5.8.2.2.2. We Don’t Hire Blacks by Aaron Dewitt (我们不雇用黑人, 2020)

This amazing video was originally uploaded to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d81mEbL8Yw8 by Aaron DeWitt (The Chinese Tea) on 2020-09-21 but it was down as of 2021-06-21. Last Wayback Machine (web.archive.org, 网站时光机) archive as of that date: 2020-11-03.

The video description was:

This is an exposé of racist companies that I worked for, some of which operate in the United States and Canada, all of which are headquartered in China.

In it, Aaron describes his experiences with the recruitment team of one of his former employers, an unnamed "Chinese ed-tech company in Beijing", for which he worked in human resources. In another also deleted video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6uFGGunRxc he mentions that he cannot mention the name of the company because he was under NDA.

Notably, in that video, he gives several screenshots of Google Sheets spreadsheets with explicitly racist reasons why people were not hired, one of which is reproduced here. Examples of such reasons include:

  • "Skin color"

  • "Non-Caucasian"

  • "62-years old"

  • "elderly"

  • "Hispanic"

He mentions:

On the first day at this company, I had an orientation with my supervisor Ng, who is the head of the training department. She told me:

"We hire blacks. Obama black is OK. But no darker, or they’ll scare the kids. The kids will think they’re some kind of monster!"

which would lead parents to just go to a competitor instead. Then he mentions about the Google Sheets documents that:

They shared this document with the entire management team in Beijing, and everyone not only knew, but expected this discrimination to take place.

In the video he also explains how he once went to a 2 week holiday to Bali, and when he came back with his skin darker due to the tanning, he was reprimanded by a manager, who said that he could not work looking like that.

He explicitly mentions later the video that VIPKid, for which he did not work, is a similar company in nature, but not the one he is talking about.

Wikipedia mentions about VIPKid

Its online-classroom portal enables students to receive 25-minute English language lessons from fluent English-speaking teachers.

In March 2019, VIPKid fired two American teachers for discussing the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 (六四事件) and Taiwan (Republic of China, 台湾, 中華民國) with their students in China. Teachers have also reported witnessing child abuse when teaching lessons, but they found little recourse to report such issues.

As of 2021-05-05, the banner image of VIPKid’s website explicitly includes a token black person: https://web.archive.org/web/20210505045920/https://www.vipkid.com/, so their PR department clearly caught air of this. This is however only a frontend for hiring American teachers. The real Chinese client website https://www.vipkid.com.cn/, rest assured, contains no black people: (archive)

Wikipedia links as one of its sources to this 2019 article https://www.wired.com/story/when-online-teaching-job-becomes-window-child-abuse/ which mentions:

Of the dozens of companies vying to cash in on the tutoring business, it is by far the largest, having raised $825 million in investment capital since its founding. Other major players include Qkids, Magic Ears, DaDa, and Gogokid, all based in China.

so it is overwhelmingly likely that one of those is the one mentioned Aaron is talking about:

  • Qkids

  • Magic Ears

  • DaDa

  • Gogokid

Later in the video Aaron mentions that the company in question "basically went bankrupt".

He also mentions that he later worked for offcn, which is run by the Chinese Government, and they would absolutely not hire black people.

We don t hire blacks by Aaron DeWitt 2020
Figure 36. Screenshot of the video We Don’t Hire Blacks by Aaron Dewitt (我们不雇用黑人, 2020) showing a list racist job interview candidate rejection reasons.