“Apple’s Sexist and Racist Employment Policies: ‘As American as Apple Pie?'” By Rebecca Theodore
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Here, in the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay area of northern California many of the world’s largest technology corporations thrive in earnest. Here, in the leading nucleus for high-tech innovation and progress, the worldwide headquarters for Apple Inc is mirrored in all its technological glory as Silicon Valley continue to account for more than one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States.
But nestled deep within this opulence lurks a dirty secret.
While the global conscious effort to promote better employment practices rages on, Apple is now devised into an ‘Animal Farm‘ type of pecking order where according to a Facebook poll, 77% of its senior-level employees are men and 74% are white. Overall, 41% of Apple’s employees are of Asian origin, while only 2% of employees are black with just a handful of white women in the senior leadership of the company.
To be sure, the Luddite fallacy that ‘technological unemployment leads to structural unemployment‘ has its bearings.
In this regards, if “racism is played by the “poors of reason” then Apple’s recently released television commercial – “Living The Life of Dreams” vividly shows that at the table of technology all men are not brothers. Although the commercial is a great depiction of “the kind of life most of us would like to live, and can, if we just buy iPhones and Apple apps, there is no place in this ‘life of dreams‘ for Blacks, Native American, or Hispanic women and men or their children.” It’s an all White and Asian Apple World.
Yet, despite this, our iPhones and Apple apps continue to be the way we live.
{IMAGE VIA – appleinsider.ru} According to a Pew Research Center Study, 64 percent of blacks and 60 percent of Hispanics owned smart phones as of 2013, compared to 53 percent of Whites. Most are black males and in the young demographic; 18-34 years of age.
And it is here that bigotry creates another vicious false illusion.
Whereas Apple Inc is a great part of a capitalistic venture that offers freedom of choice and creativity, and shows the positive role that corporations play in today’s modern society; at the same time, it also shows how corporate culture is capable of enlarging and upholding “class tyranny” by using the ideology of liberation and equality to register ‘Social Darwinism’ to explain the success of certain social groups and a drastic interpretation of the “fit of the fittest” as a means to its own end.
Stilled in the Orwellian philosophy of an ‘Animal Farm‘ indoctrination, situations of oppression are evidenced not only from the intent and ploy of the oppressors but also from the gullibility of the oppressed. Most Blacks, Native American, and Hispanic men and women are not in a position to be better educated or informed because of education disparities, forcing them to accept Apple’s fake sense of individuality that keep them focused on the fact that they can indeed belong to the ‘in crowd’ of society with their iPhones, when in reality they do not.
More obvious is the fact that Apple’s ‘Living The Life of Dreams‘ commercial serve as a propaganda model of social control by twisting and altering the rhetoric of capitalism and modifying the shameful history of discrimination and segregation to augment its power and control; while at the same time breeding innovative and ignoble ways to define minority identity and values in present American society.
And it is in this obscurity of ironies that Apple’s ingenious whim is established.
Notably, it must also be stated, that apart from Apple’s Advanced Technology Group former vice-president Don Norman’s admission that “Apple only excels at generating strong positive emotional reactions from those who use its products,” Apple still continues to control 39.2 percent of the market share among individual manufacturers, by insulting the intelligence of the minority and taking it as its victory.
Rebecca Theodore is a popular Op-ed columnist based in Atlanta, GA. She writes on national security and political issues. Follow her on twitter @rebethd or email at rebethd@aol.com
Other than this, technophobes, luddites and neo luddites triumph in the results, but the heat should now be turned on Apple for its lack of diversity and sexual preference in its employment practices.
Moving aside the need for Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to join Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo and release information on the diversity of its 80,000-member workforce, Bloomberg.com writes, that “Apple has added language to its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee Charter, pledging to “actively” pursue women and members of underrepresented groups for its board of directors.”
But in the ‘battle of the cowshed‘ the main principle still remains;- “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
