You’ve got a lot wrong in your statements.
“Businesses don’t really think in terms of ethnic groups; they deal with markets irrespective of ethnicity.”
This is not true. If you look back through my piece, you see Apple using hip-hop music and #blacklivesmatter imagery to sell Beats headphones.
“For company boards and management, talking about race and ethnicity at the company level is divisive because it leads to a complicated can of worms.”
Yet they constantly do so without making any systemic changes. I wrote about this last summer when many companies, in response to the George Floyd protests, pushed forward many statements in support.
“If Tim Cook makes a special move which is seen as conciliatory to Blacks in the US, it will be criticized for making a political move from the US Right.:”
Cook was willing to make that political move by not releasing a jailbroken version, as I wrote in the article. The right pilloried Apple for it, but it was a risk he was willing to take.
“Then, its critics in China will ask it to make a conciliatory move to Uyghurs in China, which are a persecuted minority, putting it at loggerheads with the Chinese government. China is its second biggest market after the US, and all its iPhones and Macs are made in China. It cannot afford to make this move.”
This is a rhetorical distraction from the central argument from Apple that it made in the article — that Apple, despite showing earlier political courage, refuses to do so despite its technology being key to the rise of the #blacklivesmatter movement. Furthermore, your first premise does not flow logically into the second. There is no evidence that by taking a stance for #blacklivesmatter, that Apple would then be drawn into making statements toward other persecuted minorities. When Apple spoke up regarding privacy, was it then pressured to make statements about privacy in other areas of American or international contention?
The rhetorical distraction you made — and I don’t think it was intentional — is known as the “whataboutism” move within anti-racist circles. What that means is that I spent a great deal of time curating evidence and organizing it into a narrative and argument. And instead of engaging on that premise, you bring it something extra (your views on how China is deeply embedded within Apple’s supply chain and production) that prevents you from challenging my story on the presented merits. If you have a problem with my evidence, then attack it. If my argument, which flows from the evidence, is illogical, then point out the inconsistencies. But don’t bring in other stuff that negates the focus on Black Lives and how Apple is failing to seize the moment.