Your Diversity & Inclusion-Themed Hackathon Is Large-Scale Tokenism
Read Next: Black Lives Matter is Not a Design Challenge
If you’ve come here to be fragile, please check that at the door, or leave.
If you’ve come here to listen and learn like you vowed you would, welcome. Thank you for following through and making time and mental space for this.
I call myself a Near-Futurist because I believe that we already have the knowledge, technology, and resources to fix our most pressing problems — food scarcity, police brutality, accelerating climate change, privatized healthcare, and a fragile economic system, to name a few — and that we should focus on solutions before we even think about bringing these broken systems with us to Mars. We can already solve these problems. We have known, written, and talked extensively about solutions. The missing piece of the puzzle (or perhaps the puzzle itself) is the cultural shift required; social change is only sustainable if more of us (and the most power-rich of us) believe that all Bodies deserve food, health, and peace.
In recent weeks I’ve observed tech companies grasping for meaningful change in their organizations. Mostly, they’ve ended up shoehorning initiatives into their existing structures and work cultures, which were problematic from the outset. One recent example of this is the D&I-themed hackathons that are being planned, especially by companies that have no background in or process for anti-racist product development. In the past week I’ve spoken to three different peers whose companies are planning these.
Your hackathon won’t cure racism.
It won’t solve the problems that your company, industry, and country are having with “Diversity & Inclusion.” In fact, it may hurt more than help.
Let’s play out some of the micro- and macro-aggressions that will occur in the coming weeks and months as tech giants and start-ups rush to ensure their employees that they work at a #woke company that is doing #something.
The Hackathon theme is “D&I” or “Social Good”
The announcement email reads something like, “in these challenging and unprecedented times, it’s important to your bosses that you all come together for 48 hours…” …to attempt to hack our way out of a 400+ year sociopolitical system of oppression. There’s no actual mention of Black Lives Matter (despite the fact that this movement is the reason you started talking about race this month) because that would be divisive, and to focus on BLM (or even name it) would mean claiming support of its actual demands — like true justice for Breonna Taylor, or defunding the police. After all, your company is too innovative to get caught up in the specific problems of Black folks in America. You can think bigger and fix things for all the diversities! Who can argue with “All POC Matter”?
You’re getting flashbacks to middle school dodgeball. It’s team time.
The micro-aggressions continue. How will leadership choose your teams? Can you choose your own team? Thank God you sit with that Black guy at lunch sometimes, and do The Nod to that other one when you pass each other in the hallway. (What was his name again?) You were sure being friendly would come in handy at some point, somehow. You start to strategize.
Obviously, they wouldn’t put all 4 Black employees on the same team. That team would be way overpowered. Isn’t that like, segregation? Obviously every team deserves one Black person! Oh… but there aren’t enough Black employees to do that… You put any thoughts as to why this is on the back burner, and decide you’ll settle for any person of color being on your team. This calculation happens in a nanosecond.
The assignment of a Black person to each team seems fair until you realize that tokenism goes beyond the hiring process and happens throughout a person’s career. Your Black coworker joins the Zoom call and is greeted more warmly and with more relief than they have ever experienced at work.
The Brainstorm Sesh
The PM on your team informs you that to stay on schedule, you can only allocate 3 hours to defining the problem and architecting a solution. You don’t have time to research deeply into the economic and social barriers that contribute to the problem you’re trying to solve, so you rely heavily on your own assumptions and the experiences of your favorite (only) Black team member.
Throughout the meeting there are moments of anticipatory silence where the mental gaze of the group falls on them, looking for insight or approval at the ideas being thrown out.
Let’s pause our scenario for a moment.
My (and your coworkers’) individual Black experience and community knowledge are incredibly valuable and always worthy of belief and respect, not just now. But we can’t tell the richness and depth of our life stories in a matter of minutes. Moreover, we may not want to talk about our experience here, knowing that it will fall on the opportunistic ears of White folks with a solution searching for a problem, who are trying to get a gold star from their boss. This isn’t actually a healing space. More often than not, this is an exploitative experience.
Odds are, your Black coworker is being asked their opinion a lot these days. We’re being told (in our Slack DMs) by folks that we haven’t worked with in months that should we need a listening ear, you’re ‘here’ for us. Even though you’ve never been ‘here’ for us in the past, like that time our boss said something racist and we were the only one that flinched. Or that other time we offered insight about how your new feature could be inaccessible and you ignored that part of the feedback.
We’ve been asked to join ad hoc D&I committees and not offered pay/raises for the extra labor this entails. We’re not professional sociologists, historians, or anti-racism coaches. We often adopt those roles when you ask because we know you won’t do the homework. You need to do the homework. And not just when it’s trending on Twitter. Doing this re-education work for you takes away from the time we can put into the job we were hired for and specialize in. It takes away from time we could have used to advance our skills and our careers. Morrison calls this distraction.
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
Take some time to reread this quote. Again. Let’s get back to the hackathon.
Who had the best hack?
By nature, hackathons are fast, loose, and well, hacky. They produce work that we hope will stay duct taped together long enough for us to get through the demo without embarrassing ourselves. They’re meant to be thought exercises and team building activities. Hackathons often aren’t contributing to lasting change in your company or industry by their own very transient nature. Your BIPOC users deserve better than a hacked-together solution.
It is pure ego that to think that a group of mostly White, cis-men who haven’t previously done anti-racist work could solve massive problems if only they typed fast enough, drank enough coffee, and made enough social and technological assumptions to ‘hack’ racism (assumptions which are built on years of casually racist media and education). The decades — the centuries — of community organizing, teaching, and direct action by people of color simply have nothing on your code base.
This is the epitome of White Saviorism: your belief that when you choose to step in, you’ll immediately have a great solution for these poor folks because of your brilliance.
Hackathons are an important form of intellectual play, they’re gamified. Black Lives Matter is not a game. It’s a movement that will require more than 2 days or 2 months of your time. It’s ongoing action, unlearning, and amplification of Black voices.
So how do you ‘win’?
How should your company go about judging your hack?
Will it be judged by your majority-White C-suite or managerial team? Do they have the context for the problem space, beyond the technological aspects? How can a jury that lacks diversity judge whether your Diversity & Inclusion hack is valid?
What if all of the Black employees at the company were the jury? Well that wouldn’t be fair! They’d judge our solutions too harshly! They might actually have some of the context that would put us under real scrutiny!
What constitutes a good solution? Often, we define a good solution as the most ‘clever’ one. The one that ties an impressive, bouncy bow around the problem.
But messy, complex problems require complex solutions. There’s no one app, or app feature, that can answer that call. The work that’s needed will require more than code, more than UI design. In most cases, it doesn’t require us to make anything new at all. In most cases, technology simply reflects back to us the (often misguided) assumptions that we already had, and amplifies them.
So who wins? We need a winner! That’s just it — you don’t win. If you’re doing anti-racist or ‘social good’ work for Brownie points and gold stars and promotions, your focus is in the wrong place and you’re going to burn out fast. If you’re looking for validation for work that is supposed to challenge your worldview, stop looking. Stop waiting for a pat on the back for doing what we should all be doing. Anti-racist work isn’t glamorous, and it rarely wins awards or contests.
Post-Hack
The danger of the hackathon is really in the aftermath, or lack thereof. It will be easy for employees and employers to walk away feeling that they’ve actually contributed toward a more equitable world. You’ll be able to pat yourself on the back and say “I put 48 hours towards a good thing, see ya next year!”
“Anti-Racism work is not self-improvement work for White people. It doesn’t end when White people feel better about what they’ve done.
It ends when Black people are staying alive and they have their liberation.” -Rachel Cargle
Or maybe you’re on the winning team and the prize is that you get to build this product out, with all its code debt and inherent biases as a shaky foundation. Simple assumptions like “statistics show that Black people spend less on medicine. Maybe that’s because they have less symptoms?” lead to ‘solutions’ like health insurance providers offering Black patients bad insurance plans.
Your team’s assumptions have a butterfly effect. Intention isn’t impact. We cannot take our jobs as designers and developers lightly, especially when it comes to making tech more accessible and equitable.
Though this scenario is written in a hypothetical tense, it is absolutely based on the non-fictional experiences that I and many of my peers have had. I’m writing this to offload some of the emotional labor that my POC colleagues are doing at an increasing rate. I’m writing this as a resource so that you can redirect your energy. Your intention is good. The impact, unfortunately, tends to be detrimental.
Here are some things that you and your company can do instead:
Consider cancelling your hackathon. Seriously. Consider breaking those hours out across the rest of the year, into a series of talks, readings, and workshops that lead to your collective unlearning. Hire professionals in the anti-racist space who are trained and paid to lead these conversations.
Focus on long-term features, policy changes, and accessibility practices, not a one-time event or discussion. Keep putting pressure on your leadership to add tangible goals (vs. “we will do better moving forward”) and transparency to their initiatives.
Read Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression. This book is a great overview of the ways that tech has actually perpetuated racism and inequality. We now understand that the ways algorithms and machine learning operate are inextricably tied to the worldviews and biases of their creators.
Grapple with your racism and Whiteness. You’re racist. Racism is not just those people over there in white hoods and dusty toupees, it’s your coworkers casual remark about the funny indigenous intern being their ‘spirit animal’. It’s your boss hiring his buddy for a higher position instead of promoting the Latina woman who’s been leading your team brilliantly for years (…when was the last time you turned down a job so that a POC could take it?). It’s that instantaneous twinge of fear you have when a Black man passes you on the street. It’s your assumption that he’d never want to (or be able to) use your product. Grapple with these. Call yourself out. Drill down into why and why and why your coworkers make these comments. Actively research and seek out spaces that are having these conversations with White (and non-Black) folks.
Remove ‘obviously’ from your professional thought processes. Question all assumptions about your user and their life. Why are White, middle class user personas often the default? How is this detrimental?
Donate, protest, and amplify the voices of those who have been doing the work, who are the experts. Read the people you quote.
And most of all, keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
If you learned something from this work, support my writing via Paypal.
The online professional tech community has been historically vicious — sometimes to the point of violence — when they get called out. As you read and share this, I would ask that you check your coworkers and watch for signs of that vitriol, and to step in and stop it. Protecting queer Black women includes the ones whose names and faces you know, not just folks ‘over there’.
I appreciate you. Thanks for being here.
Read More: Black Lives Matter Is Not a Design Challenge. Watch Schessa’s follow-up talk at SF Design Week