Transcript of episode 011 -

Big Tech and their responses to Black Lives Matter

Bridget Todd (00:04):

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

Bridget Todd (00:12):

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is, There Are No Girls on the Internet. In the 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 that their platforms and technology have nothing to do with politics and pretty much just trying to stay out of it.

Bridget Todd (00:39):

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 "call to arms" in violation of Facebook's own policies.

Bridget Todd (01:03):

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.

Bridget Todd (01:38):

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 that our 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.

Bridget Todd (02:10):

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 could there be such a huge disconnect and what will it take for them to meaningfully get into the game?

“…the internet has the potential to be the most democratizing platform, communications platform in human history”

Catherine Bracy (02:28):

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.

Bridget Todd (02:47):

That's Catherine Bracy speaking at the PDF Conference. Catherine is a civic technologist. 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?

Bridget Todd (03:01):

She co-founded the Tech Equity Collaborative and organizes 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 platforms being used to harm marginalized people. While tech leaders look the other way and do nothing."

Reporter (03:26):

The White House is saying that those authorities moved in on those peaceful protesters in order to enforce Washington DC's 7:00 PM curfew.

Donald Trump (03:34):

I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.

Bridget Todd (03:41):

I live in DC, 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 amoral tech leaders and how they've contributed to the climate that has led us to all of this.

Bridget Todd (04:10):

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.

Bridget Todd (04:28):

How did you get started working in tech?

Catherine Bracy (04:31):

Oh, 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. At that point 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. So I decided I was going to work in some legal arena for a year while I studied for the LSAT and go from there. 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.

Catherine Bracy (05:33):

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. I really thought that that was a critical piece of a healthy democracy and I wanted to be a part of that. And that over the course of the first decade of this millennium, the internet became the place where that was actually happening and happening actually in a really exciting way. These were back in the days when we thought that the internet was going to fix all of our democratic woes and break down all these barriers to entry to the conversation for people who had been left out. So that's where I decided I wanted to be.

Bridget Todd (06:31):

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.

Catherine Bracy (07:04):

Yeah. I had been doing ... I had started obviously with the Obama campaign and obviously that was political organizing, but it was still pretty mainstream, I guess I would say. And then at Code for America, the work was very focused on the administration of government. It didn't deal at all with sort of political power or 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 power dynamics and how that impacted our work. It's one of the reasons I ended up leaving Code for America. 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.

Bridget Todd (07:56):

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.

Catherine Bracy (08:10):

It was hard to get tech people to really understand that because they didn't have a lived experience with it. These are comfortable people who come from privilege and they get it when it's 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.

Catherine Bracy (08:36):

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. That's been pretty exciting to see. So 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.

Bridget Todd (09:08):

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?

Catherine Bracy (09:21):

You know, because they're comfortable. They're not ... Like I said, 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 it's going to directly affect them, so they're motivated and incentivized to be engaged on a certain issue. We're trying to organize people who are comfortable and they're at a remove from the pain. And the richer you are, the higher up the hierarchy you are in the tech sector, the further away from pain you are. So it's just hard for them to understand that life experience, because they don't have it. They don't have a lot of exposure to-

People want ways to participate that’s helpful. It’s difficult to make change from a place of shame

Catherine Bracy (10:00):

... 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 difficult for them to get it. And I also think it's hard just psychologically for people to be implicated. If 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 got rich off of it. And people don't like to be implicated, they want to be given invitations to participate in a way that's hopeful and... 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 productive action from that.

Bridget Todd (10:51):

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 00:11:33] and [Brown 00:11:34] people. And until very recently, Amazon sold facial recognition technology to police departments, technology that according to a US 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.

Bridget Todd (11:53):

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 Zapolsky, hit send on a memo affirming the company support of Black Lives Matter, he didn't mention that just a few weeks earlier the company had fired [Chris Smalls 00:02:19], a Black former Amazon employee, who spoke out against unsafe conditions at Amazon warehouses due to COVID-19. In a leaked memo, Zapolsky called him not smart and not articulate. After Trump quoted Miami police chief and noted racist, Walter Headley, 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.

Bridget Todd (12:54):

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?

Catherine Bracy (13:34):

Well, that is the million dollar question and it is something that we are working on every day at TechEquity is just, how do we create the momentum, the political will among decision makers? I mean, our theory of change and the hypothesis that we're testing and have seen a pretty promising result is that the... 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 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, this is a shared problem we want to solve this and we're going to 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... We want to go work for companies that are doing it better, so we're going to vote with our feet kind of thing.

Bridget Todd (14:42):

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 and respect in the technology space, hosting initiative 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 fraud. Can I be critical of an offer that was made with good intentions but actually kind of supports a system that assumes Black voices are charity cases, it's uncomfortable. And I guess that's sort of the point. We need to be willing to be uncomfortable.

Bridget Todd (15:40):

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, 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 helping you out to sort of alleviate their guilt around white supremacy. And 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.

Catherine Bracy (16:29):

Yeah. I mean, I like to think of it as great, that's a really good first step it is hardly enough. And another way to think about it is, when you look at those well-meaning but maybe kind of fucked up offers of help, oftentimes what you read between the lines is, I'm willing to do a thing that doesn't challenge my power. So, I will mentor you, but it doesn't... But I'm still above you, a mentor-mentee kind of thing. Or, I will invest in your company, but I'm investing, 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, and it doesn't need to be giving something up in a way that disempowers them or makes them poor, but they are going to have to release the stranglehold, right? 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.

Catherine Bracy (17:36):

So this is like the tech crunch piece that I wrote that was laying out some of those options. And we have found that when you move past the sort of charitable offers of help to the, what is going to make meaningful structural change asks, then you start getting hard noes or getting ignored. And these are things 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 that 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 let go... Lay down for that?

Catherine Bracy (18:35):

And the answer has been, [inaudible 00:00:18:37]. It sounds like... I get it, but it's not really ringing my bell. Or, 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 of reasons I won't get into, does actually benefit the tech industry because they are a newer sector, and some of the companies who will be paying more in taxes. So, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than to look at it as 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.

Bridget Todd (19:25):

In the wake of calls for racial justice, online publishing platform, Medium, announced Colin Kaepernick would be joining their board. Full 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. 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 at technology, media, and inclusion?

Catherine Bracy (19:51):

Yeah. I mean, I found that just really... And I couldn't... I wasn't sure I could articulate why it rubbed me the wrong way at the time, but I mean, it's... He doesn't have any experience, for all the good he's done he's a...

Catherine Bracy (20:00):

Many experience. For all the good he's done, he's a football player and that's fine. He may actually end up being a great board member, but why did you go to him when there are all these people with black folks who have experience in media and technology, who would way more relevant, bring way more relevant experience to the board. And the implicit, the thing I heard implicitly, it was like, "Well, we had to go to this guy because we couldn't find anyone else that could fill that seat." And that was the thing that I found kind of offensive. And there's also this thing of like, "Well, famous black people are fine, but we're not willing to do the thing that would like actually create equity." And we've seen this for the last hundred years in Hollywood and elsewhere.

Catherine Bracy (20:55):

It's like black celebrities get a pass and that allows white people in power to kind of say, "Yeah, we've done the thing. See, I've got my black friend." Jack Dorsey, love him, I think the commitments he's making lately are great, a really great step forward, and the transparency he's doing around his giving is great, but the transparency around his giving has shown that basically the black organizations he's giving to are just people Jay Z and Beyonce told him to give money to. And how is that meritocratic or that's not helping the overall question of equity.

Bridget Todd (21:36):

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?

Catherine Bracy (21:48):

Yeah. And I think it's like, "Oh, you're dogging on him." But also like, "Gosh, nothing's ever good enough. We put somebody black on the board and now you're shitting on us still." And so I don't want it to be like 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 there. "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 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.

Technology isn't neutral and it isn't apolitical.

Bridget Todd (22:32):

More There Are No Girls on the Internet after this quick break. 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 apolitical to avoid accountability and justify their own silence as our 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 have time.

Catherine Bracy (23:28):

It was a Friday morning and I was like, "You know what? I have some things to say."

Bridget Todd (23:34):

So how have tech leaders been able to get away with framing their technology and platforms as apolitical?

Catherine Bracy (23:40):

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 activists community that they're focused so much on Facebook, 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 Congress person asking them what they're going to do to regulate companies like Facebook. But I will say, and this might be controversial, but I think there's some truth in that. It is true that these platforms in a vacuum are neutral, but it's just like the ... What was the Mike Tyson quote of like, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." They're all neutral platforms until people get on them.

Catherine Bracy (24:28):

And then once you have more than like five or 10 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 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? We're not facilitating that. And they don't understand the level of the depth of their understanding of how power dynamics work is very superficial. And so they don't get it 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 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.

Catherine Bracy (25:28):

And so 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, 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 B, 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 that these tools are built in a more ethical way.

Bridget Todd (26:08):

What would it look like for these tools and platforms to be built with the quality in mind?

Catherine Bracy (26:12):

Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit hard to ... It's very intangible, right? It's hard to explain implicit bias to people. It's kind of the same way. You can't measure what you can't see kind of thing. And you don't really ... 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 it's not like they're actively making bad decisions. They're not actively setting out to screw people over, but they just can't anticipate that their tools might be used in that way. And so one of the things is having these ethical frameworks where 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 this applied real world situation."

Catherine Bracy (27:11):

So if you're building tools that are going to create workplace efficiency, well, maybe you should, and those are going to be in the hands of, let's say, a UPS driver. This is going to make your route better. So maybe you should sit with a UPS driver and understand. I feel like a lot of those companies don't care. They're not talking to the driver because the person that's paying for the thing is actually the driver's boss. And so it's just things like that. Would it occur to you in the product planning meeting and maybe we should like sit with the drivers and see how this is going to go and take the way that they use the tool into account or how it screws up their life.

Catherine Bracy (27:49):

They can't plan 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 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 basic. And we do a lot of that work. I've got story after story of just 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.

Bridget Todd (28:34):

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.

Catherine Bracy (28:45):

Yeah. And I think a lot of people put us in the diversity and inclusion bucket and that kind of rubs me the wrong way, not because I don't think that that's important work. 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. And then it pushes the rest, 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 that box checked." And it's actually, that's not okay.

Catherine Bracy (29:37):

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 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 we have to meet them where they are. And so that's got to look different than just-

Catherine Bracy (30:00):

... Get them where they are. That's got to look different than just a diversity and inclusion program.

Bridget Todd (30:07):

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 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.

Catherine Bracy (30:23):

Right. And then it becomes extra work. I have been in that position too, the only person of color on a leadership team at an organization of 15 people on it, and always had to be the one who was bringing it up at the staff meetings and it's just like emotionally draining. And then you feel like, I don't want to be seen for just that. 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 an organizational issue and not just put it on the black person to deal with? I've been there. So I think that's why I feel like the approach at Tech Equity is like, okay, yes, representation. And also, all these white folks have to get in on it too.

Having more people with a diversity of life experiences and backgrounds working in tech is one way we can address inequality

Bridget Todd (31:06):

We shouldn't just be fighting for a more inclusive tech sector because it's the right thing to do. Having more people with a 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 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 "tech people."

Catherine Bracy (31:42):

Yeah. I think that that's a really pervasive unspoken caste system within the tech world. I do think it's starting to change, along the same trajectory as the platforms are neutral thing. People understand that that's not true. And I think people also are starting to understand that the humanities side of building technology is just as, or it may potentially even more important than the actual writing of the code.

Catherine Bracy (32:17):

My feeling is, that's going to start to change a lot, and people are going to start to understand that even if you're a technical, you also have to have a more well rounded set of skills, in that the stuff that you're bringing to the table as a communicator is as just as important, if not more than writing the good code.

Catherine Bracy (32:43):

I feel a lot better about that than I did, say, two or three years ago. And that also, I do think it's important for folks who want to get into tech. I feel like a lot of people from underrepresented communities who don't have traditional educational backgrounds feel like they have to learn how to code in order to break into tech. And you really don't. If you're a really kick ass retail manager, you can work at a tech 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 learning how to code, there's like a chilling effect for people who bring a whole bunch of different kinds of skill sets to the table, and we need folks to put themselves forward and apply for those kinds of jobs.

Bridget Todd (33:31):

Yeah. I think we need a massive cultural change around who feels qualified to go into tech, and who feels qualified to take up space and call themselves a person in tech. Who has the authority to have an opinion or be a decision maker.

Catherine Bracy (33:45):

We obviously organize 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 nontechnical 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 the product getting out into the world. So yeah, that is a weird dynamic that we're hoping to change.

Bridget Todd (34:16):

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.

Catherine Bracy (34:35):

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 four years after the Loving's case. 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. I think this is something we don't talk about a lot, is the biracial black experience. And how that's played out in my life has really been an ability to be both and all the time. So I see things from multiple perspectives naturally, and I feel like I can fluidly move between different kinds of cultural contexts more easily than some other folks might be able to do. And that, for me, I'm always looking to, how do I carve out the common ground here? How do I build the bridge? How do I create the common understanding? Because I felt like I always had to do that growing up. Bring two sides together. I'm like the physical manifestation of that.

Catherine Bracy (36:02):

So at some point I'll have enough therapy and will write a book and be able to actually speak more intelligently about what that has meant, that biracial black existence has meant for just my identity in the way that it's made my work richer. I've recently started, and I think the Tech Crunch article maybe was the first place I said this. I always feel 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 I can be both of those things at the same time, and figuring out how those identities sit together is an important thing for me, and I think makes the work better. I don't know if that was me offloading a bunch of psychology [inaudible 00:07:10]. I appreciate you being my therapist for the day.

Bridget Todd (37:15):

As depressing as it's been to watch racial animosity intensify 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.

Catherine Bracy (37:45):

That's why it's important to have 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 why I do the work that I do.

Bridget Todd (38:01):

To learn more about Catherine's work with Tech Equity, visit TechEquityCollaborative.org.

Bridget Todd (38:11):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello@tangoti.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoti.com. There Are No Girls On The Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael [Amato 00:38:30] is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (38:34):

If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:38:55]