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Comment by lucasyvas | Hacker News Reader

While a wonderful gesture, something about this feels a bit... tangential to the real issue to me in a way that's distracting. Am I off base here? It feels like it's leaning toward opportunistic.

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How is that a wonderful gesture?

This is a corporate PR stunt that has nothing to do with anything and that perpetuates racial discrimination.

This is awful.

Our political establishment has no interest in ending racism; each "side" benefits from dividing Americans into identity-based groups and pitting them against other Americans on wedge issues. The hypocritical irony now is of promoting these identity-based groups for the purposes of some vague "justice" when doing so will necessarily widen the divides and propagate hatred further. It's a cynical distraction from the reality that the actual institutionalized racism predominantly occurs under the watchful leadership of the same politicians decrying it, and then you have hangers on like Uber trying to seize an issue for their own profit. It's as transparently self-serving as all the companies changing their logo avatars to rainbows for "Pride Month" a year ago, once it was politically risk-free to do so.

As one party to an interracial gay marriage I say "no thanks."

Hear hear. Racism and other forms of idpol have been critical tools of the political establishment in oppressing the working classes throughout American history (see 1700s Virginia Slave Codes for an early example).

While bashing "bad" racism is politically correct, bashing "good" racism is almost universally seen as taboo. Hence racism is immortal in America.

>How is that a wonderful gesture?

There is an economic justice part of US racism that is not addressed enough if at all... Black people have been literally robbed of their income/wealth regularly and often for a few centuries now. If companies want to stand up and try to help repair this lack of justice that we all inadvertantly benefitted from, this is one way to do it.

Just because the government (for at least 100 years) continues to drag its feet when it comes to reparations doesn't mean individual companies can't step up.

I think perhaps it was the wrong choice of word - I didn't want to immediately condemn them and failed to come up with something more appropriate.

It's less a ploy to make Uber Eats look good than one to make people feel less bad about using Uber Eats.

Feel the same way, curious how long the gesture lasts and where they end up accounting the loss

It's virtue signaling 100% from a corporation. But w/e.

I won't consider Uber to be "good corporate citizen" for it. But it helps a bunch of small restaurants in a time period where margins are tight so net positive maybe?

At least they're putting money down on it vs just issuing some statement.

Killer Mike had a documentary on Netflix (?) about black life in America, and mentioned that money flows out of the black community far faster than any other minority in America. If we assume that Uber is acting in good faith, which I have no reason not to believe, then what else can they do?

Something can be both.

And we can enjoy the bright side of it, while not being naive.

I can only say - be very careful in how you approach these issues. Similar actions in india resulted in not so great outcomes from the government and corporations. And we are still stuck with the prejudice and discrimination - for some even greater than before.

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