Pattern Matching

Silicon Valley Is Playing Defense on Racism

In trying to do just enough, advocates say, tech companies aren’t doing enough.

Photo: Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images

Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.

This is a moment of reckoning with racism in America, and a moment for progress. Based on my conversations with some of the advocates calling for that progress, it’s fair to say that the tech industry is making… well, a little. Mostly at the margins.

U.S. tech hubs, led by Silicon Valley and Seattle, are bastions of enormous wealth and power in a deeply unequal world. Black people are both vastly underrepresented in their ranks and often underserved, or even actively harmed, by their products. So the industry is a natural target for scrutiny at a time when outrage at police brutality has boiled over and sparked a wholesale re-examination of society’s discriminatory inner workings.

So far, almost every big tech company has offered well-publicized gestures of support to the cause of racial equality. They’ve made statements, videos, pledges, donations, and even a few personnel shuffles. (My own employer launched a blog about the fight against anti-Black racism.) Those actions are, for the…