Overall, I agree, but as someone who's been in the fight for good treatment for all for a long time, I've started to worry that we're being misdirected to the wrong fights -- distracted by the obvious rather than looking deeper. Among other things, I teach at a university. I just don't get a lot of students from certain backgrounds, and it's not because of the problems at tech companies. It's because of the economic concerns of parents and the culture that we've passed to children. By college or the master's level half the community I grew up with are just not even on the same track. Maybe part of it is that we drag kids who would be great electricians through some inferior faux-college-prep charade instead of giving them an actual good education. Having taught precalc at the college level those students would have been better prepared for college by taking a shop class that involved using fractions and trig than by taking all four years of what math they actually took.
The parent comment to my previous one implied that we in the US have equality of opportunity, unlike Germany with its tracking. I am experimenting with the argument that we in the US say all the right things and yet insidiously do worse. Our rhetoric and our reality in the United States don't really line up. My high school had International Baccalaureate classes open to all, but only some kids signed up. How have we built this self-perpetuating organism of inequality that plods along even though we say all sorts of "correct" things? Even in Mississippi people are publicly concerned with race, gender, and sexual-orientation-based harassment. And yet.
The parent comment to my previous one implied that we in the US have equality of opportunity, unlike Germany with its tracking. I am experimenting with the argument that we in the US say all the right things and yet insidiously do worse. Our rhetoric and our reality in the United States don't really line up. My high school had International Baccalaureate classes open to all, but only some kids signed up. How have we built this self-perpetuating organism of inequality that plods along even though we say all sorts of "correct" things? Even in Mississippi people are publicly concerned with race, gender, and sexual-orientation-based harassment. And yet.