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SAN JOSE — The San Jose State University Human Rights Institute on Tuesday unveiled the Silicon Valley Pain Index, the first of planned annual reports focusing on racial discrimination and income inequality in the region.
Coming at a time when institutional biases against Black people and communities of color are under heightened scrutiny, the index leans on the latest available data and reporting to call out disparities such as the disproportionately high death rate of Latinos from COVID-19 in Santa Clara County and the overwhelmingly white makeup of tech company executive suites.
“The Silicon Valley Pain Index shows that white supremacy is operating in most all of the institutions and systems in Santa Clara County, whether it be in the criminal justice system, the economy, education, healthcare, or housing,” Scott Myers-Lipton, a longtime sociology professor at San Jose State said Tuesday.
Myers-Lipton, an activist who has helped lead efforts to shift minimum wage and business tax policy in San Jose — wrote the the report, which was inspired by an index compiled about New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The index includes references from 30 studies and reports on the region, and points to 65 different statistics, including racial disparities in arrests, income gaps, and representation in tech companies, where recent investigations show Black women are completely excluded at some large firms, Myers-Lipton said.
“What this report shows is that the entire playing field, that is the whole system, is tilted to advantage whites over Blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans,” Myers-Lipton said.
Briena Brown, a San Jose State student and president of the Student Homeless Alliance, pointed to one of the index measures that indicates 61% of homeless people in Silicon Valley are Black or Latino during a press conference in front of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in San Jose.
“Many of us are lucky to experience only its beauty,” she said of the library. “But we have to remember that we are standing on a site of losses and a graveyard of hope. We have failed not only homeless students, but the entire homeless population of San Jose,” Brown said, noting her father was a homeless student at the school.
“We must come together to support those who have been wronged by the system,” Brown said. “This issue is bigger than any of us.”
The index also highlights the staggering wealth of individuals and major tech companies in the region, such as the $248 billion combined net worth of the “top 10 richest Silicon Valley moguls, all of which are white men,” and the $307.5 billion in total cash reserves on hand at Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Apple, Cisco and Facebook.
“You could change a person’s life, you could change the direction of this city…with the blink of an eye and the wave of a pen,” the Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP, said Tuesday.
Moore lambasted those companies and individuals for not doing enough to support people in the community where they made their money, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Yet you sit with these fat wallets, and won’t take care of this valley,” he said.
“So we’re calling on you, tech giants. Stop pimping the people. Stop taking advantage of the people,” he said.
“And if not, maybe it’s time for us to start looking at other ways to get back at you for your lack of responsibility to this community,” he added.
“What this pain index indicates is that we’ve been making some really bad choices,” state Assemblyman Ash Kalra said, praising the report’s inclusion of white supremacy as a driving ideology in Silicon Valley.
“As elected leaders, as corporations, as community leaders, we have to make sure we call it out.”
Myers-Lipton said the index ties together disparate studies to show that not just policing, but all major institutions both public and private need “transformational change” in the region and the country.
“It is a call to every one of us in Santa Clara County,” he said, “to examine our policies, our attitudes, our culture, to ensure that Black lives matter, and to develop specific plans to end white supremacy in the institutions that we are connected to.”
