Many years ago, when I shared my New York apartment with others, a relationship developed between me and my roommate. He is a Brown -educated architect/designer. I, at the time, was an entry-level analyst. From time to time, but at least a few times a week, I'd have to walk to the avenue with him to hail a cab. Because he was black.
I'm not wedded to Uber out of principle, but I'm staunchly against our taxi establishment for it.
I'm a black man who lives in Chicago, and rarely have trouble getting a cab, dodged by maybe 1 in 10. In an Uber world where the cab companies have been driven out of business, and captured city governments allow taxi services to regulate themselves (like Uber and Lyft are asking for), people who don't have smartphones might as well start walking now. Or they can call the fly by night unregulated services that will operate in their neighborhoods by phone, and have the equivalent of surge pricing 24h a day. Or hail unmarked gypsy cabs and maybe end up dead.
I've been black all over America, often not hardly middle-class, the [edit: taxi] situation is not that dire in the 21st century, and Uber are not civil rights workers - you still have to find one that will go where you live.
edit: Not that I don't believe that your neighborhood was particularly racist, but I'll put our Chicago racists against anyone else's racists. I think the largely immigrant workforce driving taxis (especially Nigerians) are more likely to pick me up out of affinity than one might think.
You think uber of all companies would have stood up for equal rights back then? They don't even follow the law now, what makes you think they'd have done the right thing then?
Uber bans tipping. It collects the same amount of money regardless of who the passenger is. An Uber driver has no reason to use blunt heuristics (such as skin color) to try to visually identify fares who have more money.
Sounds like Uber is letting its drivers make up their own rules to continue the fiction that its drivers are "independent contractors". If they keep doing that they'll be as unaccountable for customer service as the average taxi dispatcher.
Where i live, we're not used to tipping, is that really a big thing considered by taxi drivers when picking someone? Because we don't have tipping and the racist drivers acts the same.
But the laws that they don't follow have very little to do with doing the right thing. As far as I'm concerned, Americans have a patriotic obligation to disobey corrupt laws like government-sanctioned taxi medallion monopolies. Those laws are no different than handing out tickets for doing 56 MPH in the middle of the desert... which also would still be the case if drivers hadn't protested the law by rendering it unenforceable.
Whether Uber would have behaved more ethically than taxi companies with regard to racial bias, I don't know. An Uber driver has no idea what the race of his/her next client is. It would require some genuinely evil behavior on Uber's part just to support racial bias, much less carry it out.
There are cases of Uber drivers not carrying passengers who have a fold-up wheelchair.
Then you have the whole "they aren't really employees" thing.
They (and Lyft et-al) all claim to be "empowering the sharing economy" and call themselves "ride sharing". Ride sharing is if I'm going to the shops, and offer someone else a ride to go there too.
Driving around in my private car and picking up people who want to go places, with exactly fuck all regulation, is just being an illegal taxi, which brings me to your "patriotic" argument.
> Americans have a patriotic obligation to disobey corrupt laws
So, any law that any american thinks is corrupt, they have a duty to break? Or, are you the arbiter of what's corrupt and what isn't?
> Those laws are no different than handing out tickets for doing 56 MPH in the middle of the desert
The difference is, if you break that law, you're probably only affecting yourself, or the people you know in your car.
Uber & Lyft together spent 8 million fucking dollars, campaigning for the right to self-regulate themselves, because they think a fingerprint background check is too onerous.
So sure, the medallion system might be fucked. But on the plus side, the taxi industry is actually regulated and follows the laws that are put in place to protect the fucking customers.
US in general have been more liberal on federal level and more racist on a more local level (especially in Souther state). Take civil rights act of 1875 as an example. So, a bigger company, working on a federal level in almost all the states would certainly be less prone to racism than a small cab operation run by a couple of guys from a shady garage.
I'm not wedded to Uber out of principle, but I'm staunchly against our taxi establishment for it.