Beyond Donations: How To Stop the Spread of Racism in Tech

“Oh great! Our Uber driver’s finally here!”

This was the first thing I heard as I entered the packed Atlanta restaurant. I had been pacing outside the entrance for about twenty minutes in the sweltering Georgia summer heat, running through the short speech I had prepared to give to a group of about fifty top Atlanta restaurant owners. As I headed inside, my jet black t-shirt with “Uber” emblazoned on the front starting to soak, I stood stunned at this woman’s words.

I was not her Uber driver. I was the General Manager of the Uber Eats business for the entire state of Georgia.

I felt no shame — after all there is nothing wrong with being an Uber driver — but rather, anger. This was the umpteenth time this had happened in my four years at the company. I thought to myself, “Why doesn’t anyone assume I’m in charge?” Then I briefly thought, “Should I be in charge?” My once steely resolve after practicing my speech was now stunted, with self-doubt creeping in as I slowly moved towards my audience after correcting the offender.

I sincerely cherished my time at Uber. However, as a Black man, there were countless incidents like this that happened to me and other Black coworkers that left us feeling less than welcome in the tech world.

The maddeningly late, yet welcome, awakening of the nation to anti-Black racism has created a unique opportunity to shine a light on the myriad ways that racism shows up in our society. In the tech industry, huge companies have shown their solidarity with the Black community by sending supportive emails to employees and customers and donating to racial justice-focused organizations. That’s all well and good, but it’s not enough. These initiatives don’t address a huge piece of Big Tech’s role in perpetuating racism — the daily inequities experienced by Black tech employees. I believe that non-Black tech employees have a huge role to play in rooting this out.

As my own story illustrates, one of the arenas in which racism appears in the Black tech experience is when representing the company away from the office. For those of us in roles where we are interacting with customers, partners, or investors, we’re rarely treated with the same respect as our non-Black counterparts. A friend once had a potential customer ask her to speak to the Head of Sales for the region. He was shocked when she told him that she, a Black woman, was the Head of Sales. Black startup CEOs who walk into pitch meetings with venture capitalists are met with looks of surprise, as the investor assumes that their White counterpart is the CEO. In fact, Black founders are sometimes counseled to bring along White coworkers to investor pitches to increase their odds of success. This has very real effects on Black founders’ ability to raise capital. Less than 1% of all venture capital funding goes to Black entrepreneurs.

This doesn’t just have financial implications. Imagine what these kinds of messages do to our psyche. Even the most confident Black tech employees will naturally absorb some of this and faint whispers of self-doubt will start to creep in.

Back in the office, things get worse. Many tech companies, including Uber until a few years ago, claim to be ‘meritocracies.’ They claim that there will not be preferential treatment for anyone, and everyone will be evaluated on the results they produce.

This is a lie.

Rather than evaluating employees purely on objective results, the tech world has its own clandestine set of criteria for what a successful employee looks like, and this often excludes Black people.

For example, one of the best pieces of praise you can receive in a tech company is that you ‘hustle’. This means you move fast and put perfection aside to make sure that your goal is achieved, no matter what. A good friend of mine, who is a Black woman, was quite upset a few years ago by her performance review. She was the epitome of a hustler, running circles around her peers at her company and working long hours to make sure her projects were done. Rather than praising her as a ‘hustler,’ she was told that she was too aggressive, and that her style often rubbed people the wrong way. I have since heard a similar version of this story from more than a few of my Black friends across the tech industry.

This of course has very real consequences on our careers. For all of the diversity numbers that Big Tech likes to tout, the reality is that only a fraction of the already minuscule total number of Black employees are in leadership roles. For example, the percentage of leadership roles filled by Black people is only 3.1% at Google, and 2.6% at Facebook. How is it possible that there are so few Black people advancing in these companies if the standards are the same for every employee?

While it is exciting to work on some of the most innovative products in the world at these companies, we’re often disappointed to find that the process of creating them is rife with both human and algorithmic bias. Delivery companies like Amazon don’t offer their premium services in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Facial recognition algorithms are deeply flawed, like the one used by Google Photos which labelled Black people as gorillas. These products, and more importantly the decisions and omissions made in their design, devalue the lives of people that look like us. Even when we’re in the room, we’re often powerless to change it.

Racism is a virus. One of the most important epidemiological lessons of the coronavirus pandemic is that when dealing with a virus, there is a small window of opportunity when preventive actions can have outsized impacts in stopping its spread. I believe we have this window of opportunity right now in tech. It may not seem like it, but the technology industry as we know it today is relatively nascent. It does not have embedded, centuries-long traditions and policies that need to be dismantled. I believe that non-Black tech employees must act now to slow the spread of anti-Black racism in tech.

I don’t have all the answers on what should be done, in fact, no one does. But here are some principles to follow:

Be open to hard truths. First and foremost, believe us when we say this is happening. I cannot begin to describe the loneliness and pain that we feel when we are casually gaslit in the workplace. Rather than playing devil’s advocate when a Black coworker brings up an issue, listen and learn. We ARE credible witnesses to our own experiences.

Ask hard questions. As you are providing feedback or writing a performance review, ask yourself some hard questions. Is the negative behavior you’re highlighting in a Black employee truly relevant to the business, or is it something that just bothers you personally? Why does that bother you? Imagine if the subject of your feedback were someone else, does your feeling change at all?

Challenge your coworkers. When you hear someone say something inappropriate or insensitive, speak up about it. I’ve too often heard from non-Black friends and coworkers that they aren’t sure if it’s their place to say anything when they witness bias in the workplace. Don’t worry about your place — be brave.

Push leadership to do more. As I said earlier, emails and donations are great, but we should be asking tech leaders why their boards have no Black faces on them, and why their leadership teams are so monochromatic. Your voice matters.

Do the hard work. You, like me and everyone else, are human. Changing how you act on a daily basis is not going to be easy. There will be days where you mess up, guaranteed. Don’t let a mistake or missed opportunity slow you down. This problem won’t be solved by a few weeks of marches and a few antiracist book discussions.

Now, this is all easier said than done. Seeking to stamp out racism in tech will require a lot of non-Black employees. This effort will require humility, boldness, endurance, and, importantly, compassion. But as I said, we have a small window of opportunity to act. Take it. The world will be better for it.