“I don’t vote for white men.”
It was an hour into my first day in the office of a private tech company here in Silicon Valley—on Election Day—and this person was making an open, fearless declaration of her race and gender-based criteria for staffing government.
“Fuck Trump.”
Fairly common. It was usually followed with a chorus of fuck Trumps the way church bells follow amen.
“I think he deserves a chance to respond.”
An innocent statement in most reasonable discussions. But not when the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings played on everyone’s second monitor like an all-staff meeting. I could hear the conversation through my headphones as the fool backtracked as quickly as possible to avoid certain social death after that outlandish remark.
“We staffed this project with only female creatives.”
The project had eyes on it from the highest levels of the company, the kind of opportunity people dream of at a place like this. Here was someone admitting before hundreds of people that you only got that chance if you were the right gender.
“Our external recruiting efforts are 100% focused on underrepresented groups.”
That one stopped me in my tracks. Not just admitting, but boasting about blatant employment discrimination before a meeting of thousands of employees.
I don’t bring these up to shock you or evoke any other reaction. Rather I use them as a rebuttal to this absurd article in the Washington Post trying to claim the existence of a conservative mafia lurking in the seedy underbelly of the Valley’s tech giants.
As a conservative in tech I can assure you no such thing exists. Comments like the above are said without second thought because the going assumption is that everyone who hears them will agree. And they’re right.
The only conservatives who get to be vocal are the ones who don’t have to worry about getting fired. They can say whatever they want. The rest of us, who would populate the seedy underbelly, aren’t that fortunate yet. Which is not to say you should feel sorry for us. We’ll be fine.
The hard part is sitting there and not taking part in the conversation about how anxious I am for Biden to be declared the winner or how awful Trump was in the first debate. I didn’t want Trump to win and he was objectively awful in the debate, but I my take on both events came from a markedly different perspective. Which would have made the discussion horribly awkward and likely have hurt my professional reputation. So I just sat there. That’s the hard part. The other stuff is fairly easy to swallow.
Are those conversations a problem, though? I doubt it. There are countless things I’d rather talk about at work but if people want to talk politics I’m not going to stop them.
The real problem is a statement in this article about how employers are dealing with employees who turn activist online:
“But now... my sense is that everything has become political, including not sharing.”
We’ll feel our way through handling social media activists in the workplace. But when we start judging people for what they don’t say on social media we are effectively taking away their control over their own voice.
That is a line we must not cross. Labeling people for what they don’t say is a co-equal situation to requiring people to express a preferred opinion, removing all pretense that this is about the free exchange of ideas. It also assumes social media posts make up the totality of an individual’s beliefs and actions. A true dumbass assumption if there ever was one.
Some conservatives lament “woke capitalism” as liberals making undue headway into controlling American culture. Deliberatus recognizes some truth in that argument but isn’t put off by it. Perhaps conservatives should wonder why they hold positions large companies with customers across the political spectrum want nothing to do with.
However, if it comes to pass that we judge people for what they don’t say then we’ll regret not taking the argument more seriously.