporean CEO with an hours-long "line of questioning" that's a thinly-veiled xenophobic and anti-Asian hate crime played out on a world stage.

White supremacy in action is also when a major clothing company decides that it's easier to use AI-generated models than to put in the work to source and hire models outside of the white physical "body standard" norm.

White supremacy in action is when you could make an effort to find and elevate Black and Brown models, Indigenous models, Asian models, Pacific Islander models, models with disabilities, and models with a variety of body shapes but decide using computer-generated images is good enough.

White supremacy in action is the company sharing this change in a major press release and wording it in such a way that the decision-makers in their company believe they should get kudos for their new "revolutionary diversity efforts."

On the surface, these two situations may seem separate to some of you. But don't get it twisted. They are branches from the same old haggard tree.

That tree desperately needs a wind storm to uproot its gnarled and deeply-rooted grip on the soil of generations.