JAMEY: We, at Greater Than Code, recently asked our supporters, listeners, and friends of the show for their opinion on what organizations we could donate to that would make the greatest immediate impact for the black community and the injustices they're experiencing right now and always. Based on the response, we've decided to split our $1000 donation equally between The Bail Project, the Black Lives Matter Foundation, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Urban League. We urge all our listeners to do what you can to support these important organizations as well.

JESSICA: Good morning. Welcome to a special episode of Greater Than Code, because there are some things more important than code going on right now. I'm Jessica Kerr and I'm happy to be here with my friend and co-host, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, Jessica. I'm happy to introduce my friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hi, everyone. We have a special episode today. Normally, our episodes are on a per week cycle, but with everything going on in the world today, we wanted to bring together a very powerful group of voices to share their thoughts and inspire our usual listeners to action and let our guests introduce themselves and tell you who they are in their own voices.

KIM: Hello, I'm Kim Crayton. I'm the founder of #causeascene community online, as well as the #causeascene podcast. I am a tech leadership coach and I've just launched The Antiracist Economist. And so, I will be talking a lot in the future about corporate blackface.

SHIREEN: My name is Shireen Mitchell. I grew up in Harlem, in the Bronx, in the projects and the time that people didn't think that black girls do code. I started coding at 10. I later founded the first women of color organization to focus on women and girls of color, to get them online and into tech back in 1999, before it was cool and nobody wanted to even work on it because you thought I was crazy to do so. And fast forward, working on policy in the tech industry, I have now been focused on online harassment and engagement issues for women of color online and in the industry. And we are specializing right now, during this particular moment, on disinformation in the black community in our elections and including the disinformation now that we're faced with Covid. I also work with a colleague on a project called Human First Tech, where we focus on issues that are human first, text second.

ISA: Hi there. My name is Isa Herico-Velasco. I'm a software engineer, open source maintainer. I am an overall [good gal] in International Woman of Mystery. I've spent my life in three places primarily, which is San Francisco, the Philippines, and New York. So, pardon my accent if it switches around. That's like my souvenir as I've grown up. I currently work at the Internet Archive, working on a website. And I am also a founding board member of a nonprofit called Bridge Foundry. It's an umbrella organization that supports other bridges across the United States and the world, that teaches women and underrepresented minorities how to code for free.

CORALINE: So the world is on fire. And as is usually the case, black and brown people are bearing the brunt of the damage, both from Covid and from our increasingly awful political situation. I know better than to ask you how you're doing, but I'd love to hear kind of what's at the forefront of your minds right now.

KIM: For me, I want to challenge your statement of increasingly. As a black woman, this has always been our reality. Just because white folks are waking up does not mean that it did not exist. And I challenged that right off the bat because I am so sick of this narrative that I keep hearing. First, it was this awakening into 2016 and now it's 2020. If you have not seen enough black bodies being destroyed on camera, then fuck you. That's not to you, Coraline. That's just -- [Chuckles]

CORALINE: Yeah, that's fair. That's a very fair point. Thank you for challenging that. I totally agree with you that a lot of people are coming to see for the first time, for a lot of people, the world as it has been for a long time, for black and brown folks. I'm hoping that some of them are listening today and we'll learn more to what you all have to say and be inspired to go and do some learning on their own.

SHIREEN: So for me, the stories that we're hearing are the things that people feel like that all of a sudden their eyes are open, usually has to do with generations. They've lived in existence or their families lived in existence that didn't have to live through any of the things that you're witnessing now. And most of that is because cameras didn't exist. Social media didn't exist. Or it's still talking about social media being in existence for, what, 10 years. And so, people are opening their eyes because now they get to see a global vision of what happens to black and brown people across the globe. We've, of course, seen protests across the globe on this one particular issue. But it wasn't this one. It's been many, many, many lives. Some, we don't name. Some, we don't know.

There's a narrative that I always push back against that only black men are dying because that's not true. Black women are dying by the police and police brutality from Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, to Korryn Gaines. And there's so many more. And I always feel frustrated when I listen to people and all their narrative is just black men because it's not true. I don't know why our community is separate like that so many times because there is no black woman is walking around not experiencing racism the same way that black man is. It didn't happen during slavery and it's not happening now. There are other narratives that go along with our issues, which is sexism and sexual assaults that aren't, I feel like, aren't naturally. It does happen. A part of the narrative of what happens to black men in police custody. And I just think that people don't realize, in my opinion, any of our historical narrative. And the reason that we're here now is that we're just repeating a cycle and a very old cycle that started from 1619. And every so often, we get to this part where we're protesting and trying to change the narrative. It changes a little bit and then people go back trying to forget it.

I literally had to post again about Tulsa. It's been 99 years since Tulsa and most white people didn't know it existed at all. That the only time they saw it or recognized it was because of a TV show called Watchmen. And people will still, you have no idea how many people who are my friends were like, "I never even knew about Tulsa." And I was just like, "How do you not know?" All these lived experiences that white people don't experience and don't believe is real because they don't experience it has been the narrative. And so that is part of where we are today, because now people are going, "Okay, I see it." But we've seen it for years now, since before 2016. This social media has done this.

The challenge is the way in which we're treated when we tell our stories, the way in which media tells our stories without our voices. A great example is Nikole's project on 1619. You got white scholars telling black scholars that they're telling the story wrong. That is historical. That's who we are. The fact that people don't want to admit that Tulsa existed, also tells the narrative that when we find out about those stories and we have mass murders, white people killing black people, that they're not a part of your crime stats, but you have no problem saying black on black crime. Why are we here? Because all of those narratives allow us to make what was happening, that we're protesting against, normal. That the only criminals out here are black and brown people. And white people can't be criminals while we're watching them right now, break the rule lock in government on a daily basis. We are not the villains in this American horror story. You all are. 

KIM: And so you just spoke to something I speak about and increasingly people in my community is like, "Damn, I didn't see it until you --" because I talk about this constantly. The narrative is whiteness is always cast as a hero or victim and never a villain. And white supremacy allows -- and when I say white supremacy, I mean the systems, the institutions and the policies -- allow white people, whiteness, white presenting people, anybody who the closest you get to white, to be in those roles, a hero or victim and never villain. Think about the old shoot them up westerns that the United States is famous for. Every time there is an assault on a black person, all it takes is a white woman, because it's usually a white woman, to start crying. They offer a bland apology. And the first thing you know is -- whew! Bless it. I'm just having the breeze right now, is that the expectation of the injured party who has to now, if they don't want to become a villain, has to now accept an apology from this racist individual. That is victimization and terrorization on top of victimization and terrorization. Because this narrative does not end. There is always a loophole that allows whiteness to be only hero or victim and never a villain. Even with a gun in its hands. 

SHIREEN: Sorry, or a machete, which happened the other day.

KIM: Or crossbow. 

SHIREEN: Or a knife. Whatever it is. 

KIM: You think about just what? Three weeks ago? You had white folks taking over capitals of states with fully, fully, fully armed to the teeth, spitting in the faces of police officers who were trying to protect themselves from Covid-19. And we can't walk down the street? You don't see a difference in that? This is why I'm like, "Fuck equality." We need to talk about equity. There is no way that Kim Crayton is going to have the same experience as a white person who has done the same thing in this country and have the same consequences. Period. Until we start dealing with the inequity. You can give both of us cookies. But if you shit on my cookie before you give it to me, I'm not going to eat that cookie. But we both have cookies, so we're equal.

SHIREEN: May I say the epitome of why the whole argument about All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, it's why people say, but what happens when a white person is killed? Do you have the same sympathy? Until you have the same sympathy for us. I saw something the other day. I have not processed it yet. So I'm going to say it rawly here. A white woman was comparing All Animals Lives Matter to Black Lives Matter.

KIM: Why have two classes there? [Laughs]

SHIREEN: I know what it is. When I say I don't process it, I'm saying that this is a narrative that always repeats. And I'm just letting this one video go. But this woman got on video, on video [chuckles] and basically said, "I don't understand when people don't connect the dots that black lives matter and animals lives matter." So, you still see us as animals. It's like you don't even see us as humans!

KIM: But go back to the video of the lady in the park. How many people were pissed off because people showed a video of the dog getting choked? I love me some dogs, but not over a black man's life. 

SHIREEN: They were more concerned over their animal than they were over his life.

KIM: But that's the thing that gets me. If she goes to jail or court for anything, it will be from abusing that animal because they came and got that damn dog that day. It was a shelter dog and that shelter came and got that dog from that lady, they banned her from adopting again. If she sees any justice, it will be because of her treatment of that animal. And again, I love me some dogs. 

I mean, the place that we are in right now, even with the protests that are happening, is the way in which people, especially white America, is always like, "But you destroy property." And you're just like, I'm sorry. There's two things that's a problem here. If you go back to Tulsa, you all destroyed properties, stole land from us. Not to mention the natives that you stole land from by coming here. But you've also murdered us with no one being held accountable. But all of a sudden, you're worried about property. It's like property can be replaced. Lives cannot. And so, I have a huge problem with the way that narrative is always told that when we protest, we're the violent ones but the guys walking around with the guns and spitting in police officers faces are not. 

I think Ava DuVernay is the one that said this and this stays with me now is the fact that there are people who can walk around here with the privilege of the presumption of innocence that we will never have. Let's do a history lesson. Not very long ago, we were also that property. So, to them, we're still property. So we're property destroying property. So, it's not even humans destroying property. We are these things that are property. And so when they say make America great again, let's go back. That's what they want to go back to. They may not be able to articulate it. They may not even have the conscious understanding that they'd been dripped and bathed in white supremacy all of their lives and that they see us fundamentally as something that can be bartered.

And also, let me speak to this. Whiteness has never been original. It is always stolen. It always co-opted, always taken from, appropriated from other cultures. So this is what I challenge. Show me something that's original. Show me something. Show me one thing. This is why I continue to say white people, particularly these dudes who get to do and make and cause havoc in tech, are nothing but mediocre white dudes in tech. Show me where you can compete with somebody who's been told all their life that they have to give 110%. Show me. 

ISA: That was a few hammers down on those nails there. You really hit a few points about tech culture. And the things that we're trying to converge is literally like universal love. Let's get to this moment. I come from a solidarity point. So, I want to bring this just a little bit. Filipino history has a few parallels with black history, black American history. My people were enslaved for 400 years, 300 years until we rose up against the Spaniards. And at that moment, the United States came in and took over for another 100 years. That's about 400 years of just ridiculous oppression. Now, fast forwarding to me, I don't even know my ancestors past my grandmas. And the fact that I can't understand my history is something that I've been yearning for, for a very long time. And what happened for me was that black culture and black community, black women primarily have helped me understand and helped me cultivate my own identity. And that is why I vocally stand up, because my best friends are strong black women and they're exhausted. I mean, they can't even tweet, to tweet to say I'm exhausted. So, here I am. What am I to do? Let me go rile up my Twitter and keep this conversation going. I'm about the discourse, I'm about the dialog, because the only way through the mud is through the mud. You've got to walk through this. So, I come from a place where I celebrate black culture because we consume it every day. It's the number one product of the United States. 

KIM: Not just the United States, globally. 

ISA: Absolutely.

KIM: And the levels of anti-blackness in this world while consuming our stuff is ridiculous.

ISA: Yes. And that understanding of whiteness and protecting whiteness, colorism is quite prevalent in my culture. I was told every day that my hair was too kinky to straighten it. We were using dark and lovely relaxer on my hair since I was nine years old. I stopped using it about 2013. It's taken a long time to just even take that little piece of systemic injected self-hate that just propagated through my ancestors all the way down to me. Like I had to break that moment. And I tweeted about this, I want to say yesterday, and I said that, "That type of colorism and that just berating of 'don't stay out in the sun, you're going to get too dark', 'go brush your hair, your hair's too crazy, you'll never get a job like that', that was what fueled my teenage rebellion at this point." So I really, really just stand with black America, black Americans, my sisters and my brothers in this fight because it's strength in numbers at this point. We must get our voices heard and we will.

KIM: You said several things or another thing that I always say, "Black women are the moral compass of this country." Period, period, period, period. If you're not listening or you listen, you just don't follow. And then you fuck up and then you come back to us. But with black women, if there is an issue that is important, be it in the LGBTQ community, be it in the disability community, be it in any other isms where it intersects with blackness, those women are the moral compass.

Also, one of the things you talked about and this is the about the model minority myth. So many people have internalized white supremacy and anti-blackness because those are the systems that we were all raised in. So I'm going to be honest as to why my audience is white people. Because as an educator, I can quickly come in and say, "Stop doing that. This is why you got to stop doing that. And this is what we're going to do in return." Even in that, I understand that I'm educating the oppressor while I'm also processing my own oppression. I do not have the bandwidth like you say we're tired. I don't have the bandwidth to process the oppression of black people plus my oppression and to get any work done. I will be on my knees forever. So, I do what I am good at. And that is educating and setting boundaries for the white folks where I never had boundaries before. And it takes discomforts. Like you said, going through the mud. It takes you to hit that wall. You have to be willing to hit the wall constantly because you don't have the perspective. You don't have the lived experience. And as Shireen said, if it has not happened to you, you don't believe it.

So for me, in our community, one of the things is -- and this is what I don't like compassionate coding. I don't like the whole empathy thing that we're doing in tech because that requires someone to actually give a damn and self-develop. That is sort of skills that you -- empathy, compassion are skills that you develop. I don't have time as a marginalized person in tech to wait for you to develop that while you're still harming me. I need you to get to a point where if I say this as a black woman that this has the potential to harm, you don't even have to understand it. Just know that this is an inflection point for me to make a different choice. I'm not a trans black woman, but I know that if they say something that's harming them, I'm not going to ask them to dig up their trauma and show me the scars before I say, "You know what? That is a problem. Let me figure out how to do something so that I am prioritizing the most vulnerable." When we get there, that's when the equity question will be answered. When we're prioritizing the most vulnerable, the equity question will be answered.

SHIREEN: So for me, part of the work that I've been doing with actually Human First Tech on stop over violence against women is a focus on exactly that. And I've said this before about tech. If tech spent more energy focusing on the most marginalized when they were building tech, we would be in a different space at this moment. 

[Clapping]

SHIREEN: We spent so much time. And the issues here are we constantly talk about an umbrella approach in technology, but we don't really mean the umbrella. We mean that we're going to make sure that in the end, the people who are the most privileged are just as protected as us. And the truth is that people who are causing the harm are the white people who were in the system. We can't kick them out of the system, but we're still catering to their needs over the most marginalized. And I do believe that if we start from -- and I've always said this -- there is no tech fix for the human condition. I've quoted that multiple times. It has been one of my major quotes. The fact that technology exists does not change the social construct of which we are living in. And most people don't understand the connection between that. And so, if we don't focus on the most marginalized, we do not have the fix we need.

I was reading something the other day about the nonsense with Zoom. And one of the people speaking up is someone who still believes in the fact that they should bring in all these other people, but that the solution should be with fixes for everyone, not a fix for one or two groups. Then you're just like, "That's why we don't fix anything, because you're only fixing in the end for the most privileged." So if you have the most privileged at the top and you've got the most marginalized here and you think you're coming down here and not getting to the bottom, you're not solving them. You're not solving anything for them. You're giving some space for these people to feel like they're close to the people at the bottom and they're not. And so their experiences are completely different.

So unless we start fully thinking about that from a technological framework, and I get it, most of this is capitalism and profit margin. We got it. That's America. But we also have to remind ourselves that part of where we are today is because of the concept that we were their property. That the reality is we were free laborers. They got to make money off for free labor. The things I tell people that's still in American policy is that you don't realize that you're participating in it every day. [Tipped] workers is based on slavery. The Electoral College is based on slavery. The police department is based on slavery. 

Slavery is written. And then white people tell me slavery is over. I'm just like, "I'm sorry. Can we guys stop saying that? Because let's just be clear. Most of these policies are based on 1619," us being enslaved and other people are now being caught in those policies, i. e. Jim Crow and all the likes. But it's still based on keeping us from being able to vote. So in the 13th Amendment, which most people don't even want to address, slavery is still written there. America has slavery. They wrote it in the Constitution. Go read it. 

ISA: In the worksheet, the one sheet that was given to me, there was a question there and it said what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? So I really prepared for that. And I'm going to say it. And then I'm going to ask you a question about the topics that we're talking about today.

My main superpower is that I am a bridge. I am a bridge, and I do my best to take both sides of the equation and equalize it. Like really try to bring the two sides together. And I feel like I got that superpower from learning about sisterhood in my 20's. And my leadership style is of inclusivity and diversity. We all know that it's a scientific fact and it's proven that diverse minds can be more powerful and be more productive and bring better solutions for. We don't have to answer now. But I'd like to ask the Caucasian panelists here. What are your action steps directly at work to help bridge this gap of inequity of your fellow workers, your fellow colleagues that are not of Caucasian descent to bring them up to leadership, to bring them up to a higher visibility in their professional lives.

CORALINE: I can say for myself, I really have a lot of hope for the company that I work for. It is a San Francisco tech company. So all the problems that come along with us. But personally, I try to sponsor my black colleagues at work and do everything I can with my privilege to lift them up and give them the opportunities that otherwise might be denied to them or that might be overlooked for. I also encouraged our management to engage directly with an ad hoc group that started from the bottom up of people of color at my company. I try to stay out of the way. I try to listen. I try to offer support and sponsorship where I can. I do my best to leverage my privilege.

That's not just at work. I've been doing my best in this domain since about 2013, 2014 when I had my awakening moment. And my domain is tech, so I do what I can in the tech field to make everyone have greater opportunities to the kind of life-changing potential that working in tech can bring. I don't feel like it's enough. I'm constantly asking myself how I can do more right now with everything going on. I don't think that it's safe for me as a trans woman to go to protests. I know it's less safe for other people, but I have my family to look after. I can't risk that. So I'm giving money. That's the best I can do is giving money and amplifying voices and trying to stay out of the way.

JAMEY: I'm kind of in an opposite situation. I'm not working right now and I've been having trouble finding work. So I've been trying to give money where I can, but that's like a tough thing for me. But one thing I do have a lot of is time and energy. And so I have been trying to be at protests. It's been really tough in Buffalo because everyone in the community is listening to what the black community organizers here are asking for the protests to be like. And so that's been really frustrating to see. And so, I've been trying to listen and see what our community organizers are asking for us to do and pressing other white people to listen to that. Yesterday, I went out for a march and black community organizers were there and were like, "Hey, you know what? We're not marching today because we marched yesterday. We marched for six miles and we've already done that. And it's done. And we talked to the city government and the BPD, and we have this agreement that we're working on with them. We have to give them a chance to honor this agreement. And if they don't honor it by a certain date, then we will be back and marching again. But until then, we will not, because we're showing them that we're serious about this agreement." And so the march got called off and we didn't go. And there are still people there who were like, "Well, we want to go anyway." And I was trying to express to people like, "If you think you're here to help, then you should be listening to what people are asking you to do as a way to help."

And so what I started doing yesterday when the march was supposed to be instead is I'm getting trained in crowd de-escalation tactics so that at future protests, when they do go down, because I do suspect that we will have to continue this at the date when they said that we would because I don't trust our city and our police department to make good on this agreement, I want to be able to protect people then. And so, we're trying to put together a safety group of people who can be at protests, who have training in crowd safety and de-escalation. We're talking about how can we [inaudible] teargas, how can we protect people when this is happening, how can we be safe if we want to put our bodies in between what's going on. And so in this interim period where we're being asked not to march, I'm doing these trainings and encouraging my friends to learn this stuff too, so that I want to keep my community safe. I and my community in my neighborhood get guests while being peacefully protesting on Saturday night. And it hurts me to see my community and my neighborhood hurting in this way.

KIM: I have some questions about that. I think what people in this movement, your role is to go to protests if you can. And your only role is to be watchful and to put your physical bodies between the protesters and whatever is a direct impact for them. It amazes me. But it doesn't. I find myself in my head just laughing at the things I'm about to say. Because Coraline and I, the last time I did this podcast, at the end -- I don't think it was recorded -- but you asked me a question about how people are seeing our advocacy. And I don't get pushed back because of people saying it's ego or that because I'm black. We live, survive on community. We have not gotten where we are by being individuals. So when white people show up to things because that's all you know. You've been told you're special, you're individual, and this is why Zuck and Elon Musk and these very harmful people continue to get lorded over because Elon, he got this stuff from NASA. He's not making this stuff up. He's not pulling this stuff out of his ass. He got access to stuff that was already created by our federal government about our tax money. So when white folks go to these events and they can't do the rage thing because whiteness is designed for chaos and destruction. I don't care how people take this, but that is what it is. It is designed, white supremacy is designed for chaos and destruction. There is no bottom. People need to stop looking for that.

So when I saw way too many videos of black folks marching for our right to exist and having to stop what they were doing to talk to white folks about the harm they were causing, because again, you're never held accountable for anything. And you know only chaos and destruction. So it does not surprise me that they couldn't get their adrenaline rush from being told they can't march and they still want to do this thing. That is not your role. Whoever you are in solidarity to, whoever you are protesting on behalf of, they get to dictate what's going on. This is fundamentally why I'm having a problem with any white voice right now. If you are not black and you are talking, you better have some really important shit to say. Because if not, you need to shut the fuck up and amplify other folks because you're causing a problem.

I'm going to give you an example. Sara Chipps just tweeted last night about a TMZ video, I mean, a leaked audio of cops. I guess she's in New York, but it's a brief clip of cops saying, "Hey, there are people blocking," whatever. And then there's a cop that says, "Just shoot and run them over." And so she tweets, "This was me and my friends." And she's saying something like the last sentence of it, "This is a joke." And people are telling her, "This is not a joke." She has no freaking perspective of how to assess risk in these environments. And so, I would not feel safe following anything a white person has to say. Because if you think this is a joke, if you can't assess risk for yourself, how can you assess risk for the people you're there to protect? It wasn't a joke. Why would a police officer say that on the system, whatever you want to call it. This is not a joke. He was in commission of his job. Fundamentally, white folks, you sit down and shut the fuck up. Go to the things. Do what's being told. That is it. 

On Twitter, please stop sharing and recommending white fragility. White fragility is problematic. White fragility is a term that Robin DiAngelo developed in an academic term that explains why white people get so upset and uncomfortable when it comes to conversations about race. Outside of the classroom, white fragility is used to harm people and for white folks to sidestep the consequences of their behavior. So when they do something, it becomes 'that's just their white fragility'. DiAngelo didn't talk about the consequences of white fragility. The consequences of white fragility is harm for those people that whatever is directed to. There is a cause and effect to everything, and we don't talk about it. This is why I had a problem with Bernie Sanders. And this is not about political, but it's about everything. It's not about class. And when you make it about class, then white people think we're equal. We're not. Covid deaths are hitting native black and brown communities because the systems are designed for us to die.

ISA: Yes. 

KIM: That's all.

ISA: Thank you. Thank you for your voice.

SHIREEN: There are a couple of things I want to make sure that we are clear about. The thing that I think is so important, because I think that even the stories of other cultures, I think is important for us to make sure that we also incorporate. I think that a lot of what America is a foundation on anti-blackness and that anti-blackness is is global. I mean, we have our own colorism. We have our own versions of that. I think almost every culture has a version of that. And that becomes part of a narrative. I tell people all the time I'm a product of northern migration. My version of the world is completely different. But most people think that because I grew up in the north, i.e. Harlem in the Bronx, i.e. urban, that somehow I know anything about Middle America and racism but I don't know anything about Southern racism. I know a lot about Southern racism. Why? Because I'm a product of northern migration. I still had to go south my entire childhood. There was no out. There was no opportunity to be like, "I can't do this." The only time I don't go now is because I'm an adult and they have to pick and choose. And I can do that. But as a child, it was not a choice.

KIM: You didn't have a choice. [Laughs]

SHIREEN: I had no choice. And I always tell people when I describe the town that my family originally came from, it's like you get to the city limit sign, you go a couple of, I don't know, blocks? You get to the other part of the city, the side that says you're leaving the city limits. Like you're on that one road, that there's only two roads in and out of my town. And if you don't make the turn, you will not get to my town. And most people are on that main road and never drive to my town. And so, I find that very interesting as I try to explain that to people. My town is tiny, but I always tease about just like almost everybody in there is family. They're all related. There's all these kinds of things going on there.

But the other part about that was that you know how political my mom was when she went north and how she kept that with me and my understanding of that. Not only was I drive to the south all the time, I was drive to the polls my entire childhood. I had no choice but to go to the polls. I had no choice but to participate in what was going on in my social construct. And for those that don't know and hasn't seen me tweet about this, she was a Republican. She died a Republican. So I went to the polls when levers are being pulled. And you can actually see who wins in which machine. I have my mother on one side and my Ma on another. And I sat in the middle of the room watching my neighbors come pull levers. I was like, "Who's pulling lever where?" I got to see what my community looks like. The fact that white people still think that they can tell me what my community looks like because I'm all of a sudden an individual who's telling them something they don't understand was a narrative that they believe that isn't true. As I'm telling my story and my community story, they're willing to say in those moments, all of a sudden, I'm an individual. Prior to that, I'm just another black girl. I'm part of the culture of blackness. But when I tell my narrative, all of a sudden I'm an individual and they want to remove me from my culture as if they would know more about my culture than I do. And that's a fundamental problem across the board. But when we talk about the aspects of the way in which white supremacy is used to model minority for them to have the same sensation that they know more, especially in tech industry. 

Each industry has their cultural steps, steps of hierarchy. And then the tech industry is very much white men first, then Asian men. And then the rest of us, including Asian women that follow that line. The concept that black and brown people have any technological knowledge, my entire life since I was 10, I've been told that it's not changed. I am not 10 anymore. And I still hear those same narratives. Those pieces have not gone away. When hidden figures came out, yeah, they were like black women didn't exist in this field. And yet at the time when I was coding, Katherine Johnson existed. And yet people would tell me I still couldn't do what I was doing. 

Let me just caveat this so you understand what I'm saying, because this is the hard part for most people. This is my truth. At 14, my mom finally realized that the system of which the school I was going to, that's local to the project was not benefiting me. I was testing by 5th grade above reading and math levels that were above high school. Even my own community was telling me that I can't be smart or that my grades didn't matter. I had teachers that were giving my mother and I a hard time, especially me, because I was loud then. And well, now, that part didn't change. [Chuckles] And my mother used to say that it was quite clear that if someone pretended or said anything, they made it look like I wasn't smart, she was like I knew I was smart and I was not letting anybody even come close to saying that I wasn't. And that became a marker for what the decisions my mom had to do at that point. She kept me out of school for three weeks because when I decided what I wanted to do next, I basically said to her, like, of course you have to decide on what the proper school system is for me to match my intellect. But her solution was go to the white district. And I was like, "I'm not going to the white district." I know black and brown people who look like me, who come from the same cultural background that I have, who are also smart. Find them. And because I forced my mother to find them, she did. She had to go down to the superintendent. She had to do a whole bunch of other stuff. But the concept that white people were smarter than me or smart as me, was the only thing my mother had a solution for. And that's very cultural as well.

So when I got to go to that junior high school that had all walks of life, of all the people of color that I can imagine, from Muslims to Arabs to Asians. People don't even understand that that was even true in Harlem, that that was even possible. And yet that was my existence. So I know what it's like to understand what that existence is and watch other people learning other people's cultures, having to navigate around that, and us getting to know each other. I know what that looks like. I live that. I know we can have that. It's unfortunate that there aren't enough people like me who know what that existence is and know how to work through that. That's what's unfortunate to me, because I know that. I live that from junior high school to high school before I decided to leave New York City because they went after the Central Park Five, who is now Exonerated Five, and they came after us. The army of blue came to my community and didn't leave because a white woman was raped in Central Park.

KIM: And how many times since then has that narrative been told?

SHIREEN: I'm just saying. We just went through Amy Cooper are doing it. It's trying to get people to understand that I know what it could look like if we want to work together. But if you want to accept what whiteness gives you and that's your only option and that's the choice you're going to make because of colorism and other choices, then we can't get there. We'll never get there. I know that I am in the middle of the line of my color dynamics, but you have to know that my mom from the South could drink from the white only water fountains in the south. And nothing happened to her.

KIM: Yes, she was white. She was white passing, good Lord.

SHIREEN: So I know the distance between those things. And that's the woman who died a Republican, the woman who dragged me to the polls, who taught me what to look like. She's also the woman that told everyone in our family, every time I could remember. And when she died, I said it at her funeral because I had people in the South not even know who the freak she was, and I was just mad. I had to get up. My uncle was like, "No, sit down." I was like, "I got to get up." And I got up and I said, you know, I'm looking out here at my family in the southern town that they went to bury her in which she didn't want to be buried in. She left that town for a reason. It was that reminder in that moment when I looked out into the crowd, I was like, "We were a bouquet. No matter how complicated or what we looked like, we were a bouquet of flowers."

KIM: Yes.

SHIREEN: And when I said that, my first cousin, afterwards, he said he was doing fine. And so I got up and said that and he just bawled because he remembered. All of who she was and what she was trying to bring across from south to the north and keeping us connected. Her being missing is still a missing connection for my family. Just be clear. She was pretty much the glue. And that's why black women are so important in this moment and why they're important for the vote. That's what I learned. I know who the people were that I had to pay attention to and I knew what to do. But I also understood what the community was and that included people who came from other cultures. We have more in common than we don't from a cultural perspective. There are a lot of people who operate from whiteness that want to remove their culture and then force others to remove theirs. And I strongly disagree with all of that on multiple levels. I watch the way the other cultures respect their elders, the way we respect our elders. I'm sorry, white America, you all want to put your --

KIM: Oh, man. The school put them away. They were just trying to sacrifice my mom and pop off for a pandemic. I was like, "Good Lord. I don't care." Grandma Mikhael, one lung, one leg, one eye. Grandmas don't live as long as possible.  But I want to go back to Isa's comments about -- I did this podcast and that question about what's your superpower. And this is my answer and I feel this more so today than I have ever felt. Being a joyous black woman is my superpower because it stands in the face of everything that white supremacy says I should, how I should show up, what I should feel and think about myself, what I should feel and think about my community, what service I owe white supremacy. All of that. Every time I wake up, I roll over, I check my Twitter feeds and I'd go, "Hey." And people just think -- because the narrative is on the angry black woman. So I'm going to go lean into that while I'm soaking in the tub, while I'm cooking. I don't know you all people. I'm not upset with you. You're not even my audience. What I'm doing is highlighting to the people who follow me what white supremacy looks like, because until now, it was only swastikas, hoods, burning crosses in yards. No, it's everything that allows you not to examine whiteness. Whiteness is so ignorant of its own existence. And yet it is owed an opinion for everything. It is fine to sit back and have people want to engage. First of all, if you're going to engage with me, one of the rules is you need to do your homework.

I just love it when somebody sees -- one tweet has not looked at Kim Crayton's anything and decides to engage as if I'm just your average Twitter. Oh my God. You just woke up a hornet's nest and you didn't even know it. So let's get this lesson started because it's not about you. I don't care about you. You are nothing. I am an educator. Why am I going to engage negatively with the lesson plan? You make absolutely no sense to me. You are a lesson. You are the lesson plan. This is why I [comment retweets]. I rarely speak to these individuals personally, I don't need to. This is my classroom. I'll run this how I feel like it. This is my classroom management. So what I'm doing is highlighting to those students who chose to be here what the problem is, because it's not just this one thing.

SHIREEN: When I was talking about the 13th Amendment and let me just make sure that we're clear about Andrew Cuomo. I mean, people keep contrasting him against Agent Orange 45, that's what I call him. Here we finally have someone who is doing something right. And you just kind of like, "No, he's still messing up, too." And people don't want to see that because they are looking at this conscience of the white supremacist, white nationalist president versus who's the governor of New York and just kind of like, "Well, we have a different white guy. He's doing better than that guy." No, he's still got his own racial issues and nobody's paying attention to it. Now, only the way he has slowed down the process to even get people to stay at home and do that initiative. But the other piece of the people don't understand. He was literally forcing the prisoners to make desensitizers for those who were in New York. So those in prison who have no space to give away from Covid, they can't do six feet apart in prison. But here they are, making desensitizers for the rest of New York. That's the great example of the 13th Amendment and why slavery still exists and people don't realize it. And that somebody like that was still instituting that action by doing that. He was using the 13th Amendment to his benefit for the rest of the white New York because that's how he saw it.

KIM: Because didn't the same thing happen in Louisiana. They got rid of because the sanitation workers were pissed off because they didn't have PPE. And they laid them off and they got the prisoners to start doing sanitation work. 

SHIREEN: They also got the prisoners to start making PPE, the thing that they [crosstalk].

KIM: Exactly. 

SHIREEN: There were prisons who also were creating PPE for others, but not for themselves in jail. Those are the examples of historical frameworks that people want to erase that are literally happening in front of you and you have no concept of that. This is what history was always about. It was allowing that kind of framework. We are their property, even incarceration. That's what slavery was about. And that's why they get these individuals who don't get major checks or even a living wage. They're in prison, but their bodies are being used to help other companies and to help the state when they want that while stop and frisk impacts the most black and brown people. Even when this was instituted, white people were not being stopped and frisked the same way as black and brown people in New York City. So Cuomo used the black and brown bodies for this moment. It's horrible, with black and brown people dying the most in different boroughs in New York City. In addition to the fact that once they stop and frisk, once Bloomberg stops and frisks, crime stats didn't move any difference.

KIM: Yep, exactly.

SHIREEN: And then the next part of that is 70% of black and brown people in prison are there, not convicted. They're there for either bail money or from not being able to have a trial. There's only about 30% of people in jail who are actually convicted of a crime and in jail for that. And sometimes those crimes, those convictions are not actually true. We know there are plenty of people who have been convicted or innocent. So the layers of the 13th Amendment that we're facing right now, why people are protesting across the globe is about those stories that most white people want to act like it doesn't exist and basically say, "What about black on black crime?"

KIM: And this is why they don't want to talk about history. And this is why I always -- I don't want to have it. If you're listening to this, please go listen to Seeing White podcast from Scene on Radio, because that podcast is specifically for white people to understand how we got here. This was all a strategy. We need to stop acting like, "Oops, this just happened." This came out of nowhere. This has been a strategy since they brought us here. This is the thing that whiteness needs to understand. And I get it. You're ignorant by design. We're all ignorant by design. And some things that Shireen was talking about, is our lived experience was not living up to the narrative that we were reading in these textbooks. We knew a whole different thing. You didn't have that. And then we go back to the history of who got to write the textbooks. This is why I have a problem with people want to use the dictionary version of the definition of racism. Who got to write that definition? I'm going to use a social science definition of racism, because it also speaks to why I do not recommend white fragility. It does not account for the effects of racism. It doesn't. So again, it makes it everybody the same. Again, whiteness loves being the same when it becomes a group thing. Everything's the same. No, we're not, buddy. No, we're not.

CORALINE: That textbook thing really resonates with me too. I grew up in the south and my community was predominately black and it was segregated. Where I went to high school, I think in my entire high school career, I had three white teachers and I didn't learn any of this because we were working off these textbooks. And that's what the teachers were expecting to teach was straight from the textbooks. So I'm one of those people you were talking about. I didn't know about Black Harlem until I saw it on Watchmen. There's so much history that I've just never been exposed to. And I consider myself a decently educated person. And there's so much I don't know and there's so much work to do. And the system, I totally agree with what you're saying, Kim, it's by design keeping people ignorant.

KIM: As long as you're ignorant, you're complicit and not know it. I mean, think about what's happening right now. Why people for the first time really taking in what they're being seen. They've been seen over and over. Now we've been seeing in our communities forever. So finally you're seeing it and again, once you know better, you do better. So now white folks are having to make a moral decision, an ethical decision. Am I going to remain complicit or am I going to do something? And this is why I wrote the piece Dismantling White Supremacy And The 5 Stages of Grief, because you all get stuck and you all feel -- let me talk about this, please. White people, your feelings are your responsibility. You go get therapy. You talk to your friends or whatever. Do not take bring that to us. Deal with it. Move on. We got work to do. Anything you're feeling is not anything in comparison to what we live with every single day. I have a shirt that says fuck civility. I have to think about where I'm going in my day when I walk out the house if that's a shirt that I can wear and not be harmed. You don't think about that.

SHIREEN: It's more than that, though. There's two things I want to say here. The challenge that we have is that most people in general, and that includes us to some extent, operate from the framework of our lived experiences. And so history only starts when we were born and ends when we die. That's a common framework and that's a problem. The difference between white America and us is that most of our ancestors are telling the stories that are being whispered down and passed down. And that's why we have a different historical narrative because all the whispers. I tell people all the time, after my mom died, all the things she has prepared me for was my superpower is the fact that I realized that even though she doesn't understand my talent, which was tech, she understood enough for me to whatever my talent was going to be, I still had to be connected to the community and connected to politics. So, what's my superpower? I have the ability to do the tech part and do politics at the same time. And me coming to the political mecca, i.e. DC, was completely a mistake. My mistake. There's a whole story around that. But the fact that I ended up here with that as my backdrop, I finally realized when I started dealing with the Stop Online Violence work and Online Violence Against Women connections to tech and policy, I was like, "Oh, I landed exactly where I was supposed to be," exactly where my skill sets were supposed to meet up. It wasn't just the fact, because when I went off to college, I was told that I can't get a job in tech. I'm a black girl. How do I think that I can code and be a programmer?

My counselors told me I went to a math and science high school, specialized, an accelerated program. I was in college courses in the evening. I was also working full time because I was taking care of myself and I was still being told that me going off to college to be a programmer was something I should not be thinking about and to be reasonable. Those are still the narratives that were told to us. So of course I was trying to be reasonable as I do the career thing, but I ain't dropping the tech stuff. So I'm going to DC, which is where I ended up. Not by choice. I did want to go DC, I'm just going to let you know that. I ended up in a predominately black college that changed my view of my own people because I'm watching my own people do different things. I'm like, "Aren't we all poor?" And they're like, "What are you talking about?" And I'm just like, "I grew up with the [projects], don't you know?" So I had to learn. That was one of the blessings of what I had to learn was that even people who looked like me came from different perspectives on this field. And that's why I get upset when people like, with Joe Biden's gaffe. If you don't see the difference between me and Trump, you're not black. It's like there are black conservatives, you forgot. Did you miss the white conservatives? Do those people still actually exist? 

And so the concept that I still don't know my community more than any white person would say something like that. It's like you're saying that you're making an assumption. That's not true. Because I went back and forth to the south and the north. I know exactly the differences in my community. I know exactly what that looks like. You don't because you're an outsider. And so for me, when I had to deal with what my superpower was, I finally fell into what it was. I didn't know what it was when I left to go. But my click ended up being people who want to go work for AOL in the beginning stages. Those people ended up millionaires. I didn't go. Why? Because I was being practical.

ISA: That part, dreaming small is the worst. The barriers we have to break to not be pegged into dreaming small. I'm still mad at myself for certain choices because I had to be practical. And my [crosstalk] are the same, they're startup founders, all of that, all of these things. And I took the long road.

SHIREEN: Exactly. But I still ended up where I was supposed to end up as far as I'm concerned. And so even though in that moment, because I didn't understand, like they didn't graduate. So let's just be clear. Yes, they ended up being millionaires, but they never graduated from school. And to me, my family's dynamic was that I had to graduate. And so I was going to do that under any and every circumstance because that was part of our legacy and that was something I needed.

KIM: And that's a different thing. When people talk about the fact that we're responsible to our family and our community, it's something that whiteness has a horrible time grasping. And I just apologize for interrupting, but I wanted to because that is important.

SHIREEN: My ultimate goal to go to college was to finish. And I wasn't going to stop. Even though these people who also happen to be black, they went off and went to go be millionaires instead. So I was like, "Fine, I'm not going to do that." But they were like, "Come with us. Come with us." And I was like, "No." And so somebody asked me later, it was like, do I still feel guilty about that? And I was like, "No, because I think that my path, the way my path went was the right path." I don't think I would have created Digital Sisters in 1999 if I had gone to work for AOL. And the part that, even though it felt small at the time, is that what I now realize is I broke a timeline. I created something that nobody else thought about in that moment. And I promise you, I would not have done that if I was still grinding at AOL trying to provide.

KIM: Exactly.

SHIREEN: And so to me, even though I was being practical in that moment, by the time I graduated, I had already sort of done all the pieces and then decided I'm going to go do this full time. And it was hard. It was it wasn't easy. There was a lot of resistance. And I just felt like my background gave me the wherewithal to get through that resistance in tech industry. And it still is what gets me through now, because I still have those guys who show up and tell me I don't know what I'm doing. I'm trying to develop use cases on what we should be doing for decentralized web right now. And everybody is like, "Why are you talking? You don't know anything." And half of them don't know anything that I know. And that's what I'm constantly up against, because they think that they are the solutions to the problem, when I'm telling them they're the problem. You're the problem. Here are the solutions. Let's get to the solutions. And to me, a lot of that is about that framework that we still operate in this country that the villains in this American horror story are white men. And the guys who think they're saving us are white men. And everybody in between are not given the same space or the same presumptions of privilege about what they know to be true to solve the problem.

KIM: That's my saying. If I could give you a number of how many times my aunt who loves me dearly was like, "You need to get a job with benefits. You need to get a job with benefits." Nothing about my [past]. I was a rebel. So nothing about my [past] was planned out. But sitting here today, I could not be doing what I'm doing without what I've been through. I could not manage myself on stage or with white people the way I do if I were not certified special needs educator.

I understand that I need to meet all my students where they are. We all have to get to the finish line by the end of the school year, but we're all not going to get there together. So I need some who are advanced, "Hey, you need to go back to pick up your friend and help them out so we can all get to this thing together." I'm going to do the part. I'm going to push you, but everybody's different. Also, great classroom management. This is when you see chaos. You could go down the hall and see teachers who have bad classroom management and that nothing was going on in there, and just looking through the window. I could have organized chaos in my class and my students still were on task. They were having fun because they knew there were boundaries. Everybody needs boundaries. You feel safe in boundaries. Boundaries help us feel safe because we know, that right there, if I'm going to go out and experiment with it, I would have been told that that's a problem. But I'm going to go over there because I know I have this safe space. So the reason that -- and it's increasingly white dudes listen to me and pay me is because of that very classroom as they never had boundaries before. They've never been told how mediocre they are and how not special they are. And that, "Hey, what you're thinking ain't that. And it's not only not that, but it's going to cause problems. And the fact that there's a level of discipline there because whiteness is built for chaos and destruction.

So when I put boundaries on how you're going to engage with me, they have clear understanding. If I do this when she goes off on me, what did I do? So for them, it's like, "Oh, what did I do?" For others, it's, "Ooh, I screwed that up." I can learn from that because she left breadcrumbs. She's an educator. She's been scaffolded in this lessons. So she's left breadcrumbs. I have something I could gird this understanding because I don't -- this is a place they have no idea how to play. This is a game they don't know how to play. But also, it's understanding lack of inclusion is a risk management issue. So what they're seeing now, we're not in the industrial age where you give somebody a manual and you go on the assembly line because we all go make widgets. But your widget has to look like everybody else's. We're in the information age where knowledge is key. You cannot get -- so you're hiring people for their lived experience. Let me repeat that. We should be hiring people for their lived experience. Whiteness does not know how to do that.

So when we talk about this and I put boundaries on them, they're understanding frustrated. They get upset. Sometimes I just say, "Hey, we ain't having a conversation. We don't move on because we're not having --" It's some very clear classroom measure because they need to understand and figure out how to build products and services that do not harm the people who are most vulnerable. They have no clue. So it goes back to Shireen's statement why people are not equipped to prioritize this stuff. They can't do it. It's not something that they're equipped to do. And that's by design. But the world has changed around them and they having a hard time catching up. I say this all the time. I would not want to be a white male right now for nothing. They are catching hale. I don't care what they're catching. I can say, "Hey, I get it. I get it." Your world is being everything you knew about yourself is being turned on [inaudible]. 

SHIREEN: It's true, but that's not new. I mean, we had the civil war over the people's worlds being turned on their heads. That was the whole purpose of the civil war.

KIM: That goes back to the thing that you said earlier, we have to keep repeating history because nobody can hear that. It's the same thing that happened in the 60's, and that's how we got in the 60's with all the people, everybody talking about equal rights or whatever. That's how we end up with the Powell memo. That's how we end up with conservatives taking over our government because it was a reaction to all of this. We've been here every time. And it happened with the suffrage. We were on a track together until white women realized that black men were going to get to vote. And then they screwed us all.

SHIREEN: The women's vote piece is also really important to bring up for the 19th Amendment, because there's always this assumption that all women got the right to vote. And the truth was, even during that time, we didn't. And no women of color got the right to vote, only white women did. Because of Jim Crow until the Voting Rights Act that got gutted recently, which allowed all the craziness that we're now faced with. They knew that those acts did have impact. I have a banner on both Facebook and Twitter that basically says that white people have a vote in a Democratic president for over 50 years, because if you look at the numbers of how white people vote and how how we vote, there's a drastic difference. And most people don't want to deal with that reality because it's true. I do get a lot of people's feelings bent out of shape about that because they're like, "But we voted 48% this one year." And it's like that one year. 48% still ain't 50, just FYI. It still ain't moved to the 90 category? 

KIM: Exactly. We ain't the same, booboo. And this is the thing with this Biden thing, black voters -- and this is where that low information I always wanted to slap. Don't come after our elderly. Don't come after our elderly, for saving your asses. We respect our elderly. Our elders who have had dogs turned on them, who have had hoses turned on them, saved our democracy because they knew that these [inaudible] white folks were not going to vote for Bernie Sanders. Period. It was not a thing of that Biden is not racist. He's racist like every other white person is racist. It is not degrees of racism. It is the fact that he has also proven that he's willing to listen to black people. And he has a record of being able to build a coalition.

What I saw with [Bernie Groves] were a bunch of people who looked very much like Trump supporters who believe in revolution, turning tables over. And who will those tables land on? My black ass. So now, we were not going to have that. It was not a wave of a flag of 'oh, we believe in Biden'. We come from communities. They have a strategy of risk reduction. He is the least likely person to cause us additional harm. [Inaudible] cause us harm? Oh hell, yeah. He did that last week. Every time he damn opens his mouth, he's going to say something he shouldn't say. But this is why he needs a black woman as a VP choice. If he brings in a white woman, oh, he's going to have hell to pay.

ISA: I really liked what you touched on, both of you, about history and keeping the narrative and really defining how black culture and black history is passed down through, Shireen said, whispers. And it's that oral tradition.

KIM: Yes.

ISA: My culture is the same. If this Covid pandemic kills and takes away our elders, then we are again at loss. We lose so much. 

KIM: We're losing wisdom.

ISA: Wisdom. Thank you. That is the perfect thing.

SHIREEN: But also legacy. I think you were going to say the right word - legacy.

ISA: Yeah.

SHIREEN: This is part of our foundational legacy. We know that to be true. 

KIM: And we honor that.

ISA: Exactly. And one of the things is that, how are we in our positions of privilege in technology trying to capture this wisdom and legacy? I work at the library, online library and an archive, and I push for people to archive their work. Black creatives, brown creatives, to archive their work for free forever. I work at a place where we're trying to keep the preservation of humanity. One of the things that inspired the Internet archive was the Library of Alexandria. What inspires me is the Library of Timbuktu and [crosstalk], because none of Greek, none of Romans can stand without Africa.

KIM: Thank you.

ISA: And the richness of cultural richness, intellectual richness, I mean, everything stems from Africa. So, forward to now, I just want to continue to tell everybody to go to the Internet Archive, archive.org and upload everything. Save every website you can that captures your distinct culture, your distinct voice, because we are literally preserving it for the next decimation of humanity. [Laughs]

KIM: Shireen, did you have this experience? And also you, Isa, did you have this experience where as your elders were getting older, we started writing down their stories? And this happens every generation. We started interviewing when we saw that my grandfather's lineage, they were getting older. We started recording that information. I got out of school for summer break on a Friday. I was in a country on Saturday. It was no summer camp. No nothing. That's the summer camp. And so we got used to sitting around elder people, talking about their experiences, what they did to overcome. And that piece, I don't know. Do white people talk about stuff like that?

CORALINE: I can say, at least in my family, my grandmother is a hero to me. She was in the thick of things in World War II and escaped from concentration camps. She had a very hard life. And I was the only person in my family who listened to her stories. My dad would say, "Oh, she just says the same shit over and over again." I was the only one in my family who encouraged her to write down all the things she had experienced. And you're right, that is not part of what white folks typically do. You're absolutely right that white folks don't have that kind of relationship with their elders. And I think that's a really sad and fucked up thing.

KIM: But as you're saying that, though, and it connects to the thing that I've been having, this is why whiteness is -- I use the word wisdom because that's what [gurt] says, that history. When you don't have that and you're designed for chaos and destruction, that's all you know. This is why Mama and Papa sacrificed for the economy, because you have nothing to [gurt] anything. Everything is a commodity. Everything is transactional. Everything I do turn this thing in and I get this thing.

SHIREEN: But that's sort of based on capitalism. Let's just think about that, which is the problem that I think we're faced with in this moment. We've just found out about Roe versus Wade, the woman who was a part of that, decided to sacrifice her belief systems for money. That she went to the other side because there is enough money for her to do that. And she's about to die, and now willing tell that story. The challenge that we face is that even though I am not going to say there aren't people in my community or those who aren't trying to get that dime from white supremacists because they want to sort of keep doing because that exist for us, too. So, let me start with a diamond and silk thing. 

KIM: I hope they have some money saved. 

SHIREEN: But they also got thrown on the side the minute they started telling Covid lies. And that's the part that I don't think people understand. We don't have that longevity on those pieces. The other key piece I want to make sure that that we understand has to do with the fact that the story, because I feel like my stories are always captured. I don't feel like I've always gotten every whisper written down or documented. The only thing I have a benefit of -- and this is historical, the first time I'm probably telling it on a podcast. My mother was kidnapped and there are news stories about her and articles about her and the articles about my family. And that's part of where my narrative sits. If that part didn't happen, I'm not sure that we will be a part of the historical record of this country. Can you understand what I'm saying? There is a media piece that actually sits with us from something that happened to my mother.

KIM: Something that happened that got white people's attention, that they found it was necessary and of value to record about and to document.

SHIREEN: Yes. So, it's documented now. But how many people know that story now? If I tell the story, nobody probably will even remember it. This is the same way I feel about the story of Central Park Five with Tawana Brawley. There's certain documentation, but some of the stories are not told in the entire way or the entire framework, because the people who are telling the stories back then and present happened to be mostly white people with a pen telling their version of our story from the outside. The challenge that I have is that as we now have, like the African-American History Museum, who has slave narratives, who have family narratives, these are places that people need to go to get those. I repeat constantly.

There's a lynch museum. You need to go to that freaking museum and see the reality of what was going on during Jim Crow. People stopping us from being able to vote. There's all of these historical narratives that you can go to if you want it. But if you are operating from a family framework and you don't want to know what the historical frameworks for you or others, or you feel guilty, so guilty that you just want to act like it didn't exist and that you're not a part of it, then we don't move forward. And then the more you wipe off what you think is the historical frame and don't connect the dots, then we just repeat this over and over. It will just be another generation of it. We'll repeat the next generation of it. And then my kids, my grandkids will have to go up against those same people again for decades. The fact of them having to go up against what I feel like my grandmother went through is ridiculous. That should not be the case. I should not be doing that. I wasn't ready for that. And yet she was whispering that to me. And that's the point. She was whispering that to me, "Be ready. Be prepared. I'm giving you all the tools." And I'm still sometimes sitting here going, "She told me." 

KIM: You didn't believe. You thought it was crazy. That's what that was.

SHIREEN: And yet. So to me, the part that we keep repeating is the part that we need to somehow figure out how to stay and hold. And that is not just the education system, because that's part of it. It is the 13th Amendment and the police system. And until we stop those two things or put a wedge in that, this thing will just repeat over and over again. And you'll get people who are both white supremacists and those who don't have a problem with white supremacists existing and allowing the harms to continue.

KIM: And this is why I want to bring it back to when you brought up 1690 and all the guff that these white historians -- 

SHIREEN: 1619.

KIM: Sorry, yes, 1619 project and all of the pushback that is coming from white researchers, educators. I need you to put this in this framework. This is -- because I can always step back and look at people's motives. They have a vested interest, particularly, that history doesn't change because as a researcher, you get paid based on your research. It depends on when you work, what you're allowed to do, who funds you. What this project has fundamentally shown is that these individuals could embrace it and have a totally different career. But that's not how white supremacy works. What is shown is that all these experts on slavery, blackness, are not experts. How do you continue to keep yourself relevant? How do you continue to get paid when everything that you base your career on is being proven in real time to be incorrect?

CORALINE: This has been an amazing conversation. I'm so happy that we got such an amazing and powerful group of people together. And I hope that the listeners to this podcast are learning and being inspired to make some changes in their own lives. We wanted to let the conversation go as long as it naturally flowed today, but we do have to bring it to an end now. And I would like to give the opportunity to our guests to share your final thoughts before we close off for the day.

ISA: I would just like to continue to take direct action on what I can do to support black people, black Americans in their struggle for equity. And one of the things that I'd like to do is to talk through direct steps. One, check my privilege on site and check others on site. What does that mean for me? That means that when I'm on my Facebook feed and somebody has something gnarly to say or something sideways to say, that will get shut down immediately from my part. And also to continue to amplify and support the black voices that are close to me, that have impacted me in a beautiful way that I want to share their love forward. I just want to stand next to you, period. I just want to be beside you. I want to hold your hand. And I want to move humanity forward. I call it the universal love. And part of it is trying to remove this ego because everyone has it. And it brings defensiveness. And I've seen in just even my professional career that it will blockade so much more progress. So however I can to dispel anything, let me know and I will do it. And I think that's like the most direct actionable step is to amplify black voices and to be there and to learn. 

SHIREEN: I feel very strongly about the fact that having people like you or a community that can relate to us having the ability to connect for all of us, that we can dispel the white supremacy if we work in unison. And without that and without us understanding that, and also dealing with our own issues with each other. Because cross-cultural issues still will exist no matter what happens, whether it's colorism or anti-blackness and the pieces in between. But I do think and I want to say this really strongly, is that we are more than them. We are way more powerful together. And we can change all of this if we work in unison in some way. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles on it. But that we understand that we come from very similar cultures and we can operate from and move forward with. And to say that, I know that I think it makes white people feel uncomfortable, is that all the brown people against the white people. And to make sure I say to that, it's not that we're against you as white people. We're against the white supremacy that puts systems in place that harms black and brown people. And until you divest from that whiteness, which I think is very uncomfortable for many white people who don't understand what that means, I don't think that you understand what that future looks like for you, but you have to divest from that in order to live in existence as even close to the equality of all the black and brown people in this country, especially America, because America was founded, are harming black and brown people. And the Constitution, even when 1776 happened, there were black people enslaved and native Americans who were being killed. You have to understand that that's part of your history. That's part of the harm of this culture. And you have to be able to divest from that existence whether it's apart or up with the rest of us. And we, as a group, as a unison group, can change the face of what America should and would or will look like. I do think there are people out there terrified the America is going to turn around, I'm sorry to tell you, too damn bad. America is about to turn around and you have to deal with the reality of what that means for you. And if the reality for you is fear, then you have not divested. And you have not invested in communities of color, in issues that are facing them. And until you do that, that fear will sit with you and you will not understand what that means. You are so busy thinking about something's going to be taken from you for you to divest, when honestly white people have taken more from black and brown people on this land than anybody else. So that's something that you have to sit with and kind of digest for yourself and then go back to historical frames and understand that some of the policies that you accept as normal has been based on the bodies and frameworks to harm black and brown people. Tech is not the solution to this. If you think that you have a silver bullet to this solution, you'd be mistaken as someone who is a technologist and encoding [inaudible], the answer to this is not tech. The answer to this is us on the ground on a daily basis. The technology can help support some of this, but that is not the solution for the end all be all for this. We have a fundamental problem socially that has been embedded in the tech space as well. And until we understand that, we don't even understand half the tech stuff that's happening right now, including face recognition, tracking protesters right now who are fighting against harms of black people, we are not participating and supporting the next steps of where we need to go.

KIM: In summation, both Isa and Shireen said some things that I want to -- I say this. When I say that black women are the moral compass of this country, it is my fondest wish that black women and indigenous women get together. Us, as a coalition, can save the world. And that speaks to the fact that that's the community. The community has always been what has saved us. Black people do not succeed on the individual thing that whiteness has. We wouldn't survive. I am where I am sitting in the house that I have because my great grandfather was a black man who told white people basically to kiss his ass. And they called him Crazy George because he was not fearful of white people in his town. He owned the grocery store. They had to eat. They had to come there. So I come from a history of rebelliousness and I've just extended that. It is just what it is. We need to understand history.

I keep telling white people or whiteness -- and this is why I say whiteness because you have no problem with blackness. And I wanted to find a word or a way to equalize those things, so that one group wasn't considered a group and then the other one was individuals. That is not how we're going to do this. So when I speak of whiteness, I mean all individuals who are white or white passing needs to understand. Again, this is not your feelings. You don't know the answers here. This is a place for you to sit back, concede and give space to those who -- and I question anybody who says they're expert at this. We're making this shit up. We're creating a world that was never meant to exist. This was not meant to exist. We are all making this shit up and we're all fucking up day in and day out. The difference, though, is and this is what I need, you fuck up. You learn from it. You apologize and you make amends. An apology with no strategy to make amends and not to do harm again is a waste. And what you're doing is continue to create scars on a community and on a space that we don't need any more scars. We are humans.

When I do my talks, I have been saying for the last two years, white folks who code, that's not the saving grace. That is not where you need to be. If you want to be a value again, lack of inclusion is increasingly a risk management issue. Profiting off racism of white supremacy is increasingly a risk management issue. This is where you see this call. Everybody this week is All Black Lives Matter. How the hell has the NFL have the nerve to put out something in there about Black Lives Matter when they would not let this man kneel and have effectively [inaudible] his fucking career. But that's how white supremacy is designed again for chaos. And there is no bottom. And this is what corporate black face looks like.

What's happening, though, is when you make a public statement, I now, as a researcher and as a person who fundamentally talks about how to build businesses that have inclusion and diversity at their core, now have a data point that I now can use to measure your actions against. You gave me that. So, thank you. Because we're not going away. I feel that this is an apartheid moment. People have been boycotting until, it wasn't until capitalism realize that they could no longer profit off either directly or reputationaly off apartheid is when you saw the things change. This is why I'm so happy to be in the business side of this about how to build these businesses, because what I need is not only black and brown people to be at the tables of power so we can challenge. We need both. We also need the ability to build our own tables. And we can't do that if everybody has to go into debt like I did, getting a business degree.

So, we need to make space for black and brown people to come to the table because, again, as Shireen said, this is not about replacing you. Okay, let me caveat. If you're mediocre as fuck and you ain't trying to change, you need to go. That's just it. You just need to go. There's no space for you here. If you have a desire to be successful and to be inclusive and to minimize harm, there's much space for you here because the people you are joining are community builders. As Isa was saying, we are bridges. We are the only way for you to get to this hallelujah moment that you want to get to. You have to come through us. You have to come through black women in the United States. Bottom line. And so, you come correct or don't come at all.

CORALINE: I want to thank the three of you for sharing this with us and sharing this with our listening community. Your voices are powerful. I'm glad that in some small way, we can help you be heard.