Google Gives Special Search Designation to Black-Owned Businesses

In the ongoing quest to fight racism by doubling down on racism, Google announced this week that they will give a special search designation to black-owned businesses on their Maps and Search listings. The feature will place a unique symbol next to businesses that have been confirmed to have black ownership, apparently in an effort to persuade users to choose those businesses instead of their awful white-owned competition.

From The Verge:

When searching for a business through Google.com or Google Maps, you’ll now be able to see a new badge to represent Black-owned businesses — it’s a black heart over an orange three-striped background, like the one you can see in these images. They need to claim their business on Google and verify they own it by mail, phone or email before they can apply for the badge; it’s not clear how or whether Google can actually tell if they’re Black-owned. In 2018, Google introduced similar badges for businesses to display if they were either “Women-Led” and/or friendly to members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Within the last few months, Google says it has seen “a surge in online searches for Black-owned businesses” as consumers look to spend money at these businesses to show support amid the Black Lives Matter protests. One of Google’s main business listing competitors, Yelp, which introduced its own Black-owned icon recently, has seen a similar increase in searches for the same type of businesses. Yelp said in its Q2 economic average report that there were more than 2.5 million searches for Black-owned businesses between May 25th and July 10th.

You know what’s funny about these new initiatives? We’re sure that actual racists are quite pleased with them! Give black students their own segregated building on campus? Stop bothering to send cops into majority-black communities? Label values like “hard work” as elements of whiteness? Put a special label on black-owned businesses? Yes, yes, we imagine that all of these proposals would be completely adored by the people who spend most of their time on Stormfront and other racist websites. What is this, if not a complete regression to the days of Jim Crow? What is this, if not racism?

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Any movement towards anything other than a colorblind society is a move in the wrong direction. The only real way forward for this country is for us to get to a point where the color of your skin matters no more than the color of your hair. Anything else is madness.

This is so obvious that you have to wonder: Who is trying to prevent us from getting to that place? And why?