> Most people have limited time, energy, and attention. Time spent on activism will be opposed; you get less bang for your buck because the dominant group will seek to undermine everything you do.
Isn't this all obvious stuff? None of which refutes the idea that activism moves the needle and is _required_ for minorities to equalize how they're treated.
> Time spent developing skills and seizing opportunities will not be, because it can be done in secret, and if you hit roadblocks just go around them and find other people to do business with.
This sounds untethered from reality. Consider being a black kid who wants to be an engineer in silicon valley. Your entire ethnicity is heavily underrepresented, so you don't have role models / might not even view working as an engineer as something attainable. Okay say you get past that and work hard, you still get fewer opportunities because bias is real and there are so many unwritten rules about how to play this game (get an internship at these companies! talk to startups! this is how to leetcode!) -- you find a lot of these things out via your connections. But if your entire network is underrepresented, how do you break in?
This is to say nothing of unconscious biases that affect you as a minority. Less favorable interpretation of your interview results, less insider information about how to play the game, fewer opportunities offered due to prejudice about your potential, pay gap.
If you hit these roadblocks, pray tell how you "just go around them" ??? If your advice is "don't protest, just work hard and be that lucky 1 person who made it to the top for your race/gender/whatever" that's pretty shit advice.
> It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
That's the problem though. You can't make yourself invaluable or succeed in your career if folks don't take risks on you. If folks don't give you opportunities. There is a huge opportunity gap for folks born black, born female, in systems of power that disadvantage them. Participating in activism to rectify this isn't a waste of time -- if it doesn't directly benefit the participants, it benefits their children.
> And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Pray tell what tactics you're talking about other than "get lucky and work hard and hope the system is less biased and more meritocratic than you think" because that's all I'm hearing in your comments. What "durable shift in power balance" was achieved as a result of this advice?
Activism has a great track record. Consider LGBT rights in the country 20 years ago vs today. Would gay marriage be possible today if not for the tireless work of activism?
You're folks to essentially shut up and work hard in the unfair systems they were born into. It's just not going to work for most of them. And it's not "asking for more power" -- it's _fighting_ for equal treatment and _exercising_ the power they already have to multiplicative effect.
Maybe your main gripe is that this takes a long time and doesn't generally pay off monetarily or career-wise for individuals, since you have to spend your money and time for the collective?
But instead of calling this stupid and at odds with success, why not be more honest and realize you can do that AND also work really hard and succeed with the opportunities you've been given. The existence of full-time activists doesn't diminish the contributions of folks who contribute in other ways, and that you can contribute in other ways does not render full-time activists unnecessary.