Thanks Tim for the thoughtful questions / comments, so let me try to address them thoughtfully.
1 — It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us that the media that many of us heavily leans left. Medium is no different. Take a look at the homepage. Not sure how much they customize the homepages here by user, but what I see on my homepage is a few publications that is the standard liberal talking line of (blacks are under attack, women are under attack). I’m not denying that these are realities, but I don’t think that anyone else can reasonably say that when the agenda is this aggressively pushed in front of people that alternative narratives, perspectives, and realities are drowned out.
2 —If you look at the paragraph where I walk about whether I or who or anyone is a racist, you’ll see that the point I’m trying to make is that trying to focus on the label is pretty pointless. No matter what I say, the reader has already made up their mind. Instead I ask the reader to consider the problem from a principles based perspective. If the reader feels like certain attacks at a certain group would be considered racist, then similar behavior towards another group should be considered racist as well. I don’t care about the specific details of the definition —I think that that is used as a tool to de-legitimize non-mainstream voices. What I care about is consistent application of the label whatever we decide the definition should be.
3 — I’ve spent time living in Berlin + Singapore. In both other cultures, my personal opinion is strongly that the popular narrative is not as effective / able to drown out a more nuanced discussion.
4 — Of course there’s other data points out there. But you and I both know that those other data points are hammered into everyone’s heads already. What I want to cover is what most people might not be familiar with.
5 — My first issue with this is that you made an assumption that the delivery drivers we hired did not look like bouncers. I think you know what implicit assumption you made here. The people we hired into this role were definitely larger or more muscular than the typical person we might hire into a kitchen role. That being said, the attacks still happened.
Second, there were a few attempts to hire non-immigrant Chinese into various roles at the restaurant, both as drivers but kitchen staff as well. However, the reality is that these businesses are pretty “crazy” places to work. The hours are long, the work is uncomfortable, the pay is not great, there is a language barrier since most of the “operations” of the business happen in Chinese. As a result, there’s little interest for non-immigrant Chinese to take up these sorts of jobs. The few that do tend to leave pretty quickly.
We did have a few white delivery drivers, but they left the job pretty quickly given a lot of the reasons above. I don’t remember a single black delivery driver being interested in the position.
