You have a good point. A friend of mine works at Yahoo and he regularly gets emails from management encouraging everyone to show up at the Yahoo booth at Gay Pride Parade. Sure, Yahoo wants to be at Gay Pride Parade because they want to be seen as an open and accepting place. If Yahoo does not participate, it looks bad because every other big company (read: Yahoo's competitors) attends Gay Pride Parade too.
But now we have a problem. What if there are conservative employees who do not support gay marriage rights? Should their opinions and feelings not count? If Yahoo is an open and accepting place, then it should be just as acceptable for a manager to send emails to employees inviting them to Straight Parade, or to "Anti Gay Marriage" Parade. But if that were to happen, the manager would be fired immediately.
Being against Gay Marriage rights is a political opinion, just like being FOR Gay Marriage rights. Isn't it discriminatory that a company like Yahoo is only allowing one opinion to be heard? In fact, isn't it problematic that Yahoo is promoting ANY political opinion in the first place? For Yahoo to remain an accepting and open work place, it should either have no political agenda at all, or it should promote all political opinions equally.
There are several things to unpack here, but I'm going to stick to one.
The primary difference, in practice, between something like Gay Pride and something like "Straight Pride", would be the power dynamic between the two.
Historically, and even to some extent currently, the people with more power have been those who would be in the latter parade.
"Punching up" is what it's called when you are challenging a group more powerful than you - "punching down" is more commonly referred to as "bullying".
Sure, it's not necessarily one dimensional, but it also doesn't just scale in terms of total magnitude summed across all dimensions (e.g. a bit of power in 50 axes is not comparable to the same quantity of power in one axis).
The reason to care about the dynamic of the past is that people are influenced by the past - in particular, people's actions in the present are often based on things that they did or that were done to them in the past.
Specifically, here, the reason to care about the past is that, even if/when we reached a point of equilibrium, where a subset of people were no longer in a minority of power, there would still likely be X Pride events for a while after, because the feeling of needing/wanting such things would not go away overnight.
Or even multidimensional. a "sum across all dimensions" doesn't make sense to me.
We are talking about something (power) that differs across contexts, locations, times etc.
Power is as complex as our (human) social organisation, an is not amenable to linear algebra.
> people are influenced by the past
Unless that is is a result of holding this belief; People are never influenced about the past, only by their subjective, current beliefs about the past. It would make more sense to consider what people believe now.
Marxist historical analysis has fallen out of favor for a good reason.
> would not go away overnight
Desire for power will never go away.
The "subset of people" is biased towards how you do your grouping; For example, that I, a white man, am naturally grouped with white slavers of the past, such that modern black Americans have something to resent me for.
Your narrative here relies on these kind of groupings in order to talk about "a point of equilibrium" and "no longer in a minority of power" - you need to identify a group as the same over a period of time in order to make these distinctions.
>Being against Gay Marriage rights is a political opinion, just like being FOR Gay Marriage rights.
There is a difference. If you are for gay marriage, you support gays having the same rights as everyone else. If you are against it, you want them to have less rights, just because they are gay, even though it doesn't affect your own rights in any way.
Now, it's still a political opinion, but it's reasonable for other people to not like it. Being in favor of segregation is also a political opinion but would provoke similar backlash.
where we have these insidious "interpretations" then end up in requiring you to do or say one thing or another to prove your allegiance to some principle other people consider sacred.
Cool article. But I always find it funny how people try to convince you that so-and-so in their company is a big shot ("our director, the fourth highest rank at Google, after CEO, SVP and VP"). Trust me, outside of your company, that person is quite irrelevant. For most people, that person is just someone working at a big company.
Hey now, at least the naming hierarchy makes sense. My favorite example is finance, where VP is such a meaningless title that Goldman Sachs argued in court that it doesn't carry any weight.
But now we have a problem. What if there are conservative employees who do not support gay marriage rights? Should their opinions and feelings not count? If Yahoo is an open and accepting place, then it should be just as acceptable for a manager to send emails to employees inviting them to Straight Parade, or to "Anti Gay Marriage" Parade. But if that were to happen, the manager would be fired immediately.
Being against Gay Marriage rights is a political opinion, just like being FOR Gay Marriage rights. Isn't it discriminatory that a company like Yahoo is only allowing one opinion to be heard? In fact, isn't it problematic that Yahoo is promoting ANY political opinion in the first place? For Yahoo to remain an accepting and open work place, it should either have no political agenda at all, or it should promote all political opinions equally.