ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 194 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr, and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Jacob Stoebel. 

JACOB: Hello. And I'm here with Rein Henrichs. 

REIN: Thanks, Jacob. And I am introducing our guest. Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn is an associate professor at Columbia University School of Social Work and faculty of the Columbia Population Research center. She employs a transdisciplinary research strategy to improve the characterization and measurement of racism and in examining the role of racism and the production of racial inequalities in health. Her work also explores the potential of media and technology in eradicating racism and eliminating racial inequalities in health. She is the lead creator of 1000 Cut Journey, an immersive virtual reality experience of racism that premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Dr. Cogburn completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University and the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar Program and at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology, and MSW from the University of Michigan and her BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

So, we have an expert here with us today. I'm very excited. So, Dr. Cogburn, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? 

DR. COGBURN: I'd have to say speaking is a superpower of mine. I do a really good job at explaining very complicated ideas especially racism, which can be difficult for people to talk about and sit with and deal with. And I do a pretty good job of making people okay talking about racism. 

REIN: Yeah. It can make people uncomfortable, very uncomfortable.

DR. COGBURN: Mm-hmm. For sure.

REIN: And people can behave in incongruent ways when they become uncomfortable.

DR. COGBURN: Yeah, that's an important piece of it. I think making people aware that what they're saying, what they believe, the values that they hold, and sort of making it clear how their behavior is inconsistent with those values. I think it's a good place to start, that you can't prioritize your discomfort over living your own values. So I think once people become aware of that, it gets easier to be conscious of it and try to work past it. 

REIN: There have been times when I've said something that had an impact that I didn't intend, and I have been called out for it. And my initial reaction is generally, "Well, I'm not racist. I didn't mean to be racist. Why are you being mean to me?" But really, for me, I have to just sit with it for a while and think about it to understand before I can grow from the experience. So I think the main thing that's happened for me as I've dealt with this more is that that amount of soak time I need has gotten shorter before I can figure it out but if I still have the same visceral reaction that I have to defend myself.

DR. COGBURN: And then the way I talk about this is that often especially, let's say, white people who identify as liberal. They believe in justice and equity in the world and everyone should be equal. There is an investment in being seen as a good person. And when someone is giving you feedback that makes you feel like you haven't been a good person in relation to race and racism, it is difficult to deal with. And it can be like a cognitive burden that starts to occur where you're processing all the ways in which maybe you haven't been a good person. And what becomes problematic about that is that it becomes about you and not about the thing that's now in the room or the thing that's happening in society. It becomes an investment in how you're perceived. And as long as you're perceived as a good person, then it's all good. But that's not really dealing with racism. That's not really grappling with the ways in which your perceptions of racism may be quite different than how someone else is experiencing you. And it's not the same as actually engaging racism in the world. Your designation as racist or a good person or not has nothing really to do with how you're acting against racism in society. 

REIN: I'm reminded of what Dr. Kim Crayton says which is that whiteness has this narrative we have to uphold, which is we are either the hero or the villain, but we're never the victim. And so if I can't be the hero in this situation, then it becomes you're attacking me. I feel this way. I center my own victimhood.

DR. COGBURN: And going along those lines, villainy is complex in how it shows up. It's not always the darkly dressed figure standing at the top of a building laughing maniacally. Villainy can take many, many different forms and can often be quite subtle and can often be quite passive. And so I think expanding the spectrum of villainy is probably a good exercise. 

REIN: I remember Malcolm X said that the white liberal is the most dangerous creature in Western civilization. And I think about that a lot.

DR. COGBURN: I would have to agree. The virtual reality piece that we created we actually deliberately targeted white liberal audiences and some people would be so confused. Like, "Why would you be talking to us? Go talk to the far-right, you know, people, MAGA." et cetera. Well, it's the "Aren't you preaching to the choir?" It's what some people would say. And then I started including a picture of an all-white choir in my talks. And I would say, "Yes, I'm absolutely talking to you." And then unpack why. And again, it's because white liberalism can lead to, again, investment in the symbolism of being liberal and often fails to translate into meaningful action in the world. There's sort of a self-satisfaction in well, I'm liberal. I'm not that bad type of white person over there. I'm a good type of white person. And there is sort of this self-satisfaction in that.

REIN: Yeah, I believe all these progressive things.

DR. COGBURN: I believe all these progressive things. There's some self-satisfaction in holding those beliefs. And that satisfaction can lead to being quite passive in the way that you engage racism. At least I'm not that, becomes your calling card as opposed to what are you doing for the world as it relates to racism?

ARTY: This makes me think a lot about just the context of things like Twitter. And we have this page, and we're retweeting these things. And there's this kind of undercurrent context of how do the things I'm doing affect how people perceive me on what side I'm on? And then that becomes the thing that people optimize for as being seen in a certain way. And then everybody's sort of in this cycle of needing to be seen by their peers in a certain way. And that becomes a thing we're optimizing for as opposed to real action, real change, real actually doing things that make a difference.

DR. COGBURN: And if it needs to be visible to really start to unpack why, why does it need to be visible? Sometimes I describe this as sort of a badge that gets handed out. Do you need a badge? Do you need a sticker that says "I'm not racist."? And then once I hand that sticker out to you, then what? That's beneficial to you. That's beneficial to how you're seen and perceived. That visibility I retweeted, I have the badge, but again, that's not action. That's not really engaging in an antiracist practice.  

JACOB: Something I think about is how as a progressive liberal, whatever you want to call it, white person I'm trying to remember that there's plenty that I still have to learn about race and racism. And if I was to turn to my theoretical "less woke" neighbor, white neighbor, realizing that maybe I don't necessarily have all of the answers for that person either and I have something to learn, I think is something I've been trying to think about more lately.

DR. COGBURN: That's another piece of it is, this is a lifelong learning type of thing. The complexity of this and how it's shaped our lives, and our identities, how we've been socialized, are really complex things. And reading the right books, and using the right words is not the same as the degree of unraveling that probably needs to happen for most people given how racism is structured in our society. So it's this combination of, often again for white liberals, in particular, it's a combination of racism existing in society, I believe in justice and equality, but I don't see race. And I'm being raised to just see people and not see race. And what happens in that dynamic is that racism exists in society. But you don't see race, which means you haven't critically engaged how racism is functioning to produce the patterns we're seeing in society. So an example, I like to use that's so obvious is mass incarceration. If you don't see race and you don't interrogate how race and racism are contributing to that pattern, then black men are in prison because they commit more crime. There's nothing else to say about that. If they stopped committing crime, they wouldn't be in prison. But if you are not ignoring race and racism, then you start to question why is that pattern emerging in society? 

So multiply that by all the things and ways in which racism touches all these things. If we haven't really interrogated those things and really thought critically and deeply about why are we seeing this pattern over and over, and over again, we tend to default to a place where we're assuming there's something about that group that's leading to that pattern. Instead of saying, "There's something about our country that's leading to that pattern." And that's a completely different kind of scope of interrogation.

REIN: Yeah. If all you knew was that there there's a high rate of crime in black communities and that black people are disproportionately incarcerated, you could think either, well, maybe black people are just inherently more violent or commit more crimes. Or the alternative is that there are other reasons. But if you don't know the history, if you don't know about Jim Crow laws, if you don't know that the Thirteenth Amendment actually enshrined a form of slavery for black people while pretending to outlaw it, if you don't know this whole history, you couldn't make a decision about which one it is. But once you know the history, it's very obvious, at least I think it is.

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. And to add to that, even before you know the history, if you have an orientation that leads you to question when you see a pattern like that. So even if you don't know why, if you have an orientation, which is sort of what an antiracist orientation is, that there's probably a system in place where we're observing a pattern at the level of the population and overrepresentation in categories of things. We've had COVID-19 infections, and deaths, or mass incarceration, or certain kinds of drug use. Whenever we observe a pattern like that, that for any group, entire group of people, where they're being disproportionately represented in that group, our orientation should lead us to say, "Why?" Not make any assumptions about why that pattern exists. It's not just a few people. It's not just one neighborhood. It's a large representation of a group of people. That should automatically trigger an inquiry, even if you don't know the exact details of why that pattern is emerging. 

REIN: Can you talk more about how to develop this sort of attitude towards anti-racism especially for folks who look like me? [Chuckles]

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. So for me, it's grounded in how we understand racism, and how it functions in society, and how we understand white supremacy. So often when people think about white supremacy, they're thinking of KKK hoods or white polos, and tiki torches, marching at my alma mater, that's University of Virginia - that's what white supremacy is. White supremacy is much more complicated than that. White supremacy sort of defaults expectations that whiteness is the norm, and that whiteness represents human, and that whiteness represents American. And norms, and practices, and beliefs, ways of being that exist in our country are often invisibly colored by whiteness. So it's not white. It's just professional. It's not healthy. Healthy is actually sort of laden in white practices and cultures and beliefs - what healthy foods are, what healthy practices are. And there's ways in which all of this is sort of invisibly shaped, invisible to some, shaped by whiteness because whiteness doesn't exist as a race. That's just people. Everybody else has race. And so, once you understand white supremacy as that function, ways of being, ways of speaking, ways of dressing, hair, ways of expressing knowledge, what is knowledge, everything, then you have to consider racism running in parallel to that. So right white supremacy is a form of racism. And then the deliberate or unintentional disadvantaging of groups of people on the basis of race running parallel to systems of white supremacy. 

So in terms of an orientation, your basic assumption needs to be everything's racist. And if it's not antiracist, it's racist because it's embedded in everything. If you didn't deliberately try to make choices that would avoid disadvantaging a group or that deliberately tried to seek ways to promote equity for a group that has been oppressed, marginalized, and disadvantaged, then you're doing the opposite of that. There's no backing into racial equity. You have to go in eyes wide open looking for every opportunity to create it. That's an orientation. It's not in this situation on diversity day this one guest that we have on the show, and I'm not talking about you all. I'm just saying there's small choices and then there's big choices that we make, and it matters at all levels. So if your default is white supremacy and racism are in everything and if I'm not actively considering how to avoid undoing those things or not perpetuating those things, I'm probably going to solidify them or perpetuate them. 

JACOB: I would love to hear about this VR project that was mentioned earlier. The first mention I heard of it was -- so we had been sharing a short talk that you gave where the first thing you said was, "I did this project. But I want you all to know it alone is not enough. Empathy is not enough." I would love to hear about the project, but I also would love to hear more about that idea about how simply having empathy is not enough. 

DR. COGBURN: So the project has been a fascinating journey for me because when I started this, when I wrote the proposal to fund this project, I had actually never used virtual reality. I barely understood what it was. I had not even used a Google Cardboard box on my phone. I haven't even looked at a 360 video before. But I had this sense based on some other work that I had done in more reading and learning that culture is a really powerful tool. Narrative and story are really powerful tools. And I wanted to think about ways to leverage those things to intervene on the problem of racism and to really think about, people don't understand this. People do not understand how racism functions in our day-to-day lives. They think about racism as do I like you or not? Do I say bad words to you or not? And I don't care about that. I mean, in the scope of stuff that's bad about racism, that's so low priority. I don't need you to like me. I need you to hate racism. It's something that I say. It's not about our friendship and holding hands and singing Kumbaya. I need you to see how the world is functioning. And so could I leverage VR, and story, and narrative to help white liberals, in particular, connect more deeply with the significance of racism and how it was functioning in society? So I reached out to my now colleague, but at the time a complete stranger to me, Jeremy Bailenson, at Stanford and asked if he wanted to work on this. And he'd been working in this space for a long time, and he was down. And we got together, wrote this proposal, got the project funded and took off from there. 

And it's interesting. So going to the language of transdisciplinary, what that means for me is that you're bringing different perspectives and disciplines to the same table to create something new together. You're not consulting a discipline. You're not bringing in a computer scientist or a programmer when you're ready to start coding. You bring them in from the very beginning at the same table with the social worker, and a psychologist, and an artist or whatever. And you're all imagining and thinking about the same problem and attempting to address the same problem together from the very beginning at the same time without hierarchy across those perspectives or disciplines. Computer science is not more important than social work. From a transdisciplinary perspective, it's saying that you can't get this job done with all of those perspectives at this table. 

So given that I didn't come to the table with a specific idea in mind and then needed a team to launch and make my idea come to fruition, it was, here's this broad idea. What are we going to do? How do we go about this? And the people at the table are imagining that together, which is really tricky when you're trying to get funding for something, and you don't actually know what you're going to do. So convincing people to give you money when you don't actually know what you're going to produce is tricky, but they did it anyway. And together we came up with this idea of becoming a black male at different points in his life experiencing racism in different forms at different points in your life. 

So this is a digital immersive experience called a 1000 Cut Journey referencing the small and big things that happen over the course of one's life that takes its toll on you. You start off as a child in elementary school having encounters with children who are sort of taunting you and using racialized language. And it's really kind of representing how at a very young age, even children don't know how they are perpetuating racist ideas and symbols that they've heard - black is bad, black is scary. That's the kind of language that they're using. You engage in the behavior of throwing blocks. We gauge you into doing that, the users. So we have you throw blocks. And even though the other kids who are all white are also throwing blocks, your doing it triggers a negative response from the teacher who thinks you're being dangerous and you're going to hurt someone. And we really created that based on well-established empirical literature around disciplinary practices and race and racism even beginning in elementary school. And you may hear people talk about the school to prison pipeline, that literature that basis is what's driving that early scene. So for each age, we were trying to think about how might racism manifest at this age? How might it show up and in what context? And so in that same area experience, you're a teen. You have an encounter with the police. And then you transition to early adulthood and you're in a workplace setting. So again, we tried to draw from what might be most salient at different ages and how might it show up? 

And we tried to capture a range of things from the police scene where you're just standing on the sidewalk and three officers are just standing over you yelling and telling you, the user, to get down on your knees and put your hands up even though you've done nothing. And there's confusion, and there's noise, and you don't know what's going on. And it feels very aggressive and scary. So that's very blatant and in your face. And then there's a moment where everything goes quiet and goes dark, and you can't hear the police or the neighbors yelling on the street. And you just hear your mother's voice saying, "Do what you have to do to get home alive." Having to do that is a function of living in a white supremacist system that devalues certain bodies more than others. And so I have to give my kid the script to survive a situation that he should have never been put in in the first place, even though he's doing nothing wrong. And throughout the VR experience, we're trying to layer these different elements, a very in your face sort of things and things that are much more subtle and nuanced in terms of how racism shows up and affects a life.

REIN: What sort of feedback have you gotten from people who have experienced this? 

DR. COGBURN: It's been a range. And I think in reflecting on this work, I think timing has been critical because I think if we had produced this work even five years before we had, it may have been received very differently. And I think we just happened to be in a window where people, white people, in particular, were more engaged in thinking about this more directly. And I think more willing to put on a headset and volunteer to experience racism. Who does that? But people did. And especially at the Film Festival, there was a whole sort of separate experience that was happening for me seeing white people rush up to sign up to participate to do this racism experience. And I hadn't expected that as sort of 10,000-foot view of what was going on or the experience of watching people, white people, go through these experiences. I hadn't calculated what that might feel like over and over and over and over again.

So the reactions were what I hoped they would be which is a really rewarding feeling because I was uncertain. And by the time we got to the Tribeca Film Festival, we had only run maybe 20 people through the experience. So we did [inaudible] how it was [inaudible] So there were shorthand expectations where I wanted black people to have experience and say that that's it exactly right. That feels authentic and meaningful. And you haven't [inaudible] kind of pressure. And my expectation for white people I thought I understood this but I don't, especially given the target of a white liberal audience. Because if you think about it, if you're trying to have a more sophisticated conversation, push your depths of understanding, if you approach that thinking, "Oh yeah, you're not talking to me. I don't need diversity training [inaudible] white people over there." I want to try and create an experience that can make a group that thinks they already get it, that thinks you're not talking to them and push them to want to listen, and be open, and engage more deeply and in a more open way. And so that was the aim and that is -- there's lots of variation in nuance that I'm happy to talk about. But that is generally how people have responded to this piece, white people in particular. 

The spectrum for black people is also quite varied where I expected the piece to just sort of be triggering and bring up negative feelings and emotions, that certainly happens, but I've also had people -- We've run a study with black people at this point to try and get a sense of how they were experiencing this. I've also had people tell me that "It was therapeutic and validating, and now I don't have to share my personal pain and stories in service of educating white people." You can just put them through this headset and they can get an education that way. So it's a range. It's a range, but all have been encouraging. 

And to the point about empathy and why I think empathy is insufficient. So one, I'm not even sure emotional empathy is really even possible, even in the piece that we created. I think you can see it. I think you can perceive it but to really understand it, is a different bar. So maybe there's degrees of empathy that are possible in a piece like this. But also empathy especially in the form of emotional empathy is internal. That's about you again. That's about some understanding that you have come to. What I'm interested in is your behavior. What I'm interested in is not just how you feel about it. I'm less interested in you feeling bad, and I'm more interested in you doing good. I'm more interested in you being antiracist. I'm more interested in how does this experience change the way that you analyze problems of race and racism in society? Not just I get how terrible that feels. Does it change the way that you place yourself in relation to racism and racist systems? Do you understand that you're not a bystander observing the bad things happening over there, that you are benefiting and a part of the very same system that's creating toxicity, chaos, violence over here? You're on the other side of that coin, even if it's passively received. Do you come to that understanding? So empathy for me is none of that, at least emotional empathy. Now we're talking about cognition and now we're talking about behavior in some pretty complex ways. And so I want to create experiences that help people get closer to those points, not just feeling bad.

REIN: Wow. I wonder if there's like a part two, which is a white person experiencing their own racism and enacting of white supremacy, microaggressions and that sort of thing that could help them sort of, me, us, perceive what it's like to be on that side of the coin.

DR. COGBURN: So there's two things. I've definitely thought about a piece that makes whiteness visible. And do you understand all the ways in which whiteness has shaped your being, your identity, your positionality, even when many white people just like to think about themselves as human. And even in the act of being able to do that, that is a white luxury. That's not a luxury that other people have - to just be seen as human. So even in that, you're enacting whiteness. So a piece that makes that more visible, I think is important. But there's been really interesting byproduct of the piece that we created, where there've been multiple people who have told me, "I was more aware of being white than I was of becoming a black man. I'm standing in this body, I'm controlling this avatar, and I'm seeing things through his eyes. But I was deeply present in my whiteness in a way I had never been before." And there may be something about just how big of a contrast the experiences you're having as this black body from your own that might make your own experiences that much clearer that you're not experiencing any parts of that in your day-to-day life. So there's something going on. Even in this experience, I have no idea how to measure empirically. It's just something that has come up anecdotally. But it's come up consistently enough that it feels worth exploring is, are you more aware of how white you are and how whiteness has shaped your experience when you experience a perspective that's so very different from that?

REIN: I'll stop suggesting features after this one. But what if there was a button you could press to flip from being black to white? So you're talking to the police as a black person, and they're being violent towards you. And you press the button and now they're like, "Have a nice day, sir."

DR. COGBURN: I think that would actually be really interesting if you could flip back and forth. So even in this piece itself, there were certain features that I was very clear that needed to be in the experience. And the contrast of whiteness was one of them that we have to see how whiteness is functioning in parallel to this experience. So you can't explain it away saying, "Oh, that just happened because x," and look for the alternative explanation. So there's certainly ways in which we strategically put whiteness in parallel to your experience that's happening from the perspective of Michael, the primary avatar. And we've also thought about ways in which we could potentially create a split experience, like a split-screen experience where there's one thing happening on one side of the screen and something else happening on the other that's sort of giving you this parallel point of view as well. And then I liked your suggestion, which is another kind of pathway to that which is toggling right back and forth between one experience and another. And then empirically for me, as a psychologist, I'm just really interested in, is one approach more effective than the other in terms of making the point and getting the point across? They may all be equally effective. But it could be that certain ways of approaching this are much more effective than others. And I don't think we really have a sense of that yet. 

ARTY: I like this idea of kind of looking at experiences on both sides and how they play into this system dynamic. I was thinking about where we started this conversation of talking about the shift to self, centering your own identity, and wanting to look like a good person and how that pulls you and stuff. At the same time, it's like, we're all people, we all have identities. We all have to go through these cycles of first these kind of shifts happen at that level. And then there's this challenge of cracking this facade of trying to look a certain way with recognizing your own dissonance within yourself and being able to go wait a minute," I actually am really blind." The willingness to be able to have these sort of experiences and put on the headset also says something of people being able to start getting to a point of recognizing their own blindness of maybe this is an experience I really do need, maybe this is an experience I want to have as part of me. 

And I think about the other side of things that pull you like getting pulled into bullying like. I think about contexts where on the other side of someone being put down, there's someone that's usually kind of has their own kind of weakness, character issues, that they're trying to buff up and feel powerful or whatever. And then bullying becomes a way to do that. And then you want to look cool because the cool kids are doing this or whatever. And there's this chain reactions of people getting pulled into these kinds of behaviors and these sort of systemic effects where all of these challenges and tensions become amplified because people are trying to look cool by somebody's definition. And I feel like with kids doing an example on school playground just showing how easy it is to get pulled into these things -- And I feel like recognizing our own kind of susceptibility to getting pulled into groups of activity that we may have dismissed but kind of going and shifting to those narratives anyway and then seeing both sides of it, that could be really powerful too. Because I think we're all pulled by wanting to fit in, wanting to be cool, wanting to be part of the tribe, wanting to be seen with whatever those values are. And then there's kind of the undercurrent dissonance that we all have to kind of come to terms and face. And what you're doing with the VR stuff is so powerful. I feel like there's all kinds of opportunity to create experiences to help people connect some of those dots. 

DR. COGBURN: One thing that I find, and not that you're necessarily doing this, I find that when we're talking about and centering racism, there's a tendency to say, "Oh, there are other things we could be doing with this too." Or "Oh, we're all experiencing bad things in life. And, could we think about those things and points of connection as well?" And that's true. All of that is true. And I also question whether is that an avoidance of grappling with racism explicitly like in really staying present with that? And it very well could be, yes, there's other things to consider and think about and problems in the world. And everyone regardless of race is having a hard time around a variety of different issues. And then there's another piece of it. That I hope with this moment that we're in right now is really helping people to see the depth and gravity of racism in particular. And that's not meant to diminish the significance of other things that are happening and going on. Absolutely not. But there has historically been a tendency to avoid racism and talking about race in particular and understanding the significance of anti-blackness and anti-black racism in our society. And really thinking about this and grappling with this as not just people who are on both sides treating each other poorly. 

Entire systems aimed, often deliberately, at creating disadvantage. That's a completely different problem than bullying. That's a completely different problem than I could call you a name, and you could call me a name and that would be terrible. And shouldn't we move past that. And it's not, again, it doesn't diminish any of that stuff, but it's saying we have to really grapple with the gravity of what we're dealing with here. And it's not on both sides, it's not I could do it to you, you could do it to me. It's a one-way street that has historically for centuries disadvantaged particular groups of people. And we got to come to terms with it because if we don't understand that, and if you don't frame the problem in that way, we're going to keep missing the mark on what's actually going to fix that. 

So going back to I don't need you to like me, I need you to hate racism. It's not interpersonal. I mean, again, it's not like interpersonal is insignificant where we need to be thinking about the way we treat each other, and talk to each other, and understand each other's points of views, and problems, and how do we have difficult conversations. But none of that will fix, prevent future disadvantage, or certainly promote equity in the way that policies need to change, systems have to change across the board. I don't say that to diminish anything that you were just saying but to add to it and say, "We should interrogate are we avoiding racism, and are we really grappling with racism as systemic and in everything and not only interpersonal?"

ARTY: And you've got dynamics that are systemic that are multigenerational as well, which makes it even harder to grapple with in that regard. I mean, at the same time, grappling with these things also requires bringing disciplines to the table to solve a problem together and breaking down barriers so that we can have conversations about these things too. The systemic problems don't get solved without people working together to solve them.

DR. COGBURN: And seeing them as systems problems, not seeing them as persons or people problems. And frankly, that's how most of us approach this. Like, "Oh, I'm biased. Everybody's a little bit biased. We need bias training." And, okay, that's an uphill battle of fixing all the individual bias that every person has that humanity is naturally inclined to categorize and create difference and assign value. So let's fight against that human tendency to categorize, create value by category, et cetera, and try to fix that. That's essentially what we're doing. As opposed to saying, "How do we account for the possibility that that's at play and try to do something about that tendency?" Rather than let's fix all the people in the room who could possibly be biased.

ARTY: So in the context of software in tech, we actually have a lot of power and influence with our software systems. Would you suggest tech folk maybe pay more attention with regards to systemic racism and technology? 

DR. COGBURN: My argument in this thing is that most technologists don't have the background necessary to adequately deal with that. So especially people who have been classically trained in engineering do not have the humanities, social science, or lived experience necessary to adequately address those problems and avoid the pitfalls. And given that, using that as a starting point, who else needs to be on your team? Who else needs to be at the table, who does have that background from the very beginning with these sort of transdisciplinary values, that that perspective is not a cute little add-on to have a social scientist or a social worker at the table with an engineer. It's saying that if your product is going to intersect with humanity, with society, it has the potential to be racist. It has the potential to be oppressive in that it's going to affect some groups more than others. It's going to disadvantage some groups more than others, and you don't have the skill set at this table to even anticipate part of how your product might be doing that. So, who else needs to be sitting at the table so you can avoid that from the very beginning? And avoiding harm is really different than imagining how you might do good, how you might achieve justice, how you might achieve equity with what it is that you're creating. And again, most teams be it disciplinary silos, racial silos, or whatever are not the types of teams are needed, that are necessary in order to actually do that kind of work. And the intention of doing good, again, is insufficient. We can have intentions all day and not actually have the skill set, and knowledge, or perspectives, or experiences necessary to understand the complexities of social inequality in our society and that's around race or any other issue. 

So my colleague and I at Columbia have started a new laboratory The Justice, Equity, and Tech Lab and a new minor in social work Emerging Technology, Media, and society minor. Social workers are learning Python. They're critically unpacking different types of emerging technologies. I'm teaching a course in the spring that's Extended Reality. And it will be taught in VR, having social workers think about that tech understanding how data and privacy issues intersect with VR. How might this be useful or not with your practice as a social worker? What are your thoughts about how to use this tool? And then also deeply engaging the tech industry in helping them understand how someone like a social worker is actually critical to what it is they're trying to do and could potentially be the type of person to help them avoid, excuse me, the shit show that they often find themselves in once they've launched a product and then realize their intentions didn't get them to the place that they hoped to get. So it's on both sides, influencing culture and practices on the tech side, and then equipping social workers and other people who are grounded in community, community practice, et cetera, equipping them with the skills, not to become technologists but to leverage what they already know in service of using technologies and in holding emerging technologies accountable. So I think it's who's at the table becomes quite critical. Again, diversity is not really about aesthetics. It's not like sprinkling color in the room. It's the thing we're aiming for here. We're aiming for gaining value from different perspectives, and different skill sets and points of view. And if we don't have that, we're going to see things in very similar ways to the people who were sitting with us who have very similar training and upbringing, et cetera.

JACOB: I think having a social worker on a software team is an amazing idea. [Chuckles] I work for a healthcare company and we employ social workers. But wow, if I could interface with some of them once in a while, I'm sure my work would benefit. I think the key to what you mentioned there is, yeah, you could bring a social worker onto a team. But then do you have engineers that even if they don't necessarily have the background, they see it as their job to listen to a social worker as opposed to engineers who think it's their job to solve puzzles and someone else can work out the human parts. [Chuckles]

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. And not even just listen to. It's work with, which is a really different orientation as well. Interestingly, so the XR class that I'm teaching in the spring, I'm working with a faculty member here, Steve Feiner in engineering. And his engineering students and my social work students are going to work together on projects from inception to prototype based on a common social issue that the teams are interested in. They'll come together try to think about an XR solution related to that and actually build it out to a prototype. So we're kind of playing around with how do you actually create meaningful collaborations between, say, an engineer and a social worker? That takes practice. That takes a template. It's not just throw people in a room and hope they get it. So I'm excited to work with Steve on this and see -- just gain some insight into what types of processes do we need to be engaging? What's the best way to set this up to maximize what we get out of these types of partnerships? 

ARTY: I think one of the key things you've mentioned here was how easy it is to build the product, not think about these things, put that product in the world and then have all these effects that you're not expecting that have potentially harmful effects. And that that is just sort of the norm is to not think about these things. Well, we intended to do good and that's insufficient. And in order to reverse these patterns and have an antiracist approach to product development, we need to be thinking about these things and how our product is going to affect these systems and those skills in terms of those effects need to be part of our product thinking and strategy of what it is we're actually building. It's so far outside the norm to do that, but I think it totally makes sense to be integrated at that level.

And I think about some of the process things in software and how they became popular was essentially having -- like, Scrum became popular largely because there was a clear cookie cutter set of templates and processes that made it easy for people to sort of start from someplace and adapt from there. And I feel like some of the work you're doing is figuring out what some of those processes and things look like that potentially like publishing here are some rules, here are some templates of interaction. Here's how we go about actually taking an antiracist approach to product development. If that sort of writing could be put together in a way that made it easy for people to go, "Okay, we're going to take an antiracist approach to product development as the standard way that we do things responsibly now." It's like those templates need to exist. It's like a starting point to get that idea to catch on. But I feel like we're at a place where people are ready for that. It's just those templates and things are missing largely right now. People aren't thinking about it that way. And I feel like you can bring a whole lot to the table by helping to figure out what those interactions look like in a way that people can have an anchor point to start from.

DR. COGBURN: I think that's really important. And we just wrote a grant proposal where we said that that was part of our aim is to produce some of those products be it a white paper or going on podcasts and talking about the collaborations, and what we're learning, and what we're doing. But we want to create some of those templates so that other people can start to think about how do you engage these kinds of -- it's really complicated. How do you engage these kinds of processes? Who should I be talking to given the scope of my project and all of those sorts of things? I think I agree 100%. They are really, really important. 

And then going back to the point about centering race is if you actively think about issues of race, you're going to cover a lot of territory in terms of dealing with issues of being marginalized. And if you are thinking about black people and not doing harm to them, you're going to cover a lot of grounds. If you think about any other source of oppression, be it physical ability, gender, whatever, and you add race to it, it gets worse.

REIN: But now I'd try to imagine what would that look like at Twitter? What sort of training would they get? I'm struggling to even picture it. 

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. And I guess it's a combination of things. So what is the training? What does the onboarding look like? And then if your company is saying, "We don't want to do harm in society." then that should be part of your onboarding. What does that mean to not do harm? Where are the potential ways where we could do harm? And then once you have clarity about that as a company, then how do you onboard new employees to get on board with what it is that you're trying to achieve and do? 

And then there's another level of -- there's only so much training one person can hold and get. And you just might need someone else in a different role that's a part of those teams. There's only so much extra stuff you're going to pour into people's heads. But if you have a meaningful position of someone who actually has power and it's not like, again, the cute symbolic sticker add-on person to the company, but actually have a meaningful role, then they'll help push the conversation. They'll help ask questions that no one else thought of. Then that team will start thinking about that problem differently. I think expecting the engineer to all of a sudden think of all the issues that they should be thinking about is not realistic either. 

So yes, there's some training, there's some onboarding that is tricky to think about and exactly where do you aim. And then there are new types of people and new types of roles that need to be in the room and not expecting everyone to sort of learn a whole nother discipline to try and do good in the world. I think that's a lot to ask. 

JACOB: I think this is yet another case for the sometimes unseen benefit of hiring engineers from non-traditional backgrounds. That's a specifically vague term because it could mean obviously people from underrepresented groups like black engineers. But also, I think there's also a benefit to hiring engineers that simply by not coming from a CS background -- because just as you were saying, someone who is coming from a different discipline or a different career, at least, hopefully, has the experience of now having two backgrounds and understanding that there is more to know about the world than the code you write and how the code you write goes out into the world and affects people and how there are other disciplines to understand it.

DR. COGBURN: And I mean, even thinking about coding as a deeply human process and not just a technical process. Code even becomes a living document. You look at two people who are trying to achieve the exact same task, and they came to that in completely different ways, through different kinds of code in the way that they were trying to represent those processes even that speaks to a human did that, a human made choices about how to construct code. And I remember when I was finishing up my doctoral program, a company called ThoughtWorks was recruiting. And they were recruiting people to be software developers, but they were recruiting historians and psychologists and put them through these training processes for becoming software developers. And some of us actually became software developers and others of us would be liaisons who were really good at communicating between engineers and the client and could really translate these sorts of ideas. But it was just so forward-thinking. This was 10 years ago. It was so forward-thinking about how they were thinking about what does a historian have to say about software development? What does a historian have to say about code? How might they approach that? I don't know. Let's see. That could be really cool and interesting. We may discover something that we never would have found out. 

Otherwise, supporting your point completely that I think that type of thinking, not only along the lines of race, which clearly I think is important, but just different disciplines, different perspectives coming to tasks that are human, are informed by how we were trained. And someone who was trained differently might approach that differently. That same work, that same technical task, may manifest in a really different way because of who they are and how they've been trained. 

REIN: A while ago we had a cultural anthropologist who moved into tech as a guest. And I would suggest that everyone hire a former cultural anthropologist. [Chuckles] But the perspective, just the awareness that there is something there that demands expertise to understand it. Because there's something in culture, in psychology, in sociology, in humans relating to each other that you can't just assume you understand because you're also a human, that there's real expertise, there's real skill. It's a technical field. And I think that's what I would like engineers to realize is that they all have to be skilled in those fields when they deliver software to people.

DR. COGBURN: And I think the core engineering curriculum needs to be modified significantly. They need more humanities and social science training. They need to understand history, and where we've gone wrong and how we’ve gotten things wrong. And I know engineering programs are squeezing in a lot already. But there's a piece of that that needs to be built in and baked in from the very beginning of perspective and orientation from the very beginning. And then picking up on your point, it’s also like there's only so much one brain is going to hold. And so maybe you need to hire a cultural anthropologist, maybe you need to hire a psychologist, people who have deeply seeped themselves in the complexities of humanity and human behavior. And let their brain and a little bit to the room and what we're doing and thinking. 

So I think it's a two-way street. How do we change the training of people who are on the technical side, and how do we meaningfully integrate people who are on the social side? You need both. And one is not more important than the other certainly when your product or whatever is intersecting with humanity and doubly so if your intention is to do good, that's an even higher bar. So you might need some different people at the table to actually achieve that. And a lawyer, an MBA, an engineer, do not have typically the skills and perspectives necessary to actually do that or maximize the possibility of that.

REIN: I feel like there are a lot of cases where this isn't just a value-add. It's not just a nice to have. For example, if you're Twitter, your product is people connecting with each other, human relationships. And if you don't understand that as a part of the core thing that you do, then you're going to build Twitter. You're going to end up with something terrible.

DR. COGBURN: And we've talked to -- my colleague, my partner who started this lab, we've done some work with Twitter and other tech companies. And once we have a chance to sit down with them and actually explain what a social worker is, it's like an easy sell. But if you think about social work as child protective services or caseworkers, then it might be really hard to see what does that have to do with software development? But if you take the word social and work, literally, then you start to actually understand the scope of what social workers do. People who center equity, injustice, and a practice of ethics, and people who translate science and research into practice, and people who work in communities, and people who are often clinically trained to understand and interact with humans. When you start to understand social work isn't that, then people get real clear about how they might benefit from those skill sets in their technical processes. 

I was in a meeting in a social media company, that I won't name, and they were talking about following up with users on the site who had been acting poorly - bullying, gaslighting all sorts of things. And they wanted to follow up and just ask them why they had been behaving that way. And he's describing this process, which is essentially like not social workers, calling people and asking them like, "What's going on in your life that's contributing to you behaving this way on the platform so that we can try and understand it?" And as soon as this person was talking -- you should have had social workers doing that - talking to people. Because people in that room say, "I lost my job, I'm taking care of an ailing parent, I'm having a really hard time." And clearly, there's a human thing going on. There's not just bad robots out there doing bad things to people. There's humans who are in complicated places doing complicated things. So, yeah, I think once you start getting into specific examples and really understand what social work is, and not just to say that social work is the only practice or discipline that's necessary at the table. But it's one that engineering and other technical fields wouldn't necessarily think of as being important to their work. And like you said, it's not just a cute add-on. It's pretty essential if you're trying to actually have positive impact on the world.

REIN: I suspect that right now there are a lot of engineers who are effectively conducting qualitative social research who aren't even aware that that's a thing that you can learn how to do.

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. I've had people come to me and they're like, "Oh, I want to run a study on blah, blah, blah." And I'm like, "Man, I've been doing this for a good 15 years." 

REIN: Here is a textbook.

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. There's nothing I can hand you to say, like, "This is how you do it and that you're actually going to do a good job at that." And there's a degree of respect other people's training and what they've done. They're not just out here being touchy-feely. Being trained to actually study human behavior, is a really complicated thing to do. And it may not be something you can pick up through an onboarding process or a training, or a quick consultation, which I feel like people often approach me and kind of want the 10-minute primer on psychology and how to measure human behavior. I'm like, "I can't give that to you."

REIN: I feel really fortunate that I've been exposed to the Safety and the Resilience Engineering community because that is a community that takes this sort of research seriously. When you go to, for example, London University and you do their course on safety study, you do research methods as a part of that course. You will learn how to code. You'll learn how to do these things to actually get meaningful results from what you're doing. I think it has to start with awareness. Because just by being aware that that's a thing, it's caused me to think differently about how I approach even sort of informal stuff that I do at work.

DR. COGBURN: Yeah. That orientation piece, what do I not know? You have to know a little bit about what you don't know and what might be important to this so that you even know where to look. And that's what I think is possible through the type of experience that you have. But I imagine it wasn't a whole degree that you were trying to get, but it was an exposure to thinking and learning and orienting you to the problems that you're trying to solve that will lead you to ask different questions and consult potentially different types of expertise in addition to knowing how to do some of that on your own. That's what feels possible in terms of modifying engineering training or thinking about an onboarding process. What could be achieved in short amounts of time that could really change the way people approach their work? As opposed to trying to download a sociology degree into someone's head. So what can be done in those short bursts of training and then who are the people we need to add to teams to supplement that? 

ARTY: So with shifting the orientation, you at least have the opportunity to recognize that there's something missing, that there is a gap here that we don't have the skills and knowledge on this team yet we know that because of our orientation, that this is an important gap. And if we don't see the gap, we don't ask the questions. If we don't see the gap, we don't think to bring anyone else on our team. Maybe that's another area to work toward getting some traction in. And I think the Safety and Resilience Community is a good place that has pioneered attention to this other set of things that we need to be worried about when we produce software that are in the set of non-direct cost of things of the not so obvious things that we need to be thinking of but because they don't have this direct benefit to profit, then it's easy to forget about completely. You're the first person I've heard talking about an antiracist approach to product development as a thing and that the goal isn't to shift the complexion of the workforce. It's to have real meaningful change and real meaningful effects on these long-standing systemic problems. In order to do that, we need the knowledge and the skills to be able to actually do that. We need the orientation to be able to see the problems, to ask the questions. And those skills, and those people, and those disciplines need to be in a position of being able to actually influence the trajectory in some of these systems. 

DR. COGBURN: And as you were talking, I was just sort of quickly kind of jotting my thoughts around. If I had to sum up that orientation and what that is into a few kind of bites, one is being antiracist, being transdisciplinary, and understanding that avoiding harm is not the same thing as achieving justice. And if more of us held those three principles in our work, we will start asking a different set of questions that might lead us to our own differences in education and also who we hire, and who we put on our teams, and who we think it's important to have in the room. Because in holding those things as your orientation, you very quickly can come to different kinds of questions that will lead you to, what do I not know and understand? What am I missing here? Where are the gaps? Rather than sort of charging forward with good intention with the current people in the room who don't have those other pieces. So I think those three elements, if we were to summarize this conversation, especially the thoughts around orientation, those certainly drive me and my work. How do I not be racist in a practice that I'm engaging and producing the work? And how do I help other people especially not be racist? And how do I humble myself and acknowledge that there's only so much Courtney can hold in her head to understand and do the complicated work that I'm trying to do? Who else needs to be at the table with me to get this done in a way that's not only avoiding harm, that's technically ethical, but in a way that might actually help him do some justice, that might actually help me improve lives, not just doing less damage to those lives. So all of those pieces I think are critical. 

REIN: Well, I think that's the right way to end this episode. 

DR. COGBURN: [Laughs]

REIN: That was great. We are running a little short on time. We typically do reflections. I would be happy to go first unless someone else wants to. 

JACOB: That's fine.

DR. COGBURN: Sure.

REIN: So as you were just sort of summing up this episode in that really wonderful way you did, I was thinking about another one of Dr. Crayton's principles, which is that intention without strategy is chaos.
And so I would say to folks who are starting to have intentions around being antiracist that it's not enough to just intend to be antiracist, to reduce harm to the most vulnerable. You have to think about what you're going to do. You have to come up with a strategy and that strategy has to be informed by looking beyond yourself, by studying, by looking at what other people are putting out there. And I think that's how you have to start doing the work. 

ARTY: I think one of the most powerful things you said Courtney was, "I don't need you to like me. I need you to see how racism functions in society." It's not about being friends, getting along. There's these aspects of things, sure. But in the scheme of things, the problems that we're talking about are the systemic racism that's baked into how our society functions that we've got these cross-generational dynamics of oppression. And if our goal is to just shift our identity and feel better and feel like we're good people, it's not actually solving anything. And in order for us to actually do things that make a difference, we need to think about how these things that we're doing affect society. And from a tech perspective, like the products we develop, if we're not actively thinking about how these things we put out in the world affect people's lives, that we can have good intentions and not even realize just be completely unaware that we're not even asking these questions. 

I think as tech, that one thing - how do we take an antiracist approach to product development? What does that look like? What kind of roles are needed? What kind of questions? What kind of orientation should we have? And if we can get some clarity around those sorts of things, of what that might look like of some actual examples that people can kind of follow -- how do I say this? I feel like a lot of the work you're doing, Courtney, with setting an example for how to actually take an antiracist approach to product development and asking these questions in orientation, and shifting some of the orientations have the potential to really, really create some powerful changes in the world. If there's one thing I'd like people to take away with them is that we really need to take a step back and look at these larger systemic things that we're trying to have an impact on as opposed to just trying to look like we're helping is to try and find some ways to actually help.

JACOB: Yeah. I'd never heard the phrase transdisciplinary before. And I fell down a rabbit hole in the middle of this [Laughs] conversation, a Google rabbit hole just sort of looking up the difference between transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. And yeah, I need to read more about this because now it's really blowing my mind. But yeah, I think the big takeaway is I'm hoping that I and anyone else listening is thinking about how that concept of bringing together people of different disciplines to sort of form a unified vision and solve a problem together, how that idea can become more commonplace. If you are a hiring manager, how can you hire engineers that even if they don't have a background in social work, can understand how a social worker might benefit their team and be open to learning about that and opens interfacing with a social worker or a historian or whatever else. 

If you are a college professor teaching computer science students, how can you be training that skill of not necessarily teaching your CS students to also be History majors, but how can you build up that skill of being a person who is interested in the intersections of disciplines as they go out and apply their knowledge into the world? Because I think all the easy problems in tech have probably been solved by now, easy like building a web server. And the problems that we're really left with are the ones of how technology is going to interface with humanity and really making people's lives better and hopefully end depression and et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I'm really thinking a lot about that. 

DR. COGBURN: Well, thank you. This has just been such a lovely conversation. And I think it's a good example of how you can talk about difficult things in a way that can be anchored in learning and thinking carefully, and vocally and trying to find ways to move forward. And it's not just about -- I think a piece that's coming up for me is that it's not just about what you believe. It's what you do. And too often people have focused, white liberals, in particular, have focused on what they believe and not enough on what they are doing and not in a symbolic superficial way, but the deep kind of work that's necessary both personally and inaction that's critical for this. 

And I think a piece that I'm left with that I would like to emphasize that we haven't really talked about yet is when we're thinking about marginalization and oppression, we have to think about that as a coin where the opposite of that exists in parallel all the time. There's no neutral in marginalization, there's no neutral in oppression. There's oppression and systemic advantage. There's being marginalized and being centered. And so we have to think about those issues coexisting. And it kind of goes back to a point that I made that might've been lost, which is when you're thinking about your work and place in this space, you're not a neutral observer thinking about what's so terrible about the world. You exist as part of it. And part of your reflection has to be how do I exist as part of the system where oppression and marginalization exists? Where am I on that spectrum of being marginalized or oppressed? What is my relationship to it? Because it's not neutral. There is no neutral. And coming to terms with that, I think is an important piece of this orientation that we're talking about. It's not just doing good. It's accepting that you have benefited from the very same system that you're trying to fight against and dismantle. And I think that recognition is important. 

But I appreciate really being here today and having this conversation with you all. And it's refreshing to see people who I wouldn't normally expect to, frankly, be having these kinds of conversations giving what I perceived to be your race, and your disciplines, and your work. So it means so much that you were really digging in, and talking, and thinking about this and in thoughtful ways. And I'm happy that I might've been able to contribute in some way.

REIN: I think you did. 

JACOB: Thanks for being here. 

REIN: Thank you.

DR. COGBURN: Thanks for having me.