Reading through the comments as a white person, I’m depressed, too...I hear you, and it pains me that so many in tech are just clueless / insensitive to the real problems of the minority voices in our communities.
Systemic racism is insidious, for so many reasons, and one of them is that it is not always overt. I believe the aggrieved commenters reacting to SJW boogeymen are not ‘racists’, in the sense that they are not consciously discriminating against people different from themselves. But voicing racism is only the tip of the iceberg! Systemic racism is baked into the system, that’s what makes it systemic!
Some of the important questions we (white // male // straight // what have you, fill in your own) need to ask ourselves are like:
How many Black friends do I have? (Nowhere near as many as White friends. That makes intuitive sense: almost everyone in my building is White, same for my job, most of my friends’ friends are White too... But what choices do I make on a daily basis that reinforce that? What different choices could I make to actually expand the range of people I have a chance to interact with?)
How can we better address inequality? (I have a doctorate and I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a snob, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. My strong preference is to hire based on merit: I’ve worked with incompetent people, unfortunately; and I would be pissed if I wasn’t rewarded for my own merit. But there’s a lot of backstory that got me here: private schools, SAT prep classes, I wasn’t bullied, my own computer, not having to have a job to support my family, not being sick, my native English language skills, I’m handsome and charming and tall and well educated and know lots of lingo and have shared experiences with most hiring managers I’ve met—all of these things helped me a lot to get to where I am now. Systemic racism comes into the picture because there are real social structures that have prevented Black and other minority communities from having access to these same resources. Just a few off the cuff examples: Jim Crow, urban food deserts, underfunded public schools, shitty computers at the public library. Merit hiring seems to me a lot less fair when I consider friends of mine who don’t have that ‘merit’ because of factors that were determined far out of their control.)
What would it be like for me to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome or unappreciated at my job? (Technical customer calls are always a boys club, and I’m good at banter w Midwestern ag tech b2b customers. But shit, I sure notice when they mispronounce a coworker’s name, or start a call w our group of men and women as ‘well, gentlemen’, or crack a dick pun. And it makes me sad to imagine what it would feel like to be the odd one out.)
Systemic racism isn’t going away, or easy to fix. We all ought to start giving some real thought to the unconscious choices we make that contribute to tech feeling like a blanket unwelcome industry for a whole lot of people. Smart, kind, creative, strong people, passionate people, worthwhile people.
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Edit to add that there were supposed to be emojis sprinkled throughout there, which made clear when I was joking...so you should assume the best in me throughout ;D