So to your mind it's more likely that the author is telling fish stories than it is the dominant financial caste ended up optimizing a given piece of tech to their best interest?
Bokay.
Bokay.
My camera apparently has the opposite problem. I can't autofocus on anything that's solid white. Did I accidentally buy the "black" model?
What about the guys at Fuji film? Is their film anti-white and Asian biased?
This whole discussion is absurd. Next thing we'll hear is that swimming pools are racist.
Please don't express disagreement this way on Hacker News, regardless of how strongly you disagree.
Um. For a long time they were. Public pools were subject to racial segregation.
Glad we have an expert on racism like yourself to help set us all straight here!
Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the
company didn’t develop a better film for rendering
different gradations of brown until economic pressure
came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional
accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate
confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s
ability to render the difference between chocolates of
different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture
manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood
grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”
Besides, where's the "racism" in the dominant financial caste optimizing a given piece of tech to their best interests? It's a commercial product, so you optimize it for your main market, which, for most of photography's life has been white.
A textbook example of racism is: "These people are inferior/primitive/stupid/immoral because they are black" (from which the colloraries come, like: "Lets exploit these infrerior people for slave labor". Or "I don't want these inferior people in my restaurant.)
This case is, on the other hand: "Black people in the US don't have us much income (a fact), and are much fewer than white people (another fact). We should better optimize our film for the most common buyer, which would be white people".
This has nothing to do with racism, it's basic economics. In fact if blacks were the most affluent or populous group, the same companies would target THEM in a heartbeat.