dear friends, i recently unsubbed from dev.to for what i felt was an egregious example of non-committal and hypocritical bullshit. The recent newsletter included a header announcing support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which we all support

I sort of scanned through the posts they were highlighting and didn't necessarily get the feel they were BLM/movement related posts, nor that they were by African-American authors, nor that any of them had anything to do with supporting community efforts. I refuse to lookup what nationality dev.to hails from, nor do i wish to imgaine that an american company could possibly be that negligent in debasing their audience, and themselves, to such an extent. This cannot be but a fucking joke to the very corporations that pretend to give a shit about any of this, if goddam solemn, obelisk headers are followed-up with checks email some how-to array methods, a todo app server, and a nice post about code-styles

aside from the boilerplate pandering nonsense and a link to charities, i don't know if even one single post mentioned was by a black person. It's almost certainly true that if they looked at all the posts they have ever highlighted, a very disproportionately low number of them were by written by black people. im also sure that whatever efforts their staff have ever made...werent made, and they probably reflect silicon valley's gender, privilege, and racial homogeneity as well as any other startup.

supporting black lives means putting your goddam money where your goddam mouth is, doing the bangs hands together for these hiring, promoting, mentoring, highlighting and encouraging that should apply to all people in the community, but which might have a disproportionately helpful impact on some in particular, when applied with a non guilt-shifting, faux-solidarity, unaccountable way that largely got silicon valley where it is