Antonio Garcia-Martinez
Apple announced earlier this week that Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook product manager who was hired to help develop its advertising business, was no longer with the company. Martinez, who joined the tech giant in April, became the target of an internal petition which claimed that his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys contained "misogynistic statements" and "racist" passages. Signed by more than 2,000 Apple employees, the statement called for Martinez's immediate termination, as well as an investigation into how the company "missed or ignored" the book's allegedly offensive content. The petition also demanded that Apple implement a plan to ensure that it would never again hire someone who has published similar views.
Billed as an autobiography, Chaos Monkeys details Martinez's experience working in Silicon Valley. The petition cited one passage in which he describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak" and "generally full of s**t" despite their attempts to appear sophisticated.
Comment: The above 'no-brainer' and common sense approach to verbal racist insults should not even have to be said or written about. And yet that's where we are; many of the "thought leaders", celebrities, pundits and media personalities of the Western world are making so many destructive statements, of such an outlandish and insane nature, that they must simply be called out - loud and clear - by anyone with the platform to do so.
People have to be reminded of what sanity looks and sounds like.