Google adds "Black-owned" business attribute to local listings

Many government policies aren't just systemically racist (some indeed are), but are also systemically "class-ist". Meaning they are designed to keep poor people poor and rich people rich. If you segment a population (say Black communities), they will become disproportionately more poor over time, and if you segment your stats by race it then appears to be specifically targeting that group. In fact you can find similar stats for Mexican/Latino-americans, who are also victim to the same policies.

So if we focus on just fixing Black issues specifically, we are now ignoring another minority group. Why doesn't Google show "Mexican-owned" businesses, or "Asian-owned", or "Female-owned" businesses? This isn't progress, nor is it useful. Perhaps more useful identifier would be "Community-owned" or "Low-income-family-run establishment", so if people are really interested in helping these poor communities, they can do so universally. Segmenting ourselves by racial or gender identity does not solve the problem, and is in fact guaranteed to make things worse in the long run.

As a progressive I am frustrated that people who call themselves progressive are now promoting regressive racially charged policies. This is not what progress should look like.

Without saying that white-owned businesses have it easy (no one has it easy these days), I believe that black-owned businesses face additional, unique challenges that white-owned businesses don’t. Some of those challenges are new (eg communities of color being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19) and others have been around for much longer (ranging from black communities being historically disenfranchised to the the mental overhead of code switching when talking to the majority of the country). Taken as a whole, I feel they contribute to a reality where owning a business is harder for a person of color than a white person.

That appeals to my sense of fairness in business: someone shouldn’t have to work 10%, 20%, or 100% harder to achieve the same outcomes. I feel ill-equipped to address this unfairness systemically (volunteering my time to teach code is the only example I can think of at the moment) but letting the reality of a black-owned business’s challenges factor into my purchasing decisions feels like a valid way to tip the scales back a bit closer to equilibrium.

The spread of US internal issues to the rest of the world is quite frightening to be honest. A social unrest in North America has way, way more influence in Europeans countries than our own local issues (I'm in the EU), and both our news and politicians react quickly to it, even though US problems are mostly irrelevant here. Even without living close to America, or try to be only consuming local content, it is impossible to avoid whatever is happening there. This country has really too much impact over the rest of the world, which wouldn’t be necessarily an issue if not for the fact that it is widely dysfunctional.

Putting tags like "Women Owned" de-legitimizes the owner. It makes women owned business seem stigmatized, as if it's unusual or especially notable. It strips them of their dignity.

BTW, it's the height of passive aggressiveness to use this rhetorical trick of naming things (antifa, anti-racist) in such a way that you use the very name to shame people.

I mean, meet my new group: the anti-evil collective. What's that? You're don't agree with us? Well, you're against evil, aren't you? Are you some kind of a demon, or a devil?