No need to calm things down or thread needles, since I am rather stoic. You wanted interaction rather than downvotes, I gave you exactly that, so no need to com

No need to calm things down or thread needles, since I am rather stoic. You wanted interaction rather than downvotes, I gave you exactly that, so no need to complain about it being exhausting either. The downvotes may have come from individuals who also think it would be helpful if you treated yourself and others as individuals rather than avatars of their racial collective. Your opinions are your opinions, there is nothing black or white about your opinion (in terms of skin color at least) or anyone else's opinions. There are white people that think like you, and there are black people that think unlike you. Having a certain skin color doesn't make your opinion more valid or more worthy of being listened to either, even if you are in a demographic minority. For your opinion to be valid it has to have merit, so you have to back it up with good arguments that can convince a reasonable person. There's no racial cheat code we can/should insert into public discourse to bypass rational evaluation. That would be the bigotry of low expectations (you can't argue effectively for your case because of your identity, so we're gonna accept your conclusion because of your identity). Shifting from the indefensible: "my opinions are absolutely related to my skin color and that's precisely why you all need to pay special attention to them" to the much milder and very different: "[it's] plausible that the lack of black folks in tech today is leading to unintended negative consequences", and glossing that over as "maybe I didn't quite say this in the exact way that won't set people off the first time", rather than admitting you were racially stereotyping yourself and (at least implicitly) other individuals is poor form. That's not a clarification, but a different argument. I think it's high time white leftists and leftist blacks confront their own racism, cuz that's the only form of socially acceptable racism that currently exists in the west. Having said that, I think there's not much interesting about the hypothetical you raised. Changing the demographic composition of any group of people is almost certainly gonna change the distribution of opinions on the spectrum on any given topic, but that does not mean we are getting closer to truth. In the end, all that should matter is the facts and the arguments. That's why slavery and segregation were abolished at a time when blacks were vastly outnumbered in the population and in politics. We don't need population level representation of blacks in tech (though it may be beneficial) to hold big tech accountable and achieve meaningful change, we just have to make the argument and raise awareness and reasonable people of all races will join in your cause if your argument has merit. Let's get back to MLK's ideal of color blindness, because those who are teaching us to see color are teaching us to hate each other.