When you think of systematic racism, you need to be thinking of the subtle stuff as well as the more brazen stuff like restaurants banning non-whites from entering or people of colour getting longer prison sentences for the same crime. Actually, the subtle stuff is insidious, because people don’t think it’s racism.

Reminds me of Google classifying black people as gorillas in their photo app.

People were saying “oh well it’s just a limitation of the technology, it was just an accident” no! That’s now how AI works! What happened was they didn’t consider black people/indigenous people/etc worthy enough to put enough of them in the training data. That’s not better than them intentionally doing it!

inb4 “the technology is still immature/in beta, they’ll get better at identifying people of colour in the future!”

That’s not how that works either! You have a responsibility to be inclusive to the best of your ability from day one! If you’re not doing that, not exaggerating, you’re better off not making the product at all.

And it’s not like a giant tech company didn’t have the resources to make it inclusive.

These aren’t pretend arguments I’m making up either. People genuinely say those things and think they’re valid excuses for this.

  • @AgreeableLandscapeOP
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    2 years ago

    Related: In the West, body modifications like tattoos and piercings make you less likely to get through job interviews and are generally seen as very unprofessional. This is because they are associated with, one, indigenous people and people of colour, and two, poor people.

    In contrast, other body modifications like nose jobs, facelifts, fillers, botox, etc are done mostly by rich white people, so they are seen favourably.

    • Mwalimu
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      22 years ago

      Never thought of this labour issue as affecting indigenous people.

    • @iortega@lemmy.eus
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      02 years ago

      I thought tattoos and piercings were associated with aggressiveness, violent behavior and being part of dangerous groups (mafia or similar), so they would be less likely to get through job interviews. At least around here though.