Writing This is a Revolutionary Act: The Tech & ICT4D Worlds are Ready For a Black Panther Moment
I recently joined Praekelt.org as a Service Designer. Previously, I’ve been in several workplaces that were nowhere near consciously striving to be fair, inclusive and transparent. Many organisations have great intentions on paper and say all the right things but in my experience, the leadership was more about results than representation and inclusivity (making it seem as if representation happens at the expense of productivity, a common misnomer). Praekelt actually allows employees to bill for time spent making concrete efforts to improving the organisation to become more inclusive, diverse and fair.
But I am also a Black woman in a South African workplace. I know how deeply nurturing and valuable it is to find osisi bendawo. I was keen to “find my tribe” as an new joiner while staying open to connections from wherever they may manifest (and this has stood me in good stead). Upon joining, I’ve become part of the team that works on our maternal health projects. Research (and the daily reality on the ground) shows that healthcare service delivery, as with the rest of South African society, “has been impacted heavily by its colonial past”. Basically, most of the mothers who are the target users of our programmes in South Africa-are black women. According to Wabiri et al, in 2012, approximately 85.7% of pregnant South African mothers identified as African by race.
The line that divides the haves and the have nots in South Africa is heavily racial. Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive because as a black woman myself, I feel particularly burdened to become the user advocate extraordinaire. I’m already a few months in and have noticed that my emotional tax is quite high with regards to how difficult I find it to speak up about my opinions and ideas at work that speak directly to the tension that exists between the work we do (which is great, life-saving work) and the cost to the user (which around data privacy can be non-monetary but still very real). It’s great being communicative until it rubs the wrong person up the wrong way.
We use a human-centred design thinking process to design services that not only help our users, but builds a service that they would love to use. Design is a collaborative endeavour and great services are made by teams, not individuals. As a new black South African mom, I have a unique vantage point and as much as I don’t want to be the spokesperson for all black women or even new black moms, where I (or anyone else) has an interesting insight into the inner workings (motivations, challenges, fears, etc) of our potential and existing users, it will only make for a better service for our users and benefit them the most.
That being what it is, I often ask myself: Why then do I find it so difficult to speak up on ideas or opinions that are informed by my being a black South African woman and currently the only black service designer in the organisation? I questioned why I didn’t feel confident and proud of the fact that I can identify closely to our users through language, culture, shared experiences of discrimination and raising kids in a society that is battling with the effects of racial segregation. I can bring insights and nuance that few others can.
I don’t believe it is “a fear-of-speaking-about-race” thing. I say this because a colleague, another person of colour, pointed out to me that I have shared other incidents, around racist incidents with my child in public channels at work, with relative ease. Why did I feel psychologically very safe when sharing these stories? And what can I do to bring that ease of openness and honesty to speaking up in my work?
I think my fear stems from the fact that we often think of racism and sexism as open, vulgar slurs or other such blatant transgressions but the reality is that even the most well-intentioned people can be unconsciously and unintentionally biased. This has been studied and it’s true — “(w)e might explicitly deny our internal reactions, but implicitly we follow their whispered mandates right down the line.” This is extremely scary for me because I’m conscious that I can easily fall victim to unintentional bias. I have experienced this before in my career and carry that trauma. I know what it feels like to, for no apparent reason other than race or gender, be treated differently; to be spoken to or judged a bit harsher than white/male/white & male counterparts, to not be given the benefit of the doubt, to be left out of collective decision-making (or even worse, to be involved but then my opinion completely ignored), to be outside of the inner circle.
These are slights real enough to impact me and my growth trajectory materially but just subtle enough that I felt petty for raising it. Plus, it was simply denied, there’s no way to prove it and it left my reputation tarnished. Even though, a colleague-turned-sister of mine stated, silence is violence, it would be naive of me to think just deciding to continuously keep speaking up will make it easier. My current workplace is wonderful — it has its challenges though and we don’t work in a vacuum so it’s not easy to simply switch contexts when I walk through the door. So, what can we do?
Although my psychological safety is affected by the very real post-traumatic stress I carry from years of unfair treatment I’ve had to endure from bosses and colleagues in corporate South Africa based on my race and gender, I can’t give up. What I do have in my area of control is not to go gently into that good night. I have to work my courage muscle and continue not to self-censor. I hope it becomes easier as time goes on as my credibility, experience, skills and confidence grow.
I agree 1000% with the musings of Bozoma Saint John, Uber’s Chief Brand Officer, when she said “there just has to be more — there has to be more of us… That is rule number one, fix number one”. The numbers just have to reflect the society we live in, we have to be just as diverse. Where I disagree with her is where she says “I don’t wanna talk about anything else until we get more”. Perhaps, at the level she is in the tech world, she can afford to say that and I’m sure she’s earned that privilege but I’m not there (YET :-) ). Since I’m concentrating on what I can do in my little piece of existence, I simply have to be me and treat my blackness and special swag the same way I treat my basic knowledge of SQL and my ability to read body language when doing user research. It’s an advantage I should be unapologetic about but conscious of as something that gives me certain privileges in expressing certain ideas and viewpoints. As long as I use it in productive and ethical ways, my organisation and most importantly, our users, will benefit.
Additionally, in a one-big-world type of way, I strongly believe, and we are currently working on this in our internal strategy to test and evaluate, that how we work as an organisation in the mobile for health space is just as important as the what. Praekelt.org is an endorser of The Principles for Digital Development and one of these is to understand the context and ecosystem in which we work as much as possible. Ecosystems include “culture, gender norms, political environment, economy, technology infrastructure and other factors that can affect an individual’s ability to access and use a technology”.The ability for us to quickly build rapport with our users, especially when conducting research, goes a long way to uncovering material insights that we might otherwise miss. I’m talking about insights that change the game, the type that turn a good service into a fantastic one. These will allow us to co-design our offerings with them in groundbreaking, new ways that will contribute to saving lives. The tech and ICT4D worlds are ready for a Black Panther moment.
So, what are the different ways in which we can all make sure that moment comes sooner rather than later?
- Practice Cognitive Empathy. Simply imagining ourselves in the shoes of our users is one thing but having an in-depth understanding into their motivations, opportunity costs, thoughts and feelings makes for services which are not just used but loved. Cognitive empathy happens more naturally, the closer you can relate to a user so if one is not in this position, one can amplify the voices of those who can do this best. It makes the difference between designing for a stereotype/caricature and designing for real people.
- Be humble. As ICT4D and user experience practitioners, we must understand our power, be self-aware and make interactions with the user mutually beneficial. These are real people with real lives. They are taking their time to help us so we must make it worth their while. This is not to say there must always be incentives for users to interact with us. For example, if our users are kids, we can make the interaction fun and educational for them. If our users are mothers, the focus group could become like a mini-support group session. There are ways to make our user interactions mutually beneficial.
- We understand the user best so we must go to war for them. If we are the ones responsible for using our detailed knowledge of the user’s needs to create a service/product that they love and feed their data into, we bear a moral obligation to educate them on the usage, processing, sharing and protecting of their data. One way to do this is to refrain from requesting any sensitive or identifiable information from a user that is not absolutely necessary to know. If it’s never captured, that’s one less place where it has to be kept track of and protected (prevention rather than cure).
