Big Tech and Their Responses to Black Lives Matter

Published Sep 1, 2020, 6:50 PM

Everything feels awful right now, but it's not all doom and gloom. Employees at big tech companies like Facebook are pushing platforms to be better and they might just be one of our best resources. Catherine Bracy, founder of the TechEquity Collaborative, explains how tech staffers are pushing companies to move beyond a Black Lives Matter statement, and make real change. 

Read Catherine's TechCrunch piece: https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/11/tech-companies-its-time-to-show-that-black-lives-really-matter-to-you/

Learn more about the TechEquity Collaborative: https://techequitycollaborative.org/

Send us an email at Hello@Tangoti.com 

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There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of My Heart Radio and Unboss Creative, I'm Brigittad and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet. In the wake of the murders of armed black people like Brianna Taylor, Tony mcdaide, and George Floyd, test companies changed their logos to Black Squares and put out statements up farming their commitment to Black lives Matter. But many of those same companies have spent the last few years pretending that their platforms and technology have nothing to do with politics and pretty much just trying to stay out of it. Last week, two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin were shot and killed by Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen year old vigilante who traveled to the protests with an illegal weapon. The Verge reported that Facebook allowed a self proclaimed militia group calling itself the Kenosha guard and used its Facebook page to issue a quote call to arms, in violation of Facebook's own policies. Now, this group remained online even after at least two people reported it before the shootings, and even after the incident. The Guardian reports that many people used Facebook to spread messages supportive of the suspected murderer. One fundraiser they report was shared more than seventeen thousand, seven hundred times on Facebook, including being shared by two hundred ninety one public groups and pages with more than three point nine million aggregate followers. And all of this happened after Facebook said it was working to enforce its policy banning content that praises, supports, or represents mass shooters. So I'm not gonna lie. Watching all of this unfold was depressing as hell, and it left me feeling like tech companies have a tight grip in our democracy and our discourse while simultaneously gas lighting us by telling us their platforms are a political and neutral which doesn't make any sense at all. The decisions that tech leaders make from what they do or don't allow their platforms to the money they pay in property taxes has a very very real impact on the lives of black, brown, and other marginalized communities. So how have tech leaders been able to get away with sitting on the sidelines for so long? And how can they put out statements affirming the lives of marginalized people to whom their own unwillingness to be active allies have hurt for so long, How can there be such a huge disconnect and what will it take for them to meaningfully get into the game. I know that the Internet has the potential to be the most democratizing platform communications platform in human history, and so the industry that's growing up on top of it, the fact that it is driving so much inequality and displacement is a tragedy. That's Katherine and Bracy speaking at the PDF conference. Katherine is a civic technologist, and instead of just accepting that tech companies have to make inequality worse, she asked why couldn't be able to tech driven economy that works for every Instead, she co founded the Tech Equity Collaborative and organized as tech companies to make communities more equitable. In a recent piece for tech Crunch, she urged tech leaders to move beyond the statement and take more meaningful action, writing staying out of it as a cop out. Staying out of it leads to platforms being used to harm marginalize people while tech leaders look the other way and do nothing. The White House is saying that those authorities moved in on those peaceful protesters in order to enforce Washington d C. Seven pm perfume, I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters. I live in d C. And while I was getting ready to speak with Catherine, my city was still reeling from watching the Trump administration shoot tear gas at protesters and Laffiette Square. When I saw that kind of chaos happening in my own backyard, I also saw the ways that platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gotten us to this place. So I was good and angry and really ready to spend our talk screaming about a moral tech leaders and how they've contributed to the climate that has led us to all of this. But I didn't really get to have that conversation. Most tech workers, Katherine says, actually want to contribute to things like equality and justice, and part of her work is making the pathways to getting them there clear, to get them off the sidelines and into the game. How did you get started working in tech? Uh? It was a little bit of an accident. Um. I uh, graduated into a post nine eleven world where, um, you know, the economy was not great. Um. I thought at the time I wanted to be a journalist and had a pretty unfortunate internship experience UM at a local news station in Boston, and UM at that point kind of had a crisis of what am I going to do with my life and decided, like any college student who doesn't know what they're what they want to do with their life, UM decided I was going to go to law school. UM, but I hadn't you know, taken the lstats or anything, so I needed to study up. And so I decided I was going to work you know, in some legal arena for a year while I studied for the ELF stats and UM and go from there. And the job I ended up landing in was a very low level admin role at a place called the Brookman Center for Internet and Society UM at Harvard Law School. And UM, I at that point realized that UM my desire and passion about journalism was really a desire and passion about how citizens access to the information that they needed to make informed decisions in a democracy, and UM I really thought that that was a critical piece of UM, you know, healthy democracy, and I wanted to be a part of that UM and that you know, over the course of the first decade of this millennium, the Internet became the place where that was actually happening, and happening in actually a really exciting way. Um. You know, these were back in the days when we thought that the Internet was gonna fix all of our democratic woes and you know, break down all these barriers to entry to the conversation for people who had been left out. And um, and so that's where I decided I wanted to be. Katherine's accidental stumble into the tech world took her to some pretty interesting places. She ran the Technology Field Office in San Francisco on Obama's reelection campaign, in at first of its kind in American politics, and even went on to design Obama's tech policy. She joined Code for America but wanted to continue bringing the focus and tech back to tough issues like power and inequality. After Trump was elected. She's sort of the initiative tech resistance up to Harness the tech world silent majority of workers who wanted to push for social change. Yeah, I mean, you know, I had been doing. I started obviously with the Obama campaign and um, you know, obviously that was political organizing, but it was still pretty um, you know, mainstream, I guess, I would say. And then a Code for America, the work was very um, uh, sort of focused on the administration of government. It didn't deal at all with sort of political power or you know, equity issues or any of that. Um, we kind of kind of stayed away from it and honestly had our head in the sand a little bit about you know, power dynamics and how that impacted our work. Um it's one of the reasons I ended up leaving Code for America. But UM, you know, I knew I wanted to take the work to be a little bit more I don't radical as the right word, but certainly more interrogative of power. Catherine started to see tech employees, folks who tend to be pretty comfortable, getting out of their comfort zones to challenge power dynamics and the tech space and amidst all the darkness that most of us felt in the beginning of the Trump administration, it gave her a little hope. It was hard to get tech people to really understand that because they didn't have a lived experience with it, Like these are comfortable people who come from privilege, and they get it when it's like this thing doesn't work and it should work and it's hurting people that it doesn't work. So I want to fix it, but they don't get it when it's like and there are all these structural dynamics underlying that that make it so it doesn't work, and we need to fix those two UM and So I kind of knew that there was an interest in civic engagement within the tech industry, but I was surprised after the election of how much of it came to the forefront and how much of it was willing to challenge entrenched power structures UM and that's been pretty exciting to see. So, you know, I'm optimistic about our ability to really move UM the rank and file of the community to a place where we are really getting into some of the deeper, more structural issues behind UM the stuff that we're building. So why do you think it's so easy for tech leaders to really not engage when it comes to political or social issues when they actually have so much power and so many resources to make change, and especially as their rank and bile employees are getting more and more involved, you know, because they're comfortable. They're not, like I said, I mean organizing this kind. Usually when people are doing organizing, it's really focused on the people who are most passionate about the issues or they have a lived experience of it, and you know it's going to directly affect them, so they're motivated and incentivized to be engaged on a certain issue. And we're trying to organize people who are comfortable and they're at a remove from the pain UM. And you know, the further the richer you are, the higher up the hierarchy you are in the in the tech sector, the further away from the pain you are. And so it's just hard for them to understand, you know, that life experience because they don't have it. They don't have a lot of exposure to other perspectives and ways of living UM, and so it's you know, it's difficult for them to get it. UH. And I also think it's hard just psychologically for people to be implicated. You know, we're having an analysis of how we got here and what the problems are and how tech contributed to them. That's going to implicate the people who've got rich off of it, UM, And people don't like to be implicated. You know, they want to be UM given invitations to participate in a way that's hopeful, and you know, it's just a lot harder UM if you're if what you're doing is embedding feelings of shame and guilt to get people to move to a place of like productive action from that. In organizing, it's incredibly difficult to make people feel motivated to take productive action from a place of shame. And in this moment of reckoning around racial justice, I think big tech companies have a lot to feel shameful about, even after posting statements supportive of Black Lives matter. It's often the rank and file employees who are pushing tech companies and leaders to be better than they are. For instance, Amazon currently deals with hundreds of law enforcement agencies to share footage from people's ring cameras, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation says allows for residents to make snap judgments about who does and doesn't belong in their neighborhoods and summon police to apprehend them. So obviously not great for black and brown people, and until very recently, Amazon sold facial recognition technology to police departments, technology that, according to a u S National Institutes of Standards and Technology study, is likely to misidentify black people and would unquestionably be used to further over surveil black and brown communities. Amazon only ended that policy after their own employees sent a letter to Amazon higher ups saying they wouldn't contribute to tools that violate human rights and that as ethically concerned Amazonians, they demand a choice in what they build and I say, and how it's used. And even as Amazon General counsel David Zabloski hit send on a memo affirming the company's support of Black Lives Matter, he didn't mention that just a few weeks earlier, the company had fired Chris Small, a black former Amazon employee who spoke out against unsafe conditions that Amazon warehouses due to COVID nineteen an elite memo, Sablotski called him not smart and not articulate. After Trump quoted Miami police chief and noted racist Walter Heatley by posting when the looting starts, the shooting starts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explicitly declined to remove the post, even as his own employees staged a walk out, which The Verge called the most significant collective worker action in the company's fifteen year history. And in light of Kyle Rittenhouse, the alleged murderer we told you about in Kenosha, it was the rank and file Facebook employees who pushed back against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's leadership. Tech employees are a valuable resource for making change of tech companies, and a lot of them are already coming from a place where they don't want to build technology that actively contributes to inequality. So how do we get to a place where tech leaders are listening to the tone set by these employees to move from just making a statement and get them to use their tremendous power to actually protect the communities they say they support and not actually contribute to making our lives more difficult or more dangerous. Well, that is the million dollar question and it is something that we are working on every day at tech Equity, is just how do we create the um momentum, the political will among decision makers, I mean our theory of change. And you know, the hypothesis that we're testing and have seen, um, you know a pretty promising results is that the constitute a very powerful constituency that tech companies have to answer to are their employees um And so if we can get them sufficiently organized, then um, then maybe that's a lever that we can use to exert influence across the across the industry, and I don't even think it needs to be. I think, you know, a lot of the tech organizing we've seen has been very antagonistic, and I think there's a place for that, But I also think there's a place for you know, like this is a shared problem. We want to solve this, and we're gonna, you know, build alternative solutions that show you that there's a way to do this that isn't the way you're doing it. And also we're gonna, like, we want to go work for companies that are doing it better, So we're going to vote with our feet kind of thing. Let's take a quick break and we're back. In addition to statements of support, in the last few weeks, I've seen a lot of people and companies that I like in respect on the technology space, hosted initiative and support of the Black community, offers of mentorship, offers of seed money for black businesses and startups. I want to be clear that I think these offers are coming from the right place and I'm happy to see them, but when you pull them apart, sometimes they can be a little weird, Like the assumption that black folks in tech automatically need white mentorship or framing funding a black lead project is a kind of charity. Some of that just didn't sit right with me, And even that assertion feels fraught. Can I be critical of an offer that was made with good intentions but actually kind of supports the system that assumes black voices or charity cases. It's uncomfortable, and I guess that's sort of the point. We need to be willing to be uncomfortable. If tech leaders of power, money, and resources truly want to help, it might involve putting themselves and uncomfortable positions that directly challenge or implicate them. In the last few weeks momentum around Black Lives Matter, I've seen so many well intentioned white people that I really like in respect reaching out and trying to help. But you know, when you take apart their offers of help, they're actually kind of fucked up, saying things like oh, I'll mentor you, or oh I'll invest in your company, and framing it is a kind of charity. It's still sort of rooted in this place of white benevolence or like they're giving you a gift, helping you out to sort of alleviate their guilt around white supremacy. And you know, I hate picking apart what I think are very well intentioned, well meaning gestures. But if we're not willing to be critical of this kind of thing, we probably won't get anywhere. Yeah, I mean, I like to think of it as like, great, that's a really good first step. It is hardly enough. And another way to um think about it is like when you look at those well meaning but maybe like kind of sucked up offers of help, oftentimes what you read between lines is like I'm willing to do a thing that doesn't challenge my power. Um. So like I will mentor you, um, but it doesn't but like I'm still above you, like a mentor mentee kind of thing. Um. Or I will invest to your company, but like I'm investing you know, like there's something in it for me there. When you start talking about the solutions that are really going to break down structural inequity, it requires that people give something up um. And you know it doesn't need to be um and giving something up in a way that that like disempowers them or like makes them poorer. But they are going to have to release the stranglehold right, like they're going to have to share in order to make the whole greater for everybody, and those kinds of solutions become a much harder ask. So this is like the tech Crunch piece that I wrote that was laying out some of those options. And we have found that like when you move past the sort of charitable um, you know, offers of help to the like what is going to make meaningful structural change asks, then you start getting hard nosed um or getting ignored. And these are things like we're working on a ballot initiative to reform the property tax code and the corporate pretty tax code in California, which has been probably the most fundamental structural flaw in California's economy and the reason why California is the fifth largest economy in the world but has the highest poverty rate in the country. UM. And that's the kind of thing where it's like, Okay, you care about black lives, Well, there's this policy decision we made forty years ago. It was very explicitly racist and defunded all of these services UM that would have helped black families. UM. Over the last several decades. We can undo that. Are you willing to, you know, let go lay down for that, and the answer has been sounds like a you know, I get it, but it's not really ringing my bell, you know, or like we can't that's not the kind of thing we get involved in UM without really being able to articulate why UM. And those are the kinds of things that and that's even one that is actually, for a bunch of reasons I won't get into, does actually benefit the tech industry because they're a newer, uh you know sector UM and some of the companies who would be paying more in taxes. So you know, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than to look at as like a deeply entrenched I mean, this is how deeply entrenched white supremacy is, is that people don't even understand or recognize when it is playing out in these ways of like yes, I will mentor you, but no, I won't put you on my board. In the wake of calls for racial justice, online publishing platform Medium announced Colin Kaepernick would be joining their board. Bull Disclosure I worked on Medium's politics team and have a good experience there. Catherine felt uncomfortable with the idea of Kawepernick joining the board. Kaepernick is great, and his legacy and commitment to racial justice is so clear, but why pick a black celebrity instead of a black person with direct experience and technology, media and inclusion? Yeah, I mean I found that just really and I couldn't I wasn't sure I could articulate why it robbed me the wrong way at the time, But yeah, I mean it's like he doesn't of any experience. He you know, for all the good he's done, he's a football player, and that's fine, Like he may actually end up being a great board member, but why did you go to him? You know when there are all these people with you know, black folks who have experienced in media and technology who would be way more relevant to bring way more relevant experience to the board. And it's, you know, the implicit the thing I've heard implicitly was like, well we had to go to this guy because we couldn't find anyone else that could fill that seat, you know, And that that was the thing that I found kind of offensive. And there's also this thing of like, you know, well, famous black people you know are fine, um, but you know, we're not willing to do the thing that would like actually create equity. And we've seen this for the you know, the last hundred years in Hollywood and elsewhere. It's like black celebrities are you know, get a pass um and that allows white people, white people in power to kind of say, yeah, we've done the things. See I've got my black friend um and you know, Jack Dorsey love him. I think the commitments he's making lately are great, a really great stuff forward, but like, and you know, transparency he's doing around his giving is great, but like the transparency around is giving has shown that basically the black organizations he's giving to are just like people Jay Z and Beyonce told him to give money to. And it's like, how is that, you know, meritocratic or you know, that's not helping the overall question of equity. I want to be clear, it's not like you're crapping on celebrities like Colin Kaepernick, but it really is a nuance question of who do folks feel comfortable lifting up and amplifying and giving a seat at the table, and who does that allow to be shut out? Yeah, and I think it's like, oh, you're you know, you're dogging on him. But also like, gosh, we can't. You know, nothing's ever good enough. You know, we put somebody black on the board and now you're shifting on us still and you know, so I don't want it to be like, you know, uh, everything is bad all the time and you can never do anything that's going to be good enough. I also think that it's important to get after like, yes, that's great, this is a great move in the right direction, but you really need to understand why it's a problematic decision and like make the next decision based on this new understanding of what's going on. He might turn out to be an amazing board member, um, but I think really what's under it's not really about him. It's really about the decision making process. More. There are no growth on the Internet after this quick break and we're back. Technology isn't neutral and it isn't a political and I hate watching tech leaders do gymnastics to avoid having to own up to the fact that their technology has had a real impact on people's lives. It even works to watch them use that lie that their platforms very political to avoid a kind of and justify their own silence as their technology hurts marginalized communities. To be silent is to be complicit. In your Tech Crunch piece, you wrote, silence is complicity. As we've learned over the last five years, almost everything tech companies do is political, whether they like it or not. It's time for them to pull their head out of the sand and use their power to support true racial and economic equity. We're gonna link to your piece in the show notes. I hope everybody reads it because it is a word. You definitely had time Friday morning and I was like, you know what I got? I have something? So how have tech leaders been able to get away with framing their technology and platforms as a political well, I mean, I don't know how they've been able to get away with it. I've been really uh surprised. And actually I have a beef with a lot of the activist community that they're focused so much on Facebook. You know, I'm getting Mark Duckerberg to do something differently when really this needs to be a public policy conversation and they should be banging down the doors of every congress person asking them what they're going to do to regulate companies like Facebook. Um. But you know, I will say this might be controversial, but I think there's some truth in that, Like it is true that these platforms in a vacuum are neutral, and but it's just like the you know, the the Mike Tyson quote is like everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. They're all neutral platforms until people get on them, you know. And then like once you have more than like five or ten people on the internet together, ship starts. It's just amplifies all the other ship that's happening in the world. And so when you have a bunch of people who don't have any life experience, who don't have a wide range of perspectives dealing with a diverse set of people and you know, experiences and all these things, it's a lot easier for them to believe that we can just hide from this because people it's not our issue. If people are going to be people, right, like, we're not facilitating that. And they don't understand, you know, the level of UM, the depth of their understanding of how power dynamics work is very superficial UM, and so they don't get they don't get it. They just because they haven't lived it. And this is one of the reasons why it's important that we have more representation of people in companies, you know, the companies who have lived it. But also, um, we need and this is the work that we're doing. We need people rank and file, people who work in the companies to get out and understand the world more and so create you know, create these opportunities for them to develop some new life experiences. I mean, it might be too late for Mark Zuckerberg, but like I said, if we get the company to the people who work in the company to get it, um, maybe he starts changing his mind or at least responding to a different set of incentives than uh he has been responding to. UM. So yeah, I mean, a we need to use our political power to put pressure on regulators and be um, you know, we need to look at um, folks who work in the companys and how we can create more opportunities for them to understand the world around them. If we're going to expect these tools are built in a more ethical way. Well, but it looked like for these tools and platforms to be built with the quality in mind. Yeah, I mean it's a little bit hard to h It's very intangible, right, Like so we it's it's hard to explain an implicit bias to people. It's it's kind of the same way like you can't you can't measure what you can't see kind of thing, and you don't really you know, it's like the unknown unknowns. You don't know when they're showing up. Um. And I feel like, you know, in the product decision making cycle, there's some things that like just aren't anticipated that. It's not like they're actively making bad decisions. They're not actively you know, setting out to screw people over um, but they just don't can't anticipate that their tools might be used in that way. And so one of the things is like having these ethical frameworks were like wait a minute, let's run this through a process that might help us see our blind spots. But also having those ethical frameworks sit within and supplied um, you know, uh, real world situation. Right. So if you're building tools that are going to create workplace efficiency, um, well maybe you should like and those are gonna be in the hands of like say a UPS driver, Like this is gonna make your route better, so like maybe you should sit with the UPS driver And like understand, I feel like a lot of those companies don't care about you know, they're not talking to the driver because the person that's paying for the thing is actually the driver's boss, right. UM. And so it's just like things like that, like maybe we should you know, it wouldn't occurred to you in the product planning meeting. Oh maybe we should like sit with the drivers and see how this is gonna go and like take their you know, the way that they use the tool into account or how it screws up their life, Like they can't plan, you know, to pick up their kids from school because they don't know what their schedule is going to be whatever that thing is that they wouldn't have known otherwise. UM. Those are the kinds of experiences we need to create for folks. And that's a very UM. I mean then there's just like a broader can we get you out in the world connected to people who aren't like you, um, to just deepen your empathy. Um, that is just like basic and we do a lot of that work. I've got story after story of just like eye opening experiences that tech workers had that might seem obvious to you or I, but they just didn't that's not the world they came from. Um, And they can't really be blamed for that, but but it is their responsibility to kind of expand their horizons. I don't know that I ever would have thought that a major part of making tech more equitable starts with helping tech employees understand empathy and how to understand other people's experiences that they might not be able to identify with. Yeah, and I think, you know, I I a lot of people put us in the like diversity and inclusion bucket, and that that kind of rubs me the wrong way. Um not because I don't think that that's important work, Like I do think representation is extremely important. But oftentimes when we say that, like, well, what we really need are people in the companies who have these lived experiences, the implication is and those people are going to carry the burden for making sure that the company doesn't funk up right and that, and then it pushes the arrest the white folks and the privileged folks. It pushes them into a path of passive role and then it's like, well, we don't have to do anything. This is on the black folks or the Latino folks or the queer folks to figure out. Um or like the CEO can say, well, I hired a diversity director. So like box checked and it's actually that's not okay, right, Like everybody in the company needs to see this as their responsibility. UM, And the way that folks who come from a place of privilege are gonna take action is going to be different. So we need to from the folks who are under represented, right, and so we need to create programming that matches that experience for those folks to make them active participants. But understand, like we have to meet them where they are. UM. And so that's got to look different than you know, just a diversity an inclusion program. I've been the person in a lot of companies whose job it is to give a shit about that kind of thing so that other people don't have to, and it can be like really siloing, isolating work. It was basically my job to care about diversity and inclusion so that the rest of the team didn't have to be burdened about it, right, and then it becomes you know, extra work. I mean, I have been in that position to the only person of color on a leadership team in an organization of fifteen people on it, and always had to be the one who was bringing it up At the staff meetings, and you know, it's just like emotionally draining, and then you want to you feel like I don't want to be seen for just that, Like I'm good at my job and I want to do my job well and be known for that too, And um, why can't we all think of this as like an organizational issue and not just like put it on the black person to deal with? Um, you know, I've been there, so I think that's why I feel like the approach at tech Equity is like, okay, and yes, representation and also all these white folks have to get in on it too. We shouldn't just be fighting for a more inclusive tech sector because it's the right thing to do. Having more people with the diversity of life experiences and backgrounds working in tech is one way we can address inequality because that means that more people will be able to meaningfuly understand experiences around inequality. And we need more people like that working as decision makers around technology and how it impacts our world. How do we make people understand that we all have a stake in this and we all have a voice in this, and we should all be allowed to demand accountability from tech leaders, even if we're not quote unquote tech people. Yeah, I think that that's a really um pervasive kind of like unspoken cast system within the tech world. I do think it's starting to change in the same as sort of on that's along the same trajectory as the like platforms are neutral thing, like people understand that that's not true. And I think people also are starting to understand that, like the humanities side of building technology is just as or potentially even more important than the actual writing of the code. Um And I So I my feeling is that's going to start to change a lot and people are gonna, um start to understand that like, even if you're technical, like you also have to have a more well well well rounded set of skills, and that the stuff that you're bringing to the table as a communicator, um, you know, is as just as important, if not more than the writing the good code. So I'm I'm starting I feel a lot better about that. And I did say two or three years ago, um, and that also, like I do think it's important for folks who who want to get into tech. I feel like a lot of you know, people from underrepresented communities who don't have like traditional educational backgrounds feel like they have to learn how to in order to break into tech, and you really don't. Like, if you're a really, um, you know, kick ass retail manager, you can work at a tech like doing customer success or sales or whatever and get your foot in the door. Um, there's a lot of applicable experience. And I worry that with this focus on like learning how to code, where there's like a chilling effect for people who bring a whole bunch of different kinds of skill sets to the table. Um, And we need folks to like put themselves forward and apply for those kinds of jobs. Yeah, I think we need a massive cultural change around who feels qualified to go an attack and who feels qualified to take up space and you know call themselves a person in tech who has the authority to have an opinion or be a decision maker. We have um uh, you know, we we obviously organized pack workers, So we asked people, are you a tech worker? And I didn't think that was a complicated question before we started asking it. But there are people who work at say Google or somewhere, but if if they're in a non technical role, they'll say, I'm not a tech worker. It's like, no, you absolutely are a tech worker. Uh, you are critical to like the product getting out into the world. UM. So yeah, that it is a weird um dynamic that we're hoping to change. For Catherine, building a more just and equitable world and working for a tech company doesn't have to be in opposition with each other. And she's hopeful that most folks in tech actually want to do both. That emphasis on doing both while building bridges and finding common ground is something that runs deep for her. So I'm bi racial and my dad's black and my mom's white, and um they got married in nine uh uh and we're you know, that was pretty early. They were the hipsters of interracial couples. Really, that was like four years after the Lovin's case. So, um, we both were alienated from both sides of the family for a while. Um ended up getting closer with my dad's side over time. Um, but it was still kind of like, I don't fit in either one of these spaces. Um. You know, I think this is something we don't talk about a lot, is like the biracial black experience. Um. And you know a lot of the work that how that's played out in my life has really been an ability to be both and all the time. Right, So I see things, um from multiple perspectives naturally, and I can do I feel like I can fluidly move between different kinds of um, you know, cultural contexts more easily than some other folks might be able to do. And that for me, I'm always looking to like, how do I carve out the common ground here? How do I build the bridge? How do I create the like common understanding? Because I felt like I always had to do that growing up. UM was like bring two sides together. You know. I'm like the physical manifestation of that. So UM you know it's been It's at some point I'll have enough therapy and we'll write a book and um, you know, be able to like actually speak more intelligently about what that has meant, like that biracial black existence has meant for just my identity in the way that it's made my work richer. Um. You know, I've recently started and I think the tech Crunch article maybe was the first place I said this. I always feel, um, you know, uncomfortable saying that I'm a black woman, even though I am. And I am also uncomfortable saying I'm biracial, because I feel like that leaves out a very important part uh my identity. So I've now started to saying I'm a biracial black woman, um and that that feels like, you know, I can be both of those things at the same time, and and figuring out how those identities sit together. Um, is you know an important thing for me and I think makes makes the work better. UM. So I don't know that that was like me offloading a bunch of like psychology antis. I appreciate you being my my therapist for the day. As depressing as it's been to watch racially animosity intensifying in the last few weeks, talking to Catherine reminded me that it's our diversity that makes us great, and it can be our strength and our salvation. It's something that can give us a little bit of hope for the future. The more people from different backgrounds, with different life experiences who feel included and lifted up in tech, this powerful industry that controls so much of our lives and democracy, the more it can be used as an effective agent of change. That's why it's important to have you know people from all kinds of walks of life. UM represented in this industry that is really central to building the public square UM and so that's you know why I do the work that I do. To learn more about Katherine's work with Tech Equity, visit Tech Equity Collaborative dot org. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tang godi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer, and sound engineer. Michaelmato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Tod. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There Are No Girls on the Internet

Marginalized voices have always been at the forefront of the internet, yet our stories often go over 
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