We Must End Racial Injustice & White Supremacy — Our Commitment

Instrumentl stands in solidarity with the Black community and is committed to the fight for Black equity.

The unacceptable injustices facing the Black community in America aren’t new. Black Americans have never not been experiencing systemic racism.

Black voices like Lori Lakin Hutcherson, Kimberly Jones, Ramesh A Nagarajah, and Tiffani Ashley Bell have reminded us that we need to turn the mirror to ourselves and see how we can go beyond making a public statement.

Even as a small company, we are responsible for contributing to the system and we need to look inward to see how we can improve as a community and as a company. For instance, we are a small team of women, queers and POC but we recognize that we don’t have any Black teammates yet. We can do better.

With this post we want to share our commitment to do better.

Our 3 commitments:

1. We will raise our voice in opposition to police brutality against the Black community (including the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor), white supremacy, and racial injustice, now and in the future.
2. We will lay a strong foundation of anti-racist culture at Instrumentl through ongoing introspection and learning.
3. We will do our part to increase economic opportunity for Black individuals and businesses. This means hiring Black employees and funding Black entrepreneurs.

Here are the immediate actions we’re taking:

For #1. We’ve put a banner on our homepage letting it be known where we stand (which links to this Medium post). We’ll be looking for future opportunities to raise our voices and elevate Black voices as we continue the fight against racism.

For #2. My teammates and I will be reading How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, paid for by Instrumentl. We’ve created a Slack channel where we can post thoughts, questions, and reflections. We’ll be using this Book Club Kit to guide our discussion, and we’ll continue to listen to and learn from Black leaders who have done the groundwork for us to learn from.

For #3. We’ve committed to researching, implementing, and following best practices for finding & hiring diverse candidates, starting with our next hire.

Instrumentl has also made donations to Black Voters Matter, National Institution for Criminal Justice Reform, and /dev/color. If you’re looking to donate, we found these resources to be helpful.

We know this is a lifelong effort and there aren’t any quick fixes.

We know that we are just getting started.

This post is a public commitment of Instrumentl’s ongoing efforts to do better.

Black Lives Matter.

Gauri Manglik, Instrumentl CEO