Michael Arrington is making an ass of himself by spending an inordinate amount of time talking about how other people are calling him racist (when no one credible has done so), explaining why he isn’t racist (using an antiquated understanding of racism that’s an incredibly low bar), while brushing off real racial inequalities in Silicon Valley (which Arrington is absolutely a part of, even if only passively so).
Before September’s AOL/Huffington Post/TechCrunch/CrunchFund editorial fiasco, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien asked TechCrunch-founder-turned-venture-capitalist Michael Arrington to give an interview for an upcoming documentary on a minority-focused start-up accelerator called NewMe. The documentary airs on November 13, but advance clips reveal a few juicy quotes from Arrington, including, most notably, “I don’t know a single black entrepreneur.”
In a blog post titled “Oh Shit, I’m a Racist,” Arrington retracted that statement and mentioned Bitcasa, a promising company whose CEO and founder is black, and in which Arrington is an investor. He also explained his own racial visor in histrionic terms: “See, my brain database doesn’t categorize people in terms of skin color. Or hair color. Or sexual orientation. When I queried that database, under stressful circumstances, I got zero results.”
His second post on the affair, “Racism: The Game,” among other things, compared recent events to a similar debacle in 2010 over women in tech. Using the journalistically-accepted and mathematically-sound transitive property, we can presume that Arrington does not categorize people in terms of gender or sex, either, and that he is outing himself as a pansexual.
But I digress. Arrington’s overarching thesis on the racial makeup of Silicon Valley—after addressing his shrill racial insecurity—explains that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. If you’ve got ideas and a business model, you’ll get funding. And if a minority or a woman fails, it’s because the vast majority of startups fail. Nobody has it harder than anybody else.
Hank Williams, an African-American entrepreneur in the tech world, is spot on in his critique of Arrington and Silicon Valley:
The market *makers* operate in a world that is not particularly even-handed. The market makers are the folks that help new young companies and entrepreneurs by providing insight, mentoring, capital, and relationships. And this part of the tech world is driven by all the same types of biases that exist in the non-tech world. And it is *much* harder for even the most talented African Americans in the tech world to gain access to influential, insightful, connected mentors, let alone investors.
Here’s my beef. I can’t stand it when people who have everything in the world—wealthy, smart, shrewd people like Arrington—don’t own up to an obvious shortcoming (here, a failure to understand his own privilege) when wide improvement is needed. Arrington has detracted—and distracted—from an important conversation by seeking pity.
Indeed. Silicon Valley is either racist or a meritocracy. Silicon Valley is either sexist or a meritocracy. Corporate America is either racist and sexist, or it’s a meritocracy. That’s pretty much the fault line. The Jim Crow south? Either racist, or a meritocracy. Nazi Germany. Either antisemitic or a meritocracy. Pick one or the other to believe.
One of the hallmarks of geek culture is the inability to conceive that their world is not a meritocracy. Because it would basically destroy them personally if it’s not, so they’ll tell themselves anything to keep up the delusion.
I generally consider Michael Arrington to play something between an under informed idiot and provocateur to draw links and clicks to his website, something that you have helped him. However this does legitimately look like an attempt at CNN to construe his remarks using sensationalist tactics to generate controversy. I do get a little bit of schadenfreude seeing Arrington get outclassed by an even bigger provocateur with an even larger microphone.
However kudos to you as well on pulling off the triple lutz of highlighting the quotes to try and make Michael Arrington look like a racist idiot of some kind, while mocking him for attempting to defend himself against Soledad O’Brien’s shameless rabble rousing, and then complaining about how too much attention on this important issue. Because oh dear, you really have no choice but to make that the highlight of your article because someone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do it.
Truly it’s a meritocracy.
I mean, look at how far we’ve come in 3 decades…from Bill Gates, an upper middle class blonde haired white guy…all the way to…to….Mark Zuckerberg…who.. uh….who is a….
Shit.
newsflash: people who work with computers and refer to their brains as “databases” are socially stunted and don’t releate well to people.
So what credentials must one require to legitimately call someone a racist?
@4 pretty spot on. After the whole TechCrunch debacle is there really any doubt that he sees himself as a law unto?
That is, if anyone not following Arrington is aware of who he is without context. Never leave that information until the second paragraph!
“my brain database doesn’t categorize people in terms of skin color”
I’m blinded by my white privilege.