Good intentions and unblinding

I’ve learned almost automatically to dismiss any position, which would primarily be defended by calling critics racist.

For instance, Shopify’s UX blog published a piece on how race should be included in alt text. I don’t doubt that the author has good intentions, but that’s not enough and could lead to overwhelmingly negative consequences.

Most are familiar with the classic of blind orchestra auditions leading to far more women playing prestigious orchestras. While far from perfect, the SATs and other standardized tests have opened doors to higher education that were mostly closed to those without wealth and family connections to top-tier schools.

This tendency to label everything, to remove all privacy, about one’s background, sexual orientation, psychological well-being, health, and political beliefs doesn’t sit well with me. For any student of history, it’s pretty obvious that adding these sorts of labels will eventually go very wrong.

Then there’s the fact that race is a messy, euro-centric categorization scheme. Are North Africans black? It often happens that someone is of African descent but finds his Arab cultural identity far more important.

An upperclass resident of Oslo has next to nothing in common with an Albanian villager, save a lack of pigmentation. Reducing both of their identities to just being “white” borders on the absurd. You get equally absurd groupings with other races.