There Are No Girls on the Internet - Big Tech and Their Responses to Black Lives Matter

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

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 [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Wake of the murders of unarmed black people like Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd, tech companies change their logos to black squares and put out statements affirming their commitment to Black Lives Matter. But many of those same companies have spent the last few years,

pretending like 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 17-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 17,700 times on Facebook, including being shared by 291 public groups and pages with more than 3.9 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 going to lie,

watching all of this unfold was depressing as hell. And it left. me feeling like tech companies have a tight grip on our democracy and our discourse while simultaneously gaslighting us by telling us their platforms are apolitical and neutral. Which doesn't make any sense at all. The decisions that tech leaders make, from what they do or don't allow on 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,

and displacement is a tragedy. That's Catherine Bracey, speaking at the PDF conference. Catherine is a civic technologist, and instead of just accepting that tech companies have to make inequality worse, she asked, why couldn't we build a tech-driven economy that works for everyone instead? She co-founded the tech equity collaborative

and organized as tech companies to make communities more equitable. In a recent piece for TechCrunch, she urged tech leaders to move beyond the statement and take more meaningful action. writing, staying out of it is a cop-out. Staying out of it leads to platform as being used to harm marginalized 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. 7 p.m. percue. 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 in Lafayette 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 immoral 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, Catherine 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 of the sidelines and into the game. How did you get started working in tech? It was a little bit of an accident. I graduated into a post-9-11 world where the economy was not great. I thought at the time I wanted to be a journalist and had a pretty unfortunate internship experience at a local news station in Boston. And 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 want to do with their life, decided I was going to go to law school. but I hadn't taken the LSATs or anything, so I needed to study up.

And so I decided I was going to work in some legal arena for a year while I studied for the LSATs and go from there. And the job I ended up landing in was a very low-level admin role at a place called the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. And I at that point realized that 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 I really thought that that was a critical piece of, you know, a healthy democracy. and I wanted to be a part of that. 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. You know, these were back in the days when we thought that the internet was going to 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 so that's where I decided I wanted to be. Catherine'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 re-election campaign in 2012, a 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 in tech back to tough issues like power and inequality.

After Trump was elected, she started the initiative, tech resistance, a hub to harness the tech world's 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, you know, obviously that was political organizing, but it was still pretty, you know, mainstream, I guess I would say. And then at Code for America, the work was very 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. We 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. It's one of the reasons I ended up leaving Code for America, but I, you know, I knew I wanted to take the work to be a little bit more, I don't know, radical is 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 in 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 too. 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. And that's been pretty exciting to see. So, you know, I'm optimistic about our ability to really move the rank and file of the tech community to a place where we are really getting into some of the deeper, more structural issues behind 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 file employees are getting more and more involved. You know, because they're comfortable. I, 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. And, you know, the richer you are, the higher up the hierarchy you are in the, in the, 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. And so it's, you know, it's difficult for them to get it. 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 problem. are and how tech contributed to them, that's going to implicate the people who got rich off of it. And people don't like to be implicated. You know, they want to be given invitations to participate in a way that's hopeful. And, you know, it's just a lot harder 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 camera. 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 a say in how it's used. And even as Amazon General Counsel David Zabloskey 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 at Amazon warehouses due to COVID-19. In a leaked memo, Siblaski 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 walkout, which the verge called the most significant collective worker action in the company's 15-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 at 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 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, you know, a pretty promising results is that a very powerful constituency that tech companies have to answer to are their employees. And so if we can get them sufficiently organized, then maybe that's a lever that we can use to exert influence

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 going to, 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 going to 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. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in. Your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yard's, but they're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

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historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. SportsSlice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsClyce on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelife-Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body.

having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 and respect in the technology space, hosting initiatives in 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-led project as a kind of charity. Some of it 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 a 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 with power, money, and resources truly want to help, it might involve putting themselves in uncomfortable positions

that directly challenge or implicate them. In the last few weeks of momentum around Black Lives Matter, I've seen so many well-intentioned white people that I really like and 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 as a kind of charity.

It's still sort of rooted in this place of white benevolence. Or like they're giving you a gift to 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 think about it is like when you look at those well-meaning but maybe like kind of fucked up offers of help, oftentimes what you read between the lines is like, I'm willing to do a thing that doesn't challenge my power. So like I will mentor you, but it doesn't, but like I'm still above you, like a mentor mentee kind of thing. Or I will invest in your company, but like, I'm investing. You know, like, there's something in it for me. When you start talking about the solutions that are really going to break down structural inequity, it requires that people give something up. And, you know, it doesn't

need to be 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, you know, offers of help to the like what is going to make meaningful structural change asks, then you start getting hard nose or getting ignored. And these are things like we're working on a ballot initiative to reform the property tax code and the corporate property 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. 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 40 years ago. It was very explicitly racist and defunded all of these services that would have helped. black families 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, it 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 without really being able to articulate why. And those are the kinds of things that, and that's even one that is actually for a bunch reasons I won't get into does actually benefit the tech industry because they're a newer, you know, sector than 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 it 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. Bold disclosure, I worked on Medium's politics team and had a good experience there. Catherine felt uncomfortable with the idea of Kaepernick joining the board. Capernick 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 of technology, media, and inclusion? Yeah, I mean, I found that just really, and I couldn't, I wasn't. I wasn't sure I could articulate why it rubbed me the wrong way at the time.

But yeah, I mean, it's like he doesn't have any experience. 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 experience in media and technology who would be way more relevant, bring way more relevant experience to the board. And it, you know, the implicit, the thing I 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. But, you know, we're not willing to do the thing that would like actually create equity. And we've seen this for that, you know, the last hundred years in Hollywood and elsewhere, it's like black celebrities are, you know, get a pass. And that allows white people, white people in power to kind of say, yeah, we've done the thing. See, I've got my black friend. And, you know, Jack Dorsey, love him. I think his, the commitments he's making lately are great, a really great stuff forward. But like, and the, you know, transparency he's doing around his giving is great. But like the transparency around

his 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 nuanced 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. 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

shitting on us still. And, you know, so I don't want it to be like, you know, everything's 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 out that 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. 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 girls on the internet after this quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yard. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying,

and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real.

From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sportslice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsSlic on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program.

I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. Technology isn't neutral and it isn't apolitical. 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's even worse to watch them use that lie that their platforms are a political to avoid accountability and justify their own silent 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 heads out of the sand and use their power to support true racial and economic equity. We're going to link to your piece in the show notes. I hope everybody reads it because it is a word.

You definitely had time. It was Friday morning and I was like, you know what? I got it. I have some things. So how have tech leaders been able to get away with framing their technology and employees? 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 surprised. And actually, I have a beef with a lot of the activist community that they're focused so much on Facebook, you know, on getting Mark Zuckerberg to do something differently when really this needs to be a public policy conversation and they should be banging down the doors of every congressperson asking them what they're going to do to regulate companies like Facebook. But, you know, I will say, and 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, you know, the, was the Mike Tyson quote, was 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, shit starts, it just amplifies all the other shit 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 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 the depth of their understanding of how power dynamics work is, very superficial. 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 and companies, you know, the companies who have lived it. But also, 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, maybe he starts changing

his mind or at least responding to a different set of incentives than he has been responding to. So, yeah, I mean, A, we need to use our political power to put pressure on regulators. And be, you know, we need to look at folks who work in the companies 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. What would it look like for these tools and platforms to be built with a quality in mind? Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit hard to, it's very intangible, right? So it's hard to explain implicit bias to people.

It's kind of the same way. Like, 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. And I feel like in the product decision-making cycle, there's some things that just aren't anticipated that not like they're actively making bad decisions. They're not actively setting out to screw people over. 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.

We're like, wait a minute, let's run this through a process that might help us see our blind spots, but also have. those ethical frameworks sit within this applied, you know, real world situation, right? So if you're building tools that are going to create workplace efficiency, well, maybe you should like, and those are going to be in the hands of, like, say, a UPS driver, like, this is going to make your route better. So, like, maybe you should sit with a UPS driver and, like, understand. I feel like a lot of those companies don't care, but, 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?

And so it's just like things like that. Like maybe we should, you know, would it occur to you in the product planning meeting? Huh, maybe we should like sit with the drivers and see how this is going to 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. Those are the kinds of experiences we need to create for folks. And that's a very, 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 to just deepen your empathy? 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. And they can't really be blamed for that. 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, a lot of people put us in the like diversity and inclusion bucket

and that kind of robs me in the wrong way, 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 fuck up. Right. And that and then it pushes the arrest, the white folks and the privileged folks, it pushes them into a 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. 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.

And the way that folks who come from a place of privilege are going to take action is going to be different. And so we need to from the folks who are underrepresented, 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. And so that's got to look different than, you know, just a diversity and 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 by it.

Right. And then it becomes, you know, extra work. I mean, I have been in that position, too, the only person of color on a leadership team and an organization of 15 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 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 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 meaningfully understand experiences around inequality. And we need more people like that, working as to do. 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 pervasive kind of like unspoken caste system within the tech world. I do think it's starting to change in the same, sort of on that 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 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 going to um start to understand that like even if you're technically

you also have to have a more well-rounded set of skills and that the stuff that you're bringing to the table as a communicator, you know, is as just as important, if not more than the writing the good code. So I'm starting, I feel a lot better about that than I did say two or three years ago. And that also, like, I do think it's important for folks 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 code in order to break into tech. And you really don't.

Like, if you're a really, 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. 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 our people who bring a whole bunch of different kinds of skill sets to the table. 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 in a tech 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, you know, we obviously organized tech workers. So we ask 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 they're in a non-technical role, they'll say, no, I'm not a tech worker. It's like, no, you absolutely are a tech worker. You are critical to, like, the product getting out into the world.

So, yeah, it is a weird 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 biracial, my dad's black, and my mom's white, and they got married in 1971. And that was pretty early. They were the hipsters of interracial couples, really. That was like four years after the loving's case. So we both were alienated from both sides of the family for a while,

ended up getting closer with my dad's side over time. But it was still kind of like I don't fit in either one of these spaces. You know, I think this is something we don't talk about a lot is like the biracial black experience. 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 from multiple perspectives naturally. And I can do, I feel like I can fluidly move between different kinds of, 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?

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, was like bring two sides together. You know, I'm like the physical manifestation of that. So, you know, it's been, at some point I'll have enough therapy and we'll write a book and, 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. You know, I've recently started, and I think the TechCrunch article, maybe it was the first place I said this. I always feel, 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 of my identity.

So I've now started just saying I'm a biracial black woman. And that feels like, you know, I can be both of those things at the same time and figuring out how those identities sit together is, you know, an important thing for me. And I think makes the work better. I don't know if that was like me offloading a bunch of like psychology on to you. So I appreciate you being my therapist for the day. It's depressing as it's been to watch racial animosity intensive vinyl last few weeks. 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 represented in this industry that is really central to building the public square. And so that's, you know, why I do the work that I do. To learn more about Catherine's work with tech equity, collaborate, dot org, got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a

of IHart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHartRadio, check out the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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