Google adds Black-owned business label to product results

Many years ago, I remember going to Borders Books (years prior to its bankruptcy) to buy a book by James Baldwin. I looked in the literature section and surprisingly none of his books were there. This was pretty odd since most bookstores carry at least one of his books. I asked for help from an employee and they told me I was looking in the wrong place, guiding me to the African American section instead. I found the irony of what the bookstore likely thought was a considerate distinction, pretty mind blowing. Here was James Baldwin, who had been a huge proponent for civil rights and a major critic of segregation, having his own books segregated away from what the bookstore categorized as “literature”, into a racially defined category instead.

I'm not much of a social critic so it's difficult to formulate the right words to explain my position, but racial profiling just doesn't seem right, regardless of its intent.

> In the past 12 months, Google search interest for “black owned businesses” has skyrocketed 600% based on Google Trends data comparing January-December 2019 to January-December 2020. Across the country, people have been looking for “black owned restaurants,” “black owned bookstores,” “black owned beauty supply” and more, which speaks to the diversity within the Black business community.

What does "diversity within the Black business community" even mean?

> Across the country, people have been looking for "black owned ${business_type}"

> comparing ... 2019 to ... 2020

Why might someone want to search for "black owned" businesses in that time period? Did Google bother investigating which demographics those searches came from?

This is presented as if having such a label is beneficial. Given the rise in white supremacist activity over the last year, maybe building an index of Black businesses isn't a great idea?

I'm looking forward to the first Twitter controversies about who does or doesn't qualify as black, when someone judged too white (or Indian or Syrian or South-American) manages to get the "black-identifying" label and gets caught.

Another example of positive discrimination. I find it absurd that skin color has anything to do with businesses’ quality. Could be that I’m just living in a Finnish bubble where I haven’t seen racism in ages.

I’m a photographer, and weddings make up the largest percentage of my income. I advertise on The Knot/Wedding Wire, which are wedding planning sites and vendor directories. I pay something like $300 a month to be on the first page of results for photographers.

Some time last year they added a filter option to their vendor search results. Black owned, Hispanic owned, LGBT owned, woman owned, etc. There are a lot of options, only one of which can possibly apply to white men - veteran owned.

I don’t really mind the race related ones, as black people can be hard to photograph for (poor) photographers used to white people. Some cultures have different wedding traditions too.

But the woman owned option? Photography is absolutely dominated by women. I’m part of a photographer group on Facebook for my region and a lot of posts start out “hey ladies.” There are entire websites dedicated to “momtographers.” I would say for every 10 female professions photographers there’s one male or less.

That disparity evens out a bit when you’re talking about decently high-end photographers, but I’d still say we’re in the minority. Yet every time I log in they ask me which of those groups I belong to, and there is no “none” option. Every time someone uses those search filters it means I’m effectively paying more than everyone else for the same amount of advertising, just because I’m a white man.

It’s gross.

Now this is interesting. I look forward to seeing the data as to how this pans out. The label is useful for those who want to support Black-owned businesses, for whatever reason, but would be equally useful for those who do not, for whatever reason.

A huge amount of political/social attitude data points available for Google - and I hope that such data are released (anonymised etc) for academic research.

I can see all kinds of tags being helpful for people who are contemplating purchasing decisions.

Black, Female, Veteran, Local, Small, LGBTQ, or other ownership/categorical tags are all information that people might use to guide their purchases.

If Google thinks Google’s customers (the advertisers) want these tags, Google will provide them.

It's terrible but I wonder how many people will avoid those items.

I dislike where this is going.

Surely this won’t backfire.

This is disgusting.

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