[If you like Greater Than Code, you should check out the Transatlantic Cable Podcast from Kaspersky Lab. They condense the most interesting infosec and cybersecurity news in 20 minutes or less. Check it out and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.] JAMEY: Hello, listeners and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 119 of Greater Than Code. I'm one of your host, Jamey Hampton and I'm here with my friend, Christina. CHRISTINA: Hi, everyone. Hi, Jamey. It's nice to be on the call this week. I'd like to welcome John with his awesome hair. JOHN: Thank you, Christina and I'm here to introduce Bianca Escalante. Bianca works at the intersection of diversity and inclusion, technology and social impact. She was born in Los Angeles to Central American parents, grew up in Southern California, graduated from UC Davis and not long after that, moved to San Francisco where she's lived in the last 17 years. The majority of her career has been spent working in STEM-education non-profits SMASH and the Children's Creativity Museum, all of which provided her with a foundation of knowledge to work in D&I in the tech sector. Most recently, Bianca was a senior manager of Social Impact at GitHub where she led the company's hyperlocal initiatives at GitHub and many of its employees to engage with some of San Francisco's most pressing issues. Currently, Bianca is taking a nice long self-care break where she is learning Italian, travelling as much as possible, and doing a shit ton of baking for friends and family and that sounds amazing. Welcome to the show, Bianca. BIANCA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I forgot about the shit ton of baking that I am doing but it has been one of the more exciting parts of my life. I made these amazing brownies last week for myself but I need brownies with the snow. CHRISTINA: It's good brownie weather, right? BIANCA: Uhm-mm [affirmative]. JOHN: We'd like to kick off with the show with a question that you probably know we're going to ask which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? BIANCA: I've been thinking about this. What I used to say to people is that my superpower is actually getting people to do stuff that I want them to do without them even knowing that they're doing it because I want them to do it and now, they're just there. I know how to leverage my influence and be persuasive when I need to because I realize that sounded kind of manipulative and weird before. But as I really started thinking about it, I was like, "Wait a minute. Just one?" and not from my arrogant standpoint but from the perspective of I'm a brown woman who works in the tech industry, I need to have multiple superpowers. I think most people from marginalized backgrounds have to have multiple superpowers and we need to be ready at any second when someone doesn't believe that our superpower is our superpower and to pull out another superpower from our back pocket. We've got superpower on superpower on superpowers, I think. That's one thing that I was thinking. But when I really started thinking about what my superpowers have brought to my professional career and even my personal life, I was like, "I'm really good at finding common ground and building from that and I'm really good at taking up on really subtle facial cues or vocal cues from books. I'm good at getting beneath the surface quickly," and then I realize, all of those things actually stemmed from my position as a cultural broker, which I think is a role that a lot of people who are the children of immigrants kind of share but maybe, a lot of people don't exactly know that there's a term for it. CHRISTINA: I didn't know. I like that term. I'm going to start using that now. I'm a cultural broker. BIANCA: You are a cultural broker. It's something I've been exploring a lot actually recently because when I think about identity as an asset, I'm like, "Hell, yeah. This cultural broker role gives me so many assets," I think that when we think about being the kid of immigrants, we think about certain things that we did as kids at a very young age like translating for our parents and stuff like that but it wasn't just a matter of translating for me and keep in mind, I'm doing all this while I'm five years. It's really kind of like understanding American culture in a way that my mom and dad, who weren't from here, couldn't understand and having to be that bridge for them, like having to explain to my dad what a dad joke is because we don't have the phrase in Spanish. There's no [inaudible]. But even humor, like what tends to be funny to Americans might not always be funny to Latinx people and what might be funny to Latinx people might not be funny to Americans. We tend to see a lot of slapsticky stuff on our media and we see people falling and hurting themselves and it's like, "Ha-ha! That's hilarious." But some people are like, "Ow, are they okay." JAMEY: That's really interesting because when I was learning Spanish, I felt like the first time that someone send me a meme in Spanish and I was like, "Yes, I'm doing so good." That was like my benchmark. BIANCA: And let me tell you one thing that I really struggled with as a kid, with this whole kind of being a bridge and having to be American but also, the Latinx for my parents, I have a terribly dry sense of humor and I think a lot of Latino people will tell you that sarcasm just doesn't really -- CHRISTINA: Doesn't go well. BIANCA: Right. It just doesn't really fly for us and my mama get so upset when I would be sarcastic and she'd be like, "I can't breathe what a daughter I raised," and I知 like, "No, Ma. It's just a joke." Now, she definitely gets it and she's way more amenable to it and now, even she's sarcastic. Growing up with that gives me translation skills that go beyond just literal translation and I think that that has been super useful and probably, like I said, all of those qualities that stemmed from being a cultural broker position has probably been what has enabled me to do some of my best work in tech, in terms of relating to people and connecting with people. JOHN: How do you interact with code switching? BIANCA: It's funny because I do quite a bit of speaking and the talk that I gave in RubyConf in November, I was definitely code switching during that talk. I was like, "This is my tech developer, RubyConf voice," and then when I think about the talk that I gave at Codeland a few months before that, it was in a completely different tone with a different kind of humor and when I think about the talks that I give with Code2040, that I'm like, I'm talking with my family, so it definitely changes from time to time. Some people say and I've heard this argument that are like code switching is not good because you're sort of toning down your authentic self but I don't believe that at all. I can understand that argument and I can understand how there is a fine line between being able to code switch really well and also, just completely 100% assimilating but I think that code twitching is almost like being able to speak different languages and being able to know your audience and being able to connect with your audience. I don't see it as bad thing. It's actually really hard to do. My one issue with code switching, I think for the people with marginalized background, it's exhausting. It can be really, really exhausting to have to use that part of your brain but in some ways, it also is a superpower because it kind of kicks in before we can even notice it kicks in sometimes. It becomes as almost instinctual for so many people who've been having to do it throughout their whole lives. CHRISTINA: I kind of look at it as a survival mechanism. You know, I wake up in the morning and when I'm in work mode, that's Christina in work mode and then when I come back and I step off the subway or my taxi and I'm back in what I call the hood, it's me again because I'm with my people, enclosed to my people and I can let my guard down and I could just be me and let it lose. But in the corporate world, you really can't be yourself. It's very nuance. It depends on your specific situation, your environment, and who is the majority but I don't think that you can be your complete, full authentic self. BIANCA: Yeah. We're not there yet. I'm going to say, actually I was speaking to somebody recently and I was saying that job that I had -- it was a job that I had about five years ago -- was the only job where I felt I could be my authentic self and where I also felt like people saw my identity as a woman and as a woman of color as an asset and that was the default. That is the only place that I've ever worked where that has been the case. I think that's why I've been thinking about identity so much lately because I'm like, "If venture capitalists can do pattern matching, which is essentially seeing some element of whiteness and maleness as an asset, why can't black and brown people have our identities be an asset as well too." I used to work in education before I went into tech and I remember sitting down and chatting with this guy and he was talking about standardized testing and what we test for and how. Our testing system is just kind of broken but what he was doing, it was so fascinating to me and I was like, "Yes, I'm so glad somebody is doing this." He was trying to translate qualities and skills like grit and hustle and diplomacy things that hood kids grow up with naturally. He was trying to translate those into a test that would assess how you were with those things. I don't know if you all pay attention to public education research but grit, five or 10 years ago, it was huge. Everybody was talking about that, about what a huge impact grit can make on your educational experience and this guy was like, "How do we test for those things?" How do we test for a kid who grown up, maybe spending more time on the streets and they have it at home and the skills that they've gained has been able to do that -- the diplomacy skills and being able to speak to anyone from a different background, the assessment skills and being able to kind of figure out a situation, figure out at this stage, figure out if it's not safe, figure out how they're going to get through to someone or how they're going to get out of a sticky situation. The adaptability which that is one thing that I talk to people all the time, especially working in D&I. I always call it the mental flow chart like when someone says something to me that is offensive, when I知 talking about D&I issues and someone says, "But you know, if we hire for diversity, aren't we lowering the bar?" which happens all the time -- all the time. In those situations, I have to go through those super-fast mental flowchart and the best situation is figure out, if I'm speaking to someone that I can turn this into a teachable moment or if this is one that I just have to write off or if this is one that I have to speak to aside later on in private, my mind goes through these questions super, super-fast and I figure out in a matter of second what sort of course of action I'm going to proceed with. That is, I think probably another cultural broker skill. I keep going back to this cultural broker thing. It's obviously been on my mind a lot lately and I think we don't talk about it enough in the tech industry because I think that it's a huge, huge, huge asset that we don't recognize. I think it also goes back to seeing someone's identity as an asset, right? JOHN: Yeah, exactly. I think it's a great central concept that sort of ties together all of other skills that you've been talking about. JAMEY: You talked about having an experience in one place, where you felt like your identity was valued and I'm wondering, what are the actual things that you saw on a day-to-day basis that caused you to feel that way at that job. BIANCA: One that stood out to me from literally Day 1, actually before Day 1 because I remember and this actually came up when I was interviewing, one of the people who interviewed me at this job, this was eight years ago now and one of the people who interviewed me was Nicole Sanchez, who some of you may know. She was the VP of Social Impact at GitHub. She interviewed me and I was sitting in there like it was my first time I had ever been interviewed by black and brown folks and I was like, "Holy shit," and Nicole came in and I was like, "What's going on here? What is this? This is amazing. Everyone here is from a really bad ass, diverse background. On top of that, they have PhDs and MBAs and super educated and super smart. What do I need to do to work here like I'll scrub your toilet because I don't care," and Nicole was kind of like, "Okay, calm down," but she was very chill and she was like, "Yes, we have built something very, very special here and I'm not going to deny that." I remember coming in the first day and like I said, I mostly work in STEM education and I think it was our director of programs was having a conversation with our director of research on behavioral issues among black boys and how this impacts their educational experience and how this kind of systemic treatment of young black in public schools ends up negatively impacting our society as a whole. I was thinking and listening to them and I'm like, "They're in the kitchen in front of everyone and they're full-on talking about black boys here. Don't get me wrong. I was here for it," but I've never been in a workplace where a conversation like that was just happening out in the open about young black boys and it was two black scholars having this conversation. I was in there kind of listening to them and they were like, "Well, what do you think?" and I was like, "Well, I don't know since my area of expertise that I can say having grown up in a really diverse environment, I saw this firsthand," and I saw that teachers were leading from a place of demonizing young black boys frankly and oftentimes, there were situations that the teachers were not ready to handle and so, they were just like, "Go to the principal's office." But there was always warmth going on underneath the surface and I think that... I don't know, just sitting there in the kitchen and having that conversation and having them ask me what I thought and also, listening to them and learning as well, it's like, this is what we do here. We normalize these conversation. We don't shy away from these conversations. We speak about race openly and we value perspective, not just because it's a good perspective. We value a perspective because we honor the fact that it's been shaped by the perspective holders experience and how they've navigated the world. Knowing that my own identity shapes the way I navigate the world and influences how I assess situations and how I form my own opinions and that somebody out there honors that and values that was astounding to me. I don't know that I've ever been anywhere that put more thought into how to really value perspectives from marginalized folks. It was your identity as an asset and we want to hear about it and they were so good at it because I never felt I was speaking on behalf of everybody now, which is how I have felt in some other roles. I never felt that way. I just felt that there was so much respect here and another concept that we've talked about a lot, which we don't talk about enough in tech, I think is the concept of distance traveled. Maybe as somebody who was a part of this amazing community and all of these folks went to Berkeley and Stanford and I was there with my measly UC Davis degree, I didn't always feel like I measured up but then, I remember sitting down with someone one day and saying like, "I have an MBA from this place. I also have both my parents who went to college and both of them grew up working and we grew up middle class or upper-middle class. Is that the same for you?" and I was like, "No. My dad didn't make it past the 6th grade and my mom barely squeezed past high school and my dad came to the United States in the cargo hold of a ship undocumented and he worked as a truck driver and supported our family of five on $30,000 a year," and they're like, "Okay, so you came from way back there and you got here. Your distance traveled is actually a lot more than mine and that's something to be really, really proud of," and I was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I have come a long way, haven't I. I think when you're the oldest in a family and your parents are immigrants, you don't stop enough and recognize your own accomplishments because you're used to just kind of go, go, go and set the example and you don't have time for self-care. You don't have time to think about things. You just have to keep going. When I stopped and I thought about it, I was like, "Actually, yeah. I had come a long way. I had to figure all this shit out on my own. I didn't have anybody to help me with my financial aid application. I don't have anybody to help me college application. No one in my entire family: aunts, uncles, no one had been to a four-year university," You know, to this day, everybody in my family because we're Latinos and we're kind of sexist -- they still exist and my cousin, Yousef who's two years younger than me went to college first and I'm like, "Wait a minute. I let it go. I've come to terms with it. I'm okay. I'm okay." JOHN: That's a great metaphor for making visible those differences. I've been aware that obviously, people have those different experience of getting to where they are currently but that distance traveled makes it such a visceral, obvious difference that I really like that. BIANCA: Yeah and the thing that I really like about that conference and I remember speaking to one of my colleagues at GitHub about this and he was a straight, cis, white dude and externally, looked like all the other guys. I'm pretty sure his name was Matt or John and he just kind of fit the job of the standard issue tech dude but there was one day where he and I started chatting and started to get know each other a little bit more and it turns out that he actually grown up in a part of, I think it was Maine, where opioid use and meth use was crazy and ran rampant and a lot of people in his family had been incarcerated and he had distance traveled as well. I think that that's one of the things that I also love about the concept is literally anyone can have that and it's a great way to kind of get a little deeper and find out a little more about folks. It's not to say that people who maybe don't have that same level of distance traveled are to be completely discounted. I think, definitely, obviously they have assets and they have skill sets and great mentors but I think paying attention to where someone came from and where they are now is a huge thing that as I see more and more in what's happening in the tech industry, I really think it would be best to pay more attention to that and like I said, identity as an asset. I hope we get there one day. Maybe because I was staring out the window and it's raining but it feels really gloomy right now. CHRISTINA: I don't want to make it even gloomier but you were talking about being the first in your family to kind of travel this road like goal is distance and I'm wondering, because of that and having the mentality of this go, go, go, how do you reconcile this whole thing about failure. In tech, there's this notion of fail fast and whether it's software or whatever technology, whether it's personal, whether it's a startup, for me personally, I really struggled with that because I've had white, male managers that have said, "It's okay to fail. It's a learning experience," and I'm like, "You don't understand. Where I come from, failure is not an option and you keep telling me that it's okay but it's not okay." Even if you think it's okay, this is what has propelled me forward, knowing that I don't have an option to fail like I have the world on my shoulders and just saying, "I値l try my best because it's okay to fail." I'm wondering how you kind of dealt with that throughout your career. BIANCA: I don't fail. No, I'm kidding. First of all, I think that perspective of fail fast, fail often, that's a super, super privilege perspective like let me just sum it up say that痴 a very privileged perspective. There is -- as I'm sure you know, Christina, and John and Jamey, maybe you experienced this as well -- an element of representation and I have always felt like I cannot fail because I know how this will reflect on people like me. If I could explain the sort of hope and fear that I had around people like Arlan Hamilton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, people who are very visible right now and who are completely blazing trails and who, in my opinion, I think they don't have a lot of room to fail. Look at what's happening with Ilhan Omar right now. I'm like, "Holy shit. That was quick," like people are turning on her really damn quick and she is a black woman and just last week, I was tweeting about how important it was for people who are migrating to the United States to pay attention to the fact that it is a black Muslim woman who is here advocating for them and now this week, Trump is calling for her resignation. I'm like, "Damn, that was quick." That to me is kind of a perfect example of we don't have the same option to fail. That sucks. CHRISTINA: It does suck. JOHN: It does. JAMEY: I haven't thought about it quite that way before but I guess I didn't kind of relate. I feel like I'm letting down the trans community if I don't have my shit together at every point in my life. BIANCA: Yeah. That is so much pressure and the thing that we need to think about is how do we build workplaces where we can take that kind of pressure off of people. Because it's already a high pressure industry as it is and then you add in all those intersections and all those nuances of the pressure that we add on ourselves, damn, how do we get anything done. JAMEY: I have actually been thinking about this a little bit recently too and I think the thing that really I find very difficult for me and I wonder maybe, you can relate to this, is being a part of a marginalized group is a struggle a lot of the time and there's pain involve with that but I feel like I'm not allowed to own that pain because particularly and maybe, this is unique to trans community, maybe not but I feel like if I express that I'm feeling pain and struggle over my experiences being a trans person, there's such a push for like it's so great to be trans and to love who you are and you have to accept yourself and I agree with those things. But there's also pain involved and I feel like I can't express that pain or people would be like, "No. You have to love yourself to be an example for other people who love themselves." CHRISTINA: Yeah, that's rough. BIANCA: That's real. CHRISTINA: Or it could be worse, which is like, "Oh, my God. Don't do that to me." Like, "You should be thankful," and I知 like, "Oh, no." JAMEY: That's true because when I think about it for myself, it could be so much worse like I have a lot of privilege in other areas of my life. CHRISTINA: Yeah but your feelings are still valid, right? JAMEY: That's totally true. I even convince myself that my feelings are invalid because of it and I think other people are doing this too. My perception is that maybe people are repressing a lot of feelings. I know that I'm repressing some feelings. I wonder how many other feeling other people are repressing that I don't even know about and maybe, if we can all talk about our feelings about this together, it would be like healing but nobody can. CHRISTINA: Nobody can, yup. BIANCA: Nobody can and let me tell you, I got invited to a healing circle for Latinas and I'm like, "I'm going to say but I don't know what this is about, what's going to happen: we all going to cry, I don't know." I am very strong but it is also a front sometimes. I'm so used to projecting that competent and strength and everything is okay because that is what I have had to do as far back as I can remember, literally since I was born. I was like, six months old and [inaudible]. The fact that I defaulted to being nervous about what this is just shows, I think how as a society, it's weird because I feel like we fear that kind of wrong-ness and discussion about emotions and about feelings and at the very same time, we crave it so much. There are so many moments I feel like in the last year and I'm married and I tell my husband, "I feel so lonely. I have friends and I have you and I have family and I have all of these people and yet, I still feel so lonely and it's this sort of deeper connection that I'm really looking to have but it's hard to get that with people nowadays." It's so hard. I do think that a part of it is human beings are amazing in their resilience but I will say, especially for people with marginalized background, in the last two years, there has been a sort of fear and a heaviness that I think we're all carrying and these are very scary times that we live in and we have the ability to wake up every day and keep going and persevere but oftentimes, what we're doing is we're suppressing a lot that we're really feeling and we're just telling ourselves like, "I don't have time to think about this or other people are depending on me or I need to get this job done for work," and we don't take time to sort of acknowledge that there might actually be some low-level trauma happening in the background for us. I was talking to somebody about it yesterday and I was like, I wonder how different I'm going to feel when this administration changes, when it becomes an administration that is more focused on inclusion and the aspects of America that I think actually make this country really great, not these terrible fucking things that we're saying right now about other people and the terrible way that we're making other people feel. I think all of that really does take a toll. No matter how good of a day we can have, it always kind of there in the background. I kind of shifted the conversation a little bit. Sorry about that. Man, we're getting gloomy. But maybe this is what we need. We need to be okay with gloominess. We need to be okay with stuff that doesn't always feel good and it doesn't sound good. There's a time and a place for joy and happiness and supporting each other and partying. I feel like you can't experience that to the fullest until you kind of get down in the dump sometimes and then you reach out to other people but I also think -- CHRISTINA: The full human experience. BIANCA: The full human experience and one of the things that I think is amazing is in these moments of feeling alone or feelings sad or feeling scared, they also sort of become opportunities to be the best of humanity and that can be really reassuring. When I'm not feeling well and somebody just randomly text me and says, "Hey, I love you. You're amazing," and I'm like, "Wow. There's still those little things." Those are so powerful. CHRISTINA: I think there was a shift, with the introduction of smartphones and social media, I feel that we've lost some of that human, in-person connection. I didn't realize how important that was until I felt like I didn't have it and how much I valued actual phone call like, what is that where people actually use a phone to make phone calls. Nowadays, I don't speak to 'friends' for months on end because our conversations are entirely via text and I realize that it was kind of burning me out. I'm like, "You know what? I'm going to accept that I need that connection. I need to hear a voice. I need to give you a hug. I need it." The social doesn't do it for me. It's like a temporary high but it doesn't fill me up the way that I need to be filled up. I feel the same, Bianca with the loneliness, it's the same thing. I realize that it's that human connection because when I with a group of friends and we're outside, I feel that warmth and it energizes me. That's when I came to that realization and the social media, it is a gift and a curse. It has its positives but it's also very damaging and we're starting to see some of the effects but I don't think we're going to see the real effects for probably, another decade or so. I don't know. It's changing the human dynamic and it is a bit scary. BIANCA: It feels so good to hear you say that and I know people do have this conversation about how social media has changed the way we connect with each other and how we communicate with each other but there was a part of me that -- I'll be 40 next month -- thought like, "Okay --" CHRISTINA: Girl edit that. If you want a job, you got to edit that part. BIANCA: Yeah. CHRISTINA: Don't tell anybody. BIANCA: Thankfully, I looked a lot younger. I'm going to lie about my age. No. But I thought it was a generational thing. I'll be honest. Talking on the phone is hard for me. I'm one of those people who has a voicemail that says, "If you want to hear from me, you should probably send me a text right after you leave me a voice message," but in-person stuff is so worth [inaudible] and people I think don't understand like, "Can we set up a phone call or can we set up a Zoom," and I'm like, "We're in the same city. I don't see why we can't just go and talk in person." I think I definitely miss that and I push for that and I feel like a weirdo pushing for that like, "Okay, old lady. Do you want to see my face in person? What's that about?" JAMEY: Pivoting the conversation a little bit, what do you do, as far as self-care? Because I feel like one of the reasons why I left, even anything related to D&I, I don't even want to hear the words 'diversity and inclusion,' but I'm an old lady and I've been in tech for a very long time and I don't like the world we live in right now. And so, I just feel I had to step back. I had to step away and kind of just try to help people, not on the skill level, but in personal level. What do you do to kind of fill your cup? This D&I work is very challenging, you're pushing against this very [inaudible], how do you stay sane? BIANCA: I don't know that I do, honestly. There is a double bind that I think D&I practitioners don't talk about and you just touched on it, which is we have the responsibility of leading the charge and blazing the trail at our companies but at what personal cost to ourselves. Because D&I is very different, most of the people who do this work are doing this work from a very personal place. This is not just a job for us. This is a goddamn revolution that we have been fighting for our whole lives, probably. My last day at GitHub was October 15th and since then, I have not been working. I've definitely been applying and doing the tech thing and having coffees and stuff like that but mostly, I've really had to just sort of stop and be with my own thoughts in a way that has been, frankly really hard and really uncomfortable, especially I would say, December and January. Those months tend to be challenging for me. My dad died five years ago suddenly in a car accident a few days before the New Year's and so, late December and January tend to be really, really challenging times for me, where I sort of, I guess revisit a good amount of trauma. I'm in therapy and I want to be 100% honest that early and often, everyone should go. Therapy is amazing. I am a huge advocate of it. I've had to convince a lot of people in my family that I am not crazy because Latinos have a very different perspective when it comes to therapy and I'm like, "I'm not crazy. I just have a lot going on," and I think that one of the things that I have come to realize in the last few weeks is that professional trauma is a thing and if you're a D&I person and you're going to be really good at the D&I stuff, there's no way you can do your best work if you're suppressing trauma that might be related to what you experience in the workplace. CHRISTINA: -- As in D&I work -- BIANCA: Yeah. I have kind of been in the mode and I'm so fortunate that I have the opportunity to take this time off and to be able to do this and I understand that not everyone has that but I've been able to have that and what I've had to do is literally, just move through a lot of really painful experiences and just kind of live with it and I know that right now, what I'm experiencing is a recharge moment. But let me tell you, I'm nervous about going back into a D&I role. I'm very nervous about going back into a D&I role and I also feel to be 100% [inaudible] very disillusioned with a lot of diversity and inclusion practitioners that are out there. It feels so much to me like -- CHRISTINA: Like a business? BIANCA: Oh, my God. It becomes such a business and for an industry that is so focused on data and numbers, there are so many people who are doing this work that are not making a significant impact, that are not changing the numbers and are not changing the data and are not improving retention of their company but really, it's become a way for companies to signal like we have this. It becomes kind of a window dressing thing and you are -- JOHN: Did you ever call it brown-washing? CHRISTINA: I never heard that term. That's interesting. JOHN: I don't either. That just came to me. BIANCA: Like, "Do I want to buy into that?" is the question that I'm asking myself. This is one of the things that is so frustrating about D&I work -- the solutions to the problem that we have, with respect to diversity and inclusion in tech, they are not that hard and there's a lot of people who have the answers. The problem with this work, the reason it is so slow is because so many folks are resistant to it and right now in addition to moving through trauma, I am also building up my sort of patience-tolerance because I think I was becoming less and less tolerant of how slow going this work was. Now, I'm trying to acknowledge that we are doing this work within a system that was not designed for this work at all. It is, unfortunately going to take time. I do still believe in it. I know that it is important. You know, you hear about this sort of bigger picture problems in tech like Amazon facial recognition or Facebook facilitating a genocide in Myanmar. You hear about the sort of global problems but the connection that I'm wondering if people are making is that it actually doesn't start with those huge global problems. It starts with the exclusion of perspectives at the very bottom but at all levels of the company. Tech is going to continue on this path of enabling these horrible things unless people really start to connect the dots between diversity and inclusion work and the problems that are happening in our world today and I'm not sure that people are connecting those dots as much as they should be. Maybe, that's just my feeling a little disillusioned right now, though. JOHN: Those are the end result of a context that was created inside that company. They're not the whole. BIANCA: Exactly, 100% and we keep acting ourselves, how do we fix these end result? How do we fix these result end results? And I would love to see solutions for the end result, don't get me wrong and I am a strong believer in more government oversight and more government intervention for this kind of stuff. I don't know that our government is savvy enough, yet to really understand these principles but I think that this is knowledge that they need to invest in. It's kind of like you're sitting there, sort of having all of these answers and it's like Hermione Granger moment, where Hermione have all the damn answers and the teachers are just so damn sick of her raising her hand and they refuse to call on her and they're like, "Anyone? Anyone?" and Hermione is sitting there like, "Oh, oh, oh, I know the answer. I know the answer," and it's like, "Anyone? Anyone? No? Nobody has the answer? Okay, bye." That's what it can feel sometimes. So many people out there have the strategies and the answers and the solutions to how to fix a lot of these problems but the powers just don't want to see it and may convince themselves that it's not they don't want to see it. It's that best practice has told us that this is how we actually need to approach it but what I've noticed recently as people start to conflate best practices with the preservation of the status quo, I don't know that I'm buying it as much as I used to. JOHN: Yeah. I've been having a lot of discussions recently about how -- and this is not my idea, I forget where I heard it from, it was probably on Twitter -- once the word 'best practice' comes into a conversation, that's basically a way of shutting down discussion. It's like, "This is best practice so we can't really talk about why we're doing it or what the pros and cons are. Let's just go forward." CHRISTINA: That's like, "We've always done it this way." BIANCA: Yeah. This is how it's going to be -- JOHN: It's like everyone does it this way. BIANCA: Everyone does it this way. Well, not everyone. Let's talk about who specifically does it this way, why they decided to do it this way and why we can't try doing in a different way. People are like, "This is the way things are done. This is what's stuck and who determined these best practices? What is their motivation behind deciding that this is a best practice." I have not read 'Winners Take All' yet but I have been hearing so much about it and I'm following Anand on Twitter and everything he says, I'm just like, "Everyone needs to support you and read your book because you really do know your shit," and it is something that is a particular interest to me as someone who spent a lot of time working in the nonprofit industry and then, came over to tech and saw a lot of the same sort of systemic practices playing out. Nonprofit boards and VCs have a lot in common, I'll say that. They don't have a lot in common but they have a lot in common. JAMEY: I was really struck by what you said about the problems not being that hard and it just being less resistance to them. I wonder what's the solutions to that because I feel like you hear a lot of times in marginalized communities like it's not this marginalized community's responsibility to end racism or end transphobia or whatever. It's the majority of people that are causing this problem and it's their responsibility to end it. I believe that but I also believe that that might not happen and so, there's a line where I have this belief that this isn't our responsibility and yet, I'm going to try to do something to lessen resistance to it anyway and I'm wondering what your thoughts on there. BIANCA: Oh, man, that's a hard one. I think that's another big challenge in addition to the solutions are here, it's just people's resistance to them. At the end of the day, who can solve these problems and who should solve these problems. That's tough. I'll tell you from my own perspective. I kind of have to hone my skills and I don't think I'm super great at this yet, for knowing when to step in and contribute because I have the bandwidth and the wherewithal to do it and I'm the right person for this but also, knowing when to take a step back and maybe, leverage some of that original superpower that I was talking about of getting other people to do what I want them to do without them knowing that they're doing because I want them to. For me, what has worked and by no means, this will work for everyone, is there are moments when I say, "I'm the person that needs to step in and I'm the person who can really help us move through this issue," and there are moments where I call on my allies and I say, "You're constantly asking me how to make things better. What you can do, I'm going to tell you exactly what you can do in this particular situation with respect to this issue that we're going through right now and I need you to go in and do it because right now, I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the wherewithal. You're someone who says that you want to do this work, I'm calling on you right now to do this work," and sometimes, they'll say, "But I'm scared," and I'll say, "It's okay. I can help you. I could hold your hand through it," and sometimes I'll say, "I will hold your hand through it." Sometimes, I'll say, "You have the [inaudible] to be scared. You are much better at this than you think you are," and I think that sort of reassurance and validation is really helpful for people, sometimes because we can easily slip into fear and then that will render us completely immobile but that's not beneficial to anyone. I think for me, it's really been a balance of knowing when I can and should step in and knowing when I need to call on others because I do struggle with that too, Jamey. There's a part of me that's like, "Man, I may create these problems. Why the hell am I having to solve these problems. It shouldn't be my responsibility," but I go back to, "If not me, then who," and a call on my ancestor and I ask them for fortitude and then I continue as best I can and when I can't do it, I call on those people who say, "Call on me when you need me," and I'm very lucky that I have come across a lot of people who has said to me, "Call on me when you need me." It's a really amazing experience, even for them to see that they have more agency than they thought they did and they have more knowledge than they thought they did. I think once you kind of put yourself out there and you get over that fear and you advocate for someone or you amplify a voice or you call someone out for something that was offensive, you realize that it's not as terrible or as scary as you might have initially thought it was and it makes it a little easier to do going forward. But this actually, I think a little part of my RubyConf talk, which I remember talking about was this sort of fear is such a primal instinct for us and I don't think that even we realized on a daily basis, how much is controlling our ability to make decisions to move forward but I think fear is up there as one of the big motivating factors -- or motivating or preventing us from doing stuff, I think. JOHN: Yeah, I find that it can often be such a subtle influence that it'll just block out certain thoughts that you're like, "I can do X. I can do Y," but Z and F are sitting there but you're afraid of them and so, they don't even come up as options and you're just like, "I only have these two options." BIANCA: Yeah. I do that too. JAMEY: And I think it's a practice thing. When you're talking about I stand up about something and then I realized I have agency, it's a good feeling to realize you have agency but I also think, at least definitely in my experience that are like practice like, "I can't stand up about this. We can't crack someone because I'm scared," and the more you practice it, the more you see that it's not so hard or maybe, you have positive results or you don't always even have positive results but practicing this muscle of having this instinct of when someone says something wrong, I'm going to say something, regardless of what the outcome of that is. BIANCA: Jamey, you just touched on something. I've been thinking about writing a Medium posts actually and I specifically have called it the muscle because I do feel like there are some people who were like those toddler bodybuilders, like from a very young age, we have had to figure out how to flex these muscles and build these muscles of navigating these sort of stuff because again, I think for people from marginalized backgrounds, we are navigating an entire society that was not designed for us and so, we have had to develop these skills and develop these muscles in a way that folks for whom society was designed for haven't had to and often times, I think this is where the argument that drives me absolutely crazy comes up where like, "Black women are going to say us." No. Let's not say that. Let's not ever say that. No, black women are going to save themselves and they are allowed to do that and the rest of us will most likely reap benefit from that because when it comes to marginalization, black women experienced a shit ton of it. We live in times where we all need to be going to the gym of agency and building up our muscles and building up our strength in order to advocate for ourselves and for others and not be afraid in doing that and practicing it. It is a muscle. It is absolutely a muscle, I think. JOHN: Yeah, they definitely is. JAMEY: I think for somebody advocating for others, it's easier than advocating for yourself, in some ways. I see this my whole life as anxiety and people are like, "How can you stand up when you have anxiety?" If someone else want something, then it's fine. If I want something, then forget it. I think you see that in this context like when I was talking about flexing the muscle, I guess, the big one that comes up all the time for me is when people misgendered me and a lot of people that just don't know anything, they're not trying to be jerks, I don't think they're bad people, I don't think they're bigots. They just don't know what they should say and so there's like, "Am I going to correct the cashier that I'm never going to see again? Maybe not. Maybe I should tell my physical therapist who I see two times a week and there's a negotiation there." It's very nerve wrecking experience for me, even as I've been flexing this muscle but then for someone else, it's easy. If you misgendered your friend, fucking forget it. It's kind of this situation that I've seen a lot of people in where it's like, "I will correct people for you like you will correct people for me." BIANCA: That works. I feel like that's taking some element of Shine Theory and applying it to everyday situations. Are you all familiar with what the women in the Obama administration? JOHN: Yes. BIANCA: Basically, Shine Theory principle was if you don't shine, I don't shine and so, there would be, I think cabinet meetings or meetings where there were multiple women in the room and one woman would say something and someone would talk over her or interrupt her or not acknowledge her idea and I知 saying women and I'm thinking it went beyond women and it was probably anyone who experienced any kind of marginalization. Somebody else would speak up and be like, "I want to get back to this person's point and talk a little bit more about that," and using that and building up those friendships and having those people who you can do that with is super, super, super powerful because I feel like I'm the same way. When it comes to me, I turn into a dork and I get all shook like I don't want to do anything but when it comes to other people, no problem. Absolutely. Stand up, figure it out, yeah and correct folks or advocate for folks. It's funny, I remember taking a Mindful Self-Compassion class a few years ago and I could be wrong but I do remember the person saying that that's a very Western thing to be more willing or likely to take care of other people and put ourselves last, whereas in other cultures, you cannot take care of anyone else until you first take care of yourself and put yourself first. That's hard, though. That's really hard. JOHN: Yeah. One thing that's actually come me is that realizing the level of privilege I have in most context and realizing that that in fact protect me and that is if I can't do that thing, if I can't take the risk, then certainly no one else is going to go out there and risk even more than I am. It's sort of who else is going to do it but I. Even to the point of thinking about it as I do have all those privileges so probably it wouldn't be that bad. I can go do this and it's still a learning process and like you said, a muscle that I'm trying to build up more but I think that's part of the thinking, at least that helps me get through there. BIANCA: Yeah. I've been thinking about it myself in terms of paying attention to the degree of privilege that I carry as a light-skinned Latina and what that means when I think about dark-skinned Latinos or indigenous Latinos or Afro-Latinos and how I need to really use my voice and not only advocate for people because I think advocating for people is important but I think, we need to be really mindful of when we are taking up space but really figuring out how to amplify the voices of other people and not have ourselves be part of this equation that say, "I'm using my position and my platform but what I really want you to focus on is this other person who understands this experience much better than I do and who can teach you a lot more than I can and whose voice is not as common as mine or not given as much of sounding board as mine as," that's been something that I've been thinking about a lot. Man, do I fuck up sometimes. I do but I have too much love to stop entirely and so, even if I do fuck up, I'm going to continue to try and educate myself and work on it. JAMEY: Me too. JOHN: It seems it's a good time just to go into reflections. BIANCA: One thing that staying with me right now is actually Christina, I hope you don't mind me saying this but talking openly about the loneliness. Hearing that someone else feels that, I'm not going to say that makes me feel better where I'd be like, "Oh, your loneliness make me feel better," but I値l say it makes me feel a little bit less alone and it makes me grateful that I brought it up because it turns out that it was something that other folks felt too and now we can all feel a little less alone today. JOHN: It goes back to what you were talking about with going to that healing circle. I think that all ties in with the doing things in person. That's one of those places where you can really find the [inaudible] for that loneliness, especially we can go into a space that's safe enough where you can share those things that you're not allowed to talk about in the larger world because it reflects on you. I think that's great from a general perspective but the more intersections you add on top of that, the more difficult it is but I think also, the more rewarding where if you can get to the point where you can share that as Latinas and say, "This is my experience but I'm not allowed to have this experience," basically, I think that's really amazing. BIANCA: Yeah. JOHN: And I think, the other part of my reflection is at the beginning, we're talking about having to develop all these superpowers as part of your coping strategies, just growing up as who you are in the context that you're in and I just want to acknowledge that. Growing up in a marginalized community, you have to develop all of these because that's the only way to get through to get where you are now and it's so much tragic that life is sort of forcing you to develop all these strategies. We can all hope for a day where they're not required but at least, you can acknowledge that some good things have come out of that, that you have these abilities that you can use that experience and the things that you learned, coping with that, to help other people and to help move things forward and to, hopefully eliminate the need for other people to develop those skills. BIANCA: Yeah, it's challenging because there's a part of me that says like, "I really would have like to have it a little easier from a younger age," but there is also a part of me that acknowledges that, "Maybe, I wouldn't have those superpowers but I have to had it." So I don't know. I want to think about that one a little bit more. You're right. They came out sort of as skills that I needed to develop very quickly and in some situations, they were definitely coping mechanisms and coping mechanisms are something that we used to heal and to survive and from that perspective, it's a challenging task to do that and also, I struggle with self-love but I would say that these are definitely attributes that I have come to really, really value and they make me different. Like I said, it's my identity, which has shaped my experience, which has allowed me to have all of these qualities and if I hadn't been born to immigrant parents, if I hadn't been born brown, if I hadn't been born lower income, I wouldn't have these things. JAMEY: I think something that's really sticking with me from this conversation is what you said about when times are really tough, you also kind of get to see, sometimes the best of human connection. When you were talking about repressing all of this trauma that people have been experiencing living in the current climate, you were talking about, "I can't process this. I have to work. I have things to do. I have things to focus on," but I think there's also an aspect of I don't want to think about this because it's so depressing, that I can't let myself feel these feelings and that's a thing that kind of more personal version of feelings repression that I definitely experienced and so, I think that spending some time really focusing on these more positive experiences that have come out of it that maybe could give you the energy to also let yourself feel the bad feelings that otherwise, maybe you don't feel you're emotionally prepared to feel. Sometimes I feel kind of almost guilty about trying to focus on the good because I don't want to takeaway from this bad situation that's hurting me and lots of people that has caused this good but I think that if you think about it more as like, "I need to focus on this for self-care but if I do, I can also allow the rest of these emotions into my heart, I guess," is a more balanced way. BIANCA: Yeah. It's funny I noticed this in working in tech of how conflict averse in tech can be and it's not even conflict averse but probably like uncomfortable averse. Anything that is prestige as remotely negative or remotely uncomfortable, we have to kind of sweep it under the rug a little bit. I do wonder how much of that is a sort of an American culture thing. This is one of the things that I had to explain to my parents because I remember my dad was like, "Why do they say things like, 'Don't upset your mother?'" and I was like, "Yeah, okay." You know, he was talking about white people because he was like, "You upset your mother all the time. I upset your mother all the time. We talk about everything in front of your mother that upset her," and we can go really, really deep into this and discuss the historical practice of sheltering and protecting white women or we could just talk about it as a surface level American thing, which I think is also valuable of like don't rock the boat. Don't cause negative feelings. Don't ruin dinner. Don't do this. I have a friend and he's cis and white and he's gay and his parents are huge Trump supporters and he is having such a hard time with them right now and he's like, "I just can't talk to them," and to me, that concept is kind of foreign. I'm like, "Why? You can't talk to your parents. That's weird." He's like, "Really, you don't understand. We just don't talk about it." And I'm like, "Well, I think you need to talk about it," but at the same time, I can empathize with like, "How hard that must be? As a gay-man, to have your parents supporting them like, is it a matter of like we can't talk about it or is it a matter of it's too hard and it hurts too much. To me, that's super sad. Again, maybe it goes back to that muscle. Maybe, we also haven't quite built up the muscle to be able to have tough conversations. JOHN: Yeah. I think white Americans, especially middle class/upper class cultures, that is so unused to that, we have to be uncomfortable at any point ever. The whole thing is based on preventing that from ever happening and that's translated directly into business culture and again, that's the diversity problem because the other people aren't running the businesses and making that sort of context okay. BIANCA: Yeah. JAMEY: I get the mental gymnastics thing too. I can relate to what you're talking about with your head, not from my parents but for some other people in my family and it really feels like we could not talk about this and I can pretend like you don't have disrespect for me and my community or we could talk about it and then, we cannot have a relationship anymore. I really think those are the two options, so it's like I cannot rock the boat and do these mental gymnastics about it, such that I don't have to cause this situation and I just caught myself saying as if my existence is what's causing this situation but it's really tough. BIANCA: Yeah, I have no doubt that it is. JAMEY: I know. I almost like don't want to leave it because that was a really bad way to end, I feel. BIANCA: But maybe that'll make people a little uncomfortable to leave it hanging like that and maybe that uncomfortable-ness is not entirely a bad thing.