The recent war in Ukraine highlighted the hypocrisy of western-media, influencers and politicians towards 'non-whites'. A similar story is played out in the streets of twitter, corporate offices and government dealings.
Recently, the founder of Bolt - A web2 payments startup owned by venture capitalists and wealthy shareholders claiming to 'democratize' commerce made comments about the ouster of the CEO of InstaCart. He highlighted the politics by Sequoia Capital behind the ouster of Apoorva Mehta.
However, in trying to discredit the Venture Capital Fund he made comments that insinuated of racism towards Indians and took pot-shots towards the credibility of websites based out of India. His comments below:
There are a few problems with his statements:
1. He doesn't take direct aim at the content published by the website that he is questioning. Instead, he tries to discredit the website by using an ad hominem (logical fallacy) attack by targeting the origin of the site 'WTF kind of 'Indian' site this this'.
2. He goes onto add another statement highlighting a similar line of thought that exposes his pre-disposed opinion towards products/services/content/media originating from India - 'Dare2Compete out of 'New Delhi' gets the most in-depth profile on this event out of any news pub?'
The inherent racism in Ryan Breslow's statement is reflective of a broader problem of insinuated racism in society. The western-society has benefited immensely from imperialist adventures and plundering of wealth in India and the rest of the world. Centuries of wealth transfer enabled the west to have a more 'educated' (albeit not in the history of racism and colonialism) society that enabled them to think at a higher scale in Maslow's hierarchy. This has led to the false belief in 'self-exceptionalism' as reflected by Mr. Ryan Breslow's statements and the false narrative of being 'self-made'.
This is the 21st Century and any form of racism against anyone is simply unacceptable.
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