[baron816]

It’s really not fair to criticize Big Tech for not having demographics that mirror the US population as a whole. There’s so many large, societal factors standing in the way of black people and people of color from being able to even consider pursuing a career in tech that putting all the blame on discrimination or prejudice means your not talking about the real issues.

If Big Tech/Big Tech Media want to help those communities, they should lobby the government to stop mass incarcerating and start educating their future engineers.

[mekoka]

The article is not pointing the blame toward discrimination, it addresses the hypocrisy of those with the means to affect change, who are glad to denounce while remaining passive. Apathy while in a position to influence is a form of tacit approval of the status quo. Basically, the article denounces a common form of virtue signaling by these people/organizations when it's convenient (like right now); They publicly plaster donations as flares to deflect attention, but then go back to their color blind ways once the storm has passed. If you're part of a community that has no valid reasons to be delineated along racial lines, at some point you have to wonder why people of a certain minority are underrepresented in your (tech, business, friends) circles. Do they ever ask? Do they care at all? Your stated explanation, incarcerations and lack of education, tends to be the quick goto. But it doesn't explain everything. It's rather increasingly becoming an excuse since, as the article is pointing out, there are instances of talent striving to emerge from those under-favored minorities despite the odds, yet the underrepresentation persists. If anything, the custodians of communities that supposedly transcend backward concepts like "race", should make efforts to encourage more forward-thinking notions such as diversity, as everybody ends up winning from the enriched perspective.