The Elephant in the Room

The Elephant in the Room

It's been a week since Google closed down Gemini's image-generating capability after it began to depict famous historical figures as "diverse".

Andrew Sullivan on Google as a victim of woke culture, Nate Silver on Gemini as a demonstration that Google has abandoned "Don't be Evil", Noah Smith's excellent 'This is Not a Good Way to Fight Racism' is both a memory and an appraisal of the events. And Ben Thompson's Stratechery article about Google's Culture complements them all.

Anti-Racism has been core to my being since I was quite young. I still remember Ricky Cardozo, the only black kid in my school, defending me when other kids were making fun of me for being in line to receive a free school lunch. He became a hero in an instant. But until that moment, he and I had never spoken. We did not speak much after because the school was deeply racist.

I went on to study Sociology and Politics and the history of empire, colonialism, slavery, immigration, and nationality. I wanted to understand why people from Africa, the Indian sub-continent, and the Caribbean were seen as separate and often singled out for abuse.

As a postgraduate, I led an organization called W.A.R. - Workers Against Racism. We were a few thousand volunteers and would be available to local victims of racial attacks. That meant fighting for victims of death in police custody, victims of Britain's immigration and nationality laws, and victims of assault by white racists.

Afia Begum was deported from the UK because her marriage ended when her husband died in a fire. We fought to keep her in the UK for years.

Towards the end of that phase of my life, I published a Penguin Special called "Under Siege: Racial Violence in Britain Today."

It told many of the victim'' stories, like Nasreen Saddique, who protected her Pakistani parents from fascists aged 14.

At the same time, Under Siege explained how public and official racism was perpetrated down to the street level.

George Roucou with his wife and Normal Lewis. He was a Manchester union member we helped fight deportation, and won.

It is not unlike the US today, where the border conversation demonizes Latino and Latina immigrants as criminals, rapists, and such. That discussion at the highest levels has consequences on the street.

I tell all of this to contextualize what I think about modern responses to racism. The Google Gemini debacle is not about Google or Gemini alone. It is the result of many well-intentioned attempts to fight racism by re-writing history and artificially elevating the victims to a status they do not have in reality. I call it superficial anti-racism. Portrayal does not cure fundamental systemic disadvantages. And the effort to - let's be honest - pretend to fight racism through identity affirmation - does nothing to stop newborn black and brown kids being disproportionately in families with low income, in schools with lower performance, and generally have a mountain to climb to even have hope.

At the root of racism are centuries of baked-in disadvantage, founded in colonialism, slavery, and more recent reinforcements. And being young and black still requires a level of determination to be equal to have any chance of escaping the foundations of disadvantage.

Changing words in books, Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, and changing images or stories are tokens of resistance, not resistance or change itself. Indeed, taken to the logical endpoint, these superficial responses reinforce the actual causes of racism by creating an illusion of challenging it. They are also damaging because those who are not victims of racism see these steps as negative to themselves. It sets up a black and brown versus white narrative.

So Google did what it seems most people are doing today: it instructed its AI to always show diversity and to diminish whiteness in favor of brown or blackness.

We all understand it wasn't malicious. But it was wrong. And damaging, as is most of the "anti-racist" methods in 2024.

The foundation of inclusion is full equal opportunity. At the base of that challenge is economics, and then the attitudes will change because they will become outdated due to equal opportunity. Civil Rights corrected obvious inequities, which took millions to fight for. Economic equality requires investment from birth to death in raising communities. Meanwhile, fighting the consequences by defending the victims of racism. Until then, young black people will continue to resist, individually, in their way, the lack of hope in their lives and will continue to over-populate US prisons.

Google's attempt at diversity did nothing to help in that context and made things worse. Tech cannot become a place where society's problems are resolved by pretending they do not exist.

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