HP's QA process is really so bad that if they have two members of non-white folks in that pair, the camera might very well not work for white people. Hence my anecdotal evidence of the webcam that doesn't focus on my white face.
I don't disagree! I also don't disagree that more rigorous QA would have caught this, without any change in the racial dynamics of the world or the distribution of race in the workforce or anything else.
But we live in a world where it's very very unlikely that they would have tested the product exclusively on non-white people, which is the point of my post. The circumstances simply would not have arose.
The world we live in predisposes things like this to fall more harshly and more often on non-whites. Hence, systemic racism.
And while a crappy webcamera is not the end of the world, this same phenomenon isn't limited to HP. I picked this as a representative example of how things can "just so happen" to have a racially biased outcome.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
Re: No offense but...
on 2009-12-22 06:33 pm (UTC)I don't disagree! I also don't disagree that more rigorous QA would have caught this, without any change in the racial dynamics of the world or the distribution of race in the workforce or anything else.
But we live in a world where it's very very unlikely that they would have tested the product exclusively on non-white people, which is the point of my post. The circumstances simply would not have arose.
The world we live in predisposes things like this to fall more harshly and more often on non-whites. Hence, systemic racism.
And while a crappy webcamera is not the end of the world, this same phenomenon isn't limited to HP. I picked this as a representative example of how things can "just so happen" to have a racially biased outcome.