Adding Season 2, episode 1 Transcript, Adding Season 1 episodes 9, 8…

Transcripts/season-1/episode-8-you-don't-deserve-us.md

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+**Jocelyn** [00:00]
+Welcome to the Git Cute podcast and today we are going to be talking about diversity and inclusion. Kind of sort of. Stay tuned.
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+Hello everyone. I'm back after uh, possibly almost two months. I think the last episode was on July six, but I'm here and within that time I do believe that I've had a couple of more reviews come in, a five star reviews, which is really helpful. Thank you so much. It's really sweet. Even though I haven't been active, I will say this in every episode, but leaving me a five star review if you do like this episode or like the podcast in general is really helpful. Um, it's pretty much just all based on Apple's algorithm. It helps business wise, it helps me drive me up the charts somewhere, people can listen to me and all of that great stuff. So that's really appreciated. So today we're going to be talking about diversity inclusion and I know the elephant in the room is why the hell were you away for two months?
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+And that's going to tie into something a little bit later on. But right now I feel like with the state of the tech community, at least on Twitter, I feel as though the diversity and conclusion episode was a good episode for me to come back on. So for those of tho, for those of you who do not know, I regularly make talks at conferences around the country about diversity and inclusion initiatives. I also do technical talks, but sometimes the diversity inclusion talks are even more fun than the technical talks. And I know that I probably shouldn't be just doing diversity and inclusion talks because then they're just going to see me as a token black woman that talks about diversity and inclusion versus the badass Java engineer than I am. However, there were seat inclusion's very important to me and it's very near and dear to my heart and I've based my complete career and brand off of diversity and inclusion feel like it would be a disservice to not share my experiences with people and try to change tech for the better because otherwise, why am I here?
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+So while I was away tech Twitter kind of went to shit. I even tweeted at some point that I was streaking like a spritz or something and whatever Italian town I was in and I feel kind of bad about that because I didn't realize how terrible everything was. I didn't realize how much Tatiana was actually having to deal with. I didn't understand the full story because it's very hard to do so when you just see a series of tweets, so the person centered it is the is Tatiana Mac. I been following Tatiana for, I don't know, maybe six months to a year now and she's absolutely hilarious if you do not know who Tatiana Mac is, she is an amazing designer, creative director and ethics advocate and I have the utmost respect for her and of course in true fashion, she goes to conferences just much like I do accept her talks are way better and she does it more frequently.
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+However, she talks about diversity, inclusion and ethics and technology and puts technology under a microscope from everything down to what paradigms we're using in our work and showing how these things can be closely linked to white supremacy, tactics and suppression. I am not saying that everybody within technology is a white supremacist. I am at a white supremacist. However, when you are working within an industry that is dominated by white males, the chances that there are white supremacists with in our community is very, very high and that's just the truth that we all have to deal with and confront. Tatiana constantly puts herself on the line because she loves technology and she loves this community and this space and she wants to make it better. She wants to educate people, so that's why I'm so incensed and I'm so angry that she's decided to quit technology and it's not that I'm angry toward her because I completely understand the reasons for wanting to walk away and walking away.
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+However, our community is shit and y'all really don't deserve her and y'all don't deserve us. Us being women of color in general. I'm not going to get heavy into the details of the situation because there is a Google doc that has been compiled by one of Tatiana's friends and there's also the vice article that goes into detail about the situation much better than I can or will, but I will say that the level of hate that Tatiana got just for presenting a talk at a react conference that wasn't necessarily React centric is kind of fucking ridiculous and as you all would be able to see in the Google doc, which I'm going to link the vice article and the Google doc in the show notes, so you're going to definitely want to read through that because it's kind of ridiculous. However, you can notice that people are reacting and about the wrong things.
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+People are getting up in arms and being defensive about react as a community and as a framework when that's not the issue that Tatiana was trying to point out nor would anybody else that was on her slide was trying to point out the argument that they were making and that the react community ultimately proved is that there are wide sweeping issues with oppressive tactics toward women and women of color and people of color within their communities. And when people get up in arms about something and start attacking people for no good reason, it kind of becomes apparent that they were right. And referencing Ken Wheeler's talk in 2018 where he used the widely known white supremacy sign in his talk saying that it was only for a circle game. Okay, that's all well and good. I mean I remember the circle game from when I was younger, but at the same time you have to be living under a rock to not understand that that is now a widely known white supremacy, right symbol.
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+It's ridiculous. In the Google doc, we'll actually show you the timeline for that as well. So the fact that he just didn't know or perhaps he meet, he might've known, he just didn't care and he was going to use it for the circle game anyway is pretty bad because in the current climate that we are in the United States with the level of hate that's being received by people of color and women of color in this country, it's just completely irresponsible and if anything it just shows that he doesn't care about anyone but himself. Just this year at self conference in Detroit, I had a talk called open source diversifying the initiative and the main point of that talk was talking about how historically open source communities have been extremely toxic for women of color and here it goes. This am very appearance situation with Tatiana that just more than proofs that we still have major, major problems in our open source communities and what are we supposed to do about that?
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+I wish that I could say that I'm surprised Tatiana received this type of hatred, but being a black woman, I know that it was only a matter of time before they started attacking somebody that speaks out about the issues in their own community, and it just proves that they're not willing to listen, nor are they willing to learn. Ultimately, Tatiana has decided to leave technology. She still has talks lined up through the year 2020 so if you go to her website, Tatiana mac.com you can see her schedule for her talks and I highly suggest that you go to a conference and hear her speak because it's ultimately very moving and you will learn a lot from her. I'm just very sad that we're losing such a great person, a such a great designer and such a great person to advocate for diversity and inclusion, but you have to realize that, okay,
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+women of color can only handle so much and they shouldn't need to handle this type of thing. There should be people going to bat for us. There should be white men and women going to bat for us where most people don't do that. They try to find reasoning outside of blatant racism and weighting discrimination versus just listening to the person of color that's telling them that they're wrong and y'all need to do better because in reality, y'all don't deserve us. You don't deserve women of color. Going from conference to conference and tweeting out all of this information just for it to go ignored and asking and you telling us to provide proof for it. We're all technologists. Learn how to fucking Google, ask somebody else. We don't need the burden of your labor.
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+I suppose this brings me to the part of the podcast where I really didn't want to talk about it, but I feel as though I owe y'all an explanation. So as I mentioned before, and as you can probably see between the dates on my episodes that it's been almost two months since I've recorded an episode and that was not initially the plan. If you listen to my other episodes, I talk about having written scripts already and all of that is absolutely true. I have episodes planned out for at least a couple of months, but something happened where I lost all ambition to keep going with this podcast. And it wasn't until today where I saw, um, my friend share a tweet from a few days ago. Now, just for reference, today's August 31st, so this is going up same day, so you might be able to find me a tweet. I don't necessarily want to link it because I don't necessarily want to direct any sort of attention to share that she does not necessarily want, however, share, tweet it out.
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+Um, a very nice Twitter thread about a podcast called the lady bug podcast and it's nothing directly that they've done to me or anything of the sort. But when I'm talking about diversity inclusion, I need y'all to understand what people of color go through. I started this podcast because I genuinely want to help people. It's something that I've based my career and my brand on and I, that's not something that I can stop because it's something that I genuinely feel that needs to happen. And this is one of the only other ways that I know how besides doing talks and being a mentor, so I started this podcast and with podcasts, nothing is supposed to come right away. Success is not immediate. I mean that's true for anything. However, when you see four white women start a technology podcast, you see that their first episode is draws some pretty similar parallels to the first episode that you have.
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+It's a lot. It's overwhelming. At the time, it was extremely overwhelming for me. I lost it, for lack of a better phrase. Um, and I just didn't know what to do and I'm not saying that they copied my episode or anything like that. I truly believe that it's just very shitty timing and very bad luck on my part that just happened to happen. I also want to mention that these four women also have a very vast array of Twitter followers and a social media following than I do. I have 825 amazing people that follow me and I can't expect any more than that. Um, I never expected to have this many people follow me, especially so many people, um, that are software engineers and, and managers and things of that nature. So it's been really great. I, I love the fact that I'm a part of tech Twitter and I get to interact with so many different people.
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+However, I digress. So when I saw that they already had a lot of reviews and they had already shot to like the top or the top ish of the Apple podcast charts for technology and just a teaser episode, and their initially, their really first episode I was crushed. I was devastated. I cried, I called my mentor and I cried some more because it just goes to that old adage, right? Where as a black person you need to work twice as hard to get half as much. And I'm not saying that to guilt anybody. I'm just saying that, that the, for the entirety of my life and for generations upon generations with black people in America, that rings true. And this particular instance felt crushing and it felt like the apex of that saying, and I did not know what to do. Maybe I wasn't in a good head space.
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+Um, but either way I decided to just stop recording podcasts because to me, I thought nobody was going to notice anyway. I'm not saying this because I want people to feel sorry for me. I'm not, it's all ties into diversity inclusion. Um, but what I'm trying to say here really is, is that women of color, we have to deal with so much in technology. Not only do we have to play against stereotypes that we have against us, um, not only do we have to prove to people that we know technology and we know how to do our jobs, not only do we have to deal with people talking over us or taking our ideas or saying that you're wrong. And then two weeks later being proven right, even though nobody acknowledges that you were actually right in the first place. We have to deal with so much and it's really hurtful when these things happen.
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+And there's usually a breaking point. Tatiana's breaking point was dealing with the massive amount of shitheads and my breaking point was dealing with a podcast by four white women that don't champion diversity at all and say that their podcast is about diversity and inclusion when there's not one single woman of color that hosts their podcasts nor anybody that is come on to host their podcasts. And I feel like that's the pinnacle of white feminism, is to solely believe that being a white woman is diversity. And that's wrong. Being a woman does not make you diverse at all. If anything, it just makes you part of the status quo. And I know that there are white women that don't want to hear that, but it's fact. There are many other people in minorities and other voices that deserve to be heard. I can't celebrate a white woman being a champion for diversity.
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+I can't celebrate them saying that they're diverse because they're not. Um, diversity goes way beyond your gender and it goes way beyond where you've come from. S like economically. Um, it comes from your background. It comes from your, your race. It comes from the school that you went to and it comes from so many different other things. And just by being a white woman, you've already limited and stunted that voice. So I never want to hear a white woman say that they're promoting diversity inclusion when there is not a person of color or non cis person or a non-binary person to be seen. It's just inaccurate. It's fallacy. And that's not something that I'm going to buy into. I am upset that I let that get me down. I'm upset that I let them, I knowingly, they didn't do it directly, obviously stop me from doing something that I love.
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+I truly record this podcast because I want other people to hear that a black woman in tech is successful, is kick ass at her job and is also out there giving advice to get into the industry to better themselves in the industry. And I won't let them dull that shine for me again. So I've come to terms with the fact that I'm more than likely we'll never get to the level of success that they've already had. Um, just because I don't have the social media following and I just probably never will and that's okay. What's okay is I hope that there is a new person every single day and maybe there's a black girl out there and high school or college and they're in computer science or they're really interested in computer science and maybe they don't see a lot of black women in technology because black women are still less than 2% of the workforce in Silicon Valley in 2019 which is sad and heartbreaking.
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+However, I want to be that role model for people. I want people to understand that you can make it, that you can be successful in this industry and not be white. I also realized that as a cisgender black woman, that I cannot be the diversity for everyone. I can only speak to my experience. However, I can try and I promise to make this podcast as diverse as possible because I cannot call myself an advocate for diversity inclusion if I don't include everyone, and if I can think that way, then it should be really easy for y'all to think that way too. So y'all
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+have made it to the end of this episode. Congratulations. As always, if you could please leave me a five star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you are listening to this, this would be fantastic for me because algorithms and such and it just really helps me out from the business side of things. Um, if you also want to send me any questions or whatever, please feel free to email me at the git cute podcast at gmail dot com at some point I want to do like a Q and a segment on here, but I just haven't gotten enough questions to justify doing it, AKA, I haven't gotten any questions at all, but it's fine. Also, if you want to follow me on social media, please follow at git cute podcast on Twitter and Instagram. And if you want to follow me on my personal Twitter, it is at so-and-so's. Feel free to drop me a line.
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+Um, however, if you come in correctly, I will block you because I just don't have the patience for that type of stuff. Um, I'm very glad that I got through this episode, that crying. I have recorded this probably at least five times, and I managed to cry. And every single one, it's just the nature of the beast when it's coming in to diversity inclusion and talking about situations that have affected me directly. But, um, I hope you all love this episode and there will be another episode coming out on Monday so you can get hit with double whammy. So, yeah. All right. Thanks for listening. Bye.