White Fragility & Silicon Valley

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I came across a post on my X feed today:

Levels @levelsio

Same with this article from yesterday. Gay acceptance is now rapidly dropping in the Netherlands. The real reason is Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrants are extremely against homosexuality. But media isn’t allowed or won’t ever write that. It’s ironic that the gay acceptance we fought for for decades in the Netherlands is being destroyed by progressive policies that keep continuously importing low quality immigrants from cultures that are completely opposed to us.

View on X

It was posted by @levelsio. In summary, MENA immigrants are (allegedly) to blame for why Dutch youth are having a change of heart towards the LGBTQ community in the Netherlands. If there were ever a test case for “tech-bro” nonsense this would be in the top five.

Levels’, that’s how I’ll refer to him, argument is built on an assumption. An assumption that many on the moral/political left struggle with: no one is obligated to like you. Not you, not your life style, not your proclivities be they by way of nature or nurture. But that’s precisely the false premise that his argument operates on and thus he (and many others in the activism sphere) project is that because you refused to recognize my cause, my choice, my way of life, as universal, you can caused a great injustice and therefore my moral outrage over your lack of acquiescence is justified. But in reality this is nothing other a kind of moral/ethical slight-of-hand.

So when our well-known and well-regarded “tech bro” (he is just shy of one million followers) lashed out, he put the blame for this change squarely on the shoulders of Arab and Muslim immigrants. However, equally consistent with what I’ve seen in tech bros, and indeed in much of the very morally-agnostic tech field, is an equally robust ignorance of history. Anti-LGBTQ attitudes have long predated the arrival of MENA immigrants. It has a well-ensconced home in the Netherlands and throughout Scandinavia though without a doubt it may have declined from where it used to be. This is not a case of North African “inception”. Secondly, and more importantly in my opinion, is that these very recent immigrant do not possess the cultural, societal, economic or political capital to enforce or enact such a change. This is nothing other that white supremacist dog whistling.