OneZero: "5 Ideas to Make Silicon Valley Less Racist"
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OneZero, the official technology and science news publication of Medium.com, published an article in late June in which the writer attempts to distill the anti-racism recommendations from a variety of people both within and adjacent to the tech industry. Some extracts below.
- Bruce
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5 Ideas to Make Silicon Valley Less Racist
onezero.medium.com/amp/p/7a1069ad05f8
Over the past two weeks, I spoke in depth with five leading thinkers about the technology industry and race, all of them Black, asking them what a truly anti-racist Silicon Valley might look like...
1. Stop denying that it’s racist
“I’m not saying that as an accusation,” adds [Leslie] Miley... “I’m saying it as a data point. Your own company data shows you’re racist.”...
That includes social media platforms that tolerate racist posts in the name of free speech... And it includes tech companies, including several of the ones for which Miley has worked, that have hardly budged their diversity numbers in the half-decade or so since they began publicly keeping track...
2. Hold employees accountable for racist behavior
If you want to not only recruit but retain and empower Black employees, you also have to hold your white employees accountable for creating an inclusive culture — including, when necessary, taking action against those who undermine it...
“The piece that’s most important of all,” [DEI consultant Y-Vonne] Hutchinson says, “is holding people accountable who harm Black employees, who undermine values of inclusion, and make the work environment more hostile. That’s where the rubber meets the road. You can hire employees all day, and if you don’t have accountability in your workplace they’re all gonna leave.”...
3. Audit all of your systems and products for racism
“Technologists need to learn more about society,” says [NYU data journalism Professor Meredith] Broussard. “Technological systems generally reproduce existing inequalities. So if you’re going to build sociotechnical systems, you need to learn about who is gonna be oppressed by them.”...
In Silicon Valley, the idea that we might be better off without a new technology — even if there’s a lucrative market for it — is rarely entertained. Broussard calls this technochauvinism: the assumption that the technological answer to a problem is always right. It has much in common with male chauvinism, she says. And “there are links to white supremacy in the notion that technology that’s developed and deployed by white male mathematicians and computer scientists is superior to all other solutions.”
4. Make reparations to groups that have been harmed
“Maybe we need Big Tech to come to the table and be held to account for its harms,” proposes Safiya Noble, associate professor at UCLA and author of the influential 2018 book, Algorithms of Oppression...
She compares Big Tech to Big Tobacco, which for decades denied its products’ harmful effects before finally being called to account and forced to pay billions for the medical costs of tobacco-related illnesses, among other settlement provisions. And to those who say we can’t afford to curtail the tech industry because it’s an economic engine, Noble notes that the same argument was once made on behalf of Big Tobacco — and, in fact, on behalf of the institution of slavery...
5. Dismantle the industry as we know it
“I’ll be blunt,” says [Macomb Community College Professor Chris] Gilliard. “I think that some of these technologies are incompatible with a free and equitable society.”
For example: “I don’t think there’s a way to have a thing that is Facebook that looks and functions like Facebook does right now, and have it be a just or equitable or anti-racist product. Its stated premise is to connect people and to give everyone a voice. And so inherent in that — and we’ve seen this over and over — is the implication that there is equal value in connecting people who are organizing for fair wages and people who are organizing for white nationalism.”...
“Roger McNamee said in a recent New York Times article that Facebook must always align with power. Well, it’s essentially incompatible that you always align with power, and that you’re equitable. Those things can’t exist together.”...