Is this a good thing? Why should I care about the skin color of the owner of a restaurant or business I'm thinking of going to?
> Google said it has seen “a surge in online searches for Black-owned businesses” in recent months
So it seems like a feature Google decided is useful for its visitors in the same way that a business' address, operating hours, and reviews are useful for its visitors.
I think we can say “segregating people based on skin color is wrong in principle,” or “segregating people is acceptable if it benefits those who are disadvantaged,” but I don’t see segregating races based on search interest as a reasonable policy.
Neither the dictionary on my desk nor Wikipedia define the term as requiring force.
For example, Yelp has a “Black owned businesses” link right at the top of the first screen of the app. I clicked on it. There is one listed in my city.
My city’s population is about 50% black, and there are way more than a single black owned business nearby.
Without saying that white-owned businesses have it easy (no one has it easy these days), I believe that black-owned businesses face additional, unique challenges that white-owned businesses don’t. Some of those challenges are new (eg communities of color being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19) and others have been around for much longer (ranging from black communities being historically disenfranchised to the the mental overhead of code switching when talking to the majority of the country). Taken as a whole, I feel they contribute to a reality where owning a business is harder for a person of color than a white person.
That appeals to my sense of fairness in business: someone shouldn’t have to work 10%, 20%, or 100% harder to achieve the same outcomes. I feel ill-equipped to address this unfairness systemically (volunteering my time to teach code is the only example I can think of at the moment) but letting the reality of a black-owned business’s challenges factor into my purchasing decisions feels like a valid way to tip the scales back a bit closer to equilibrium.
This will never stop happening, no matter how hard you try. Do you seriously believe that someone with 30 years of experience should work as hard as someone who is doing it for the first time ? That just doesn't make sense.