Given recent events (as well related discussion of lack of diversity in FoC), I just wanted to mention — now is a good time to reflect on what role people of color can and should play in the future of coding. That starts with understanding the relationship of technology and race. I can recommend several great examinations of this topic in the HCI community: • Does Technology Have Race? https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2851581.2892578 • Critical Race Theory for HCI https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3313831.3376392 Not strictly race-related, but Morgan Ames also has some great work in critically analyzing hacker culture and techno-utopianism in education policy. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3274287

one of the wonderful things about computers is that they don't care who is programming them; old or young, male or female, what shade color, or rich or poor. There is no more egalitarian field than computers, and i have worked with people of every shape and size from all over the world. Everyone else wishes they had our level playing field. I've worked on projects with people i've never seen, so that is the ultimate in freedom of opportunity and lack of bias.

And yet, we do know who's on this group. And we see the same disparities as elsewhere. You're right that our field has advantages. The question is what we have done with them.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project I love that too but unfortunately the people and communities around technology are not always as welcoming as the technology alone, so there is still much work to be done 🙂 Many young programmers get their start finding friends and collaborators online; if you are the only Black or Female or Latinx (etc) person learning about the world of software, it does feel isolating and can hamper your learning. I think we can appreciate the amazing potential of technology while also acknowledging that there’s still work to be done.

Among all the stuff I've learned this past week, this thread stands out: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1186468302400507904 Not on topic for this group, but this is a thread and we can all damn well adjust.

hi all just thought I'd add to the reading list here with a recommendation (esp for us white men) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_of_Oppression becoming (more and more) aware of what we don't (and will never have access to) know about is a useful early step!

I dislike that term 'users'. Many people seem to have stopped using it, in the 30 years since that quote. Your caution about not just building for people like ourselves is very well taken.

@shriya The observation that you don't find the programming community welcoming has nothing to do with race, religion, etc., but has more to do with the fact that nerds are like cacti, a fussy, prickly bunch. The amount of patience and attention to detail it requires to be a programmer means that as an industry we scour the world looking for talent that is so specialized. Most people who try programming quit rather quickly, because it is intolerable to be so fussy. This may change with better languages and tooling, but at the present the field is wide open to anyone who can actually do the work. As my friend Paul mentions, we are too busy digging with dessert spoons to notice the bulldozer demonstration. No other profession i can think of has so few advantages granted for nepotism. For example if your relatives are in a field like politics or entertainment, being the child of a famous person gives you a huge head start. In my firm only 10 out of 50 employees survived 6 months, because they couldn't do the job. How someone looked, or where they were from was not a factor. All this talk about people of color is maddening to me. This is a brain-based highly creative business. As far as FoC group is concerned, this group is from all over the planet, of people engaged in the struggle to improve how we program computers. All are welcome to the same cactus garden of nitpicking fussy minds.

Edward, I think it may be valuable to listen when people around you who don’t share your experiences are saying they have felt unwelcome because of their identity rather than their creations & knowledge. It’s illogical to assume you understand the experiences of everyone, including those unlike you.

(I realise I'm new in this community, have not met any of you, and have yet to contribute substantially, but edward I feel your comment is due a fairly substantial response... so first off- Hi!) "The observation that you don't find the programming community welcoming has nothing to do with race, religion, etc.," - Edward this is a grossly presumptuous and factually baseless statement. You categorically cannot claim to speak for everyone everywhere in every situation in order to discount "race, religion, etc" as factors of experience, and your very attempt to do so somewhat concerning...! I also encourage you to consider the very important distinctions between 'observation' and (lived) experience... "...but has more to do with the fact that nerds are like cacti, a fussy, prickly bunch." - Edward this is an incredibly reductive and cliché characterisation and again, if you have managed to surround yourself solely with other 'nerds' who are 'like cacti', then that's quite an achievement on your part, however I think it is far more likely you are in fact sadly stereotyping even your own friends and acquaintances purely to try and forge your point. As a 'nerd', and one who knows a whole lot of other 'nerds', I utterly reject your idea of me/us, and even if/when we have prickly moments (which surely I do, too), that is not a get-out-of-jail free card for how I (mis)treat others, and how I (mis)understand the situations around me... "No other profession i can think of has so few advantages granted for nepotism." Edward, nepotism is not the issue being discussed here, unless we expand an idea of 'family' to include class/culture/race/gender/etc in which case yes, tech industry is just as susceptible to 'nepotism' as anywhere else. As a white-european-man I have become increasingly conscious of the situations in which those markers have been what helped get me 'hired' (above a baseline of 'competence' for the required task), as i have 'fit-in', as 'one of the family'....! "In my firm only 10 out of 50 employees survived 6 months, because they couldn't do the job." That is an incredible statistic Edward which should have you asking serious questions about the workspace in which you operate, and the 'culture' you have generated. I would sorely love to chat with the 40 folks who left and see how they felt in that space... "How someone looked, or where they were from was not a factor." Unfortunately, you simply cannot make this claim outright because the effects of discrimination run so insidiously and in so many micro-veins, confounded further by unconscious bias etc... even the most self-aware/pro-active workplaces cannot (but would not try) make that claim. The best anyone/organisation can do is listen, listen, listen, try, try, try, and ensure that their awareness, sensitivity, and response is a little bit better than it was yesterday... I encourage you to step aside from your evident existing position, and also step aside from 'online chat'/forums/twitter/etc which I'm sure has been part of what's fueled your 'maddening' feeling, and instead take time to deeply consider other perspectives, both observation and experience based, via more considered medium such as the books posted above. Also, please feel free to DM me if you'd like to continue this discussion less publicly.

One thing to add: it's not the people you know who will have been excluded. It's the ones you never hear from.

Everyone, Edward's comments here are offensive in multiple ways. I've written him privately about this. I just want to publicly state that I don't stand for this. If you'd like me to explain why or what I mean, please message me privately. I will not delete the comments because the replies are thoughtful, well-informed, and worth reflecting on. Thank you Shriya, Kartik, tj, and William. Will started this thread off with a great prompt:

now is a good time to reflect on what role people of color can and should play in the future of coding

Let's continue the thread by exploring that.

I think it’s also important it is said (what Edward said) so it can be called out. Yes, tech can be more “egalitarian”(it’s possible not necessarily a fact because it has a lower barrier to entry, you can learn on the internet for cheap etc) compared to other fields but that does not mean these issues aren’t present. And it’s not even necessarily because of malicious intent. That’s why it’s useful to think of ways to it more welcoming for other people. There is work to be done not just be like it’s all fine and there is nothing we should do.

As a person Of Color myself i see there is definitely a lack of diversity here in Europe. We need more women and white people in tech. I say this because it seems that most hard core tech people here are immigrants from Asia and increasingly Africa , often second generation immigrants born here though, and not indigenous Europeans, if there is even such a thing

Half of my close friends in the computer business are multi-millionaires. They did it all without family money, fraternity connections, a parent in the business, all the usual advantages that are so common in other fields like politics and entertainment. Compare that to the WalMart fortune which wiped out most little hardware stores in America. The software successes were accomplished by working faster, harder, and building products and services that were of use to the world around them. None of them had to lie, cheat or steal, or destroy some other firm. It was all additive. They gave people a reasonable product at an attractive price, and the world is better for all their products, just like a book author doesn't crush book authors, it adds to the general wealth of society. This the great opportunity in the software field, to make products out of pure ideas converted into computer code, and the demand for software is almost insatiable, and so opportunities continue to open up, just waiting for someone to solve a longstanding problem, or streamline a tedious paper process. If i wanted to make a better mousetrap, i might be confronted by the need to raise significant capital, and have barriers to entry. Software is one of the very few fields that allows someone to compete without a lot of capital and/or connections. Yes there are barriers emerging caused by incumbents, but compared to any other field, we are a marvel of open opportunities for those who can do the work. Software is intellectual property creation at a very high level, and places like the Apple App Store, make it possible for hundreds of thousands of developers to make a living by adding joy and convenience to people's lives. This is a very welcoming space, and a level playing field. Isn't that what most other spheres don't offer?

Oh wow, this threads seems to have got out of hand. I guess there is a reason people say not to talk about politics and religion. So much true I see in both @Edward de Jong / Beads Project and @tj personal experiences and opinions that it isn’t even funny. Anyway I think it is really good that we can discuss all this stuff openly without have to become disrespectful, otherwise we become another totalitarian regime ourselves.

The idea of a channel for controversial subjects was discussed a bit here, if you're curious. I've done "tone it down" comments (in the form of "this is drifting off-topic; let me repeat the initial discussion prompt") here-and-there in other threads. It tends not to work. This thread is a bit different, though, as it's not just off topic. In this case, we have one person saying I don't see any racism, surrounded by people saying I do. In the current cultural moment, it is entirely not the time to push the I don't see it, so it doesn't exist argument. If you don't know about the pay gaps, the glass ceilings, the double standards, the algorithmic bias… please go elsewhere to learn about those things. This thread was meant to be a place for people who are already past the 7 stages of white grief (to speak very crassly about something serious — sorry) and are ready to engage on the level of here are papers about critical race theory and start working on how do we fix this here in our own practice? Will came in at a very advanced level, and we haven't managed to meet him at that level. Can we do that? I tried, and I'd love to see some others try too. (And re: representation in countries outside the USA — that's a very interesting consideration, it it does serve as an interesting counterpoint [in the musical sense] to what's happening in the USA right now. But please be aware that some folks might see it as a counterargument, and that might be hurtful or a distraction. The problem in the USA, the problem of interest right now due to the cultural moment, isn't just about, say, the relative percentage of various races employed in tech. It's a far broader and deeper issue. I hope that enough of us are aware of the scope of that issue and are able to think about how to address it. That's the conversation Will set up, and that's the conversation we should be having in this thread. If you'd like to discuss other facets of the intersection of race and tech, I'll meet you in a new thread.)

I would like to be respectful of any decisions of this community on where and how we discuss this, but I feel strongly that I can't comfortably be quiet as a person of privilege when other people of privilege argue that the privilege doesn't exist or has minimal impact. It's not quite clear to me where this left off. Is there going to be a controversial topics channel? I realize that it is an uncomfortable topic to which I don't have anything close to the full perspective on, but I believe silence is not what is being asked of me right now.

To attempt to steel man Edwards comments, we can ask why, given that a keyboard doesn't know who is typing on it, is that minorities are so marginalised in Tech. I think it's probably a symptom of that very fact. It's too easy to dismiss human concerns because "all that matters" is what happens in the computer. "The computer doesn't know about variable names, what does it matter we call it Master/Slave", "We just need a bitmap to test this algorithm, what does it matter it's from Playboy", etc etc. Then if somebody raises concerns with these, they are immediately seen as causing a needless nuisance, and also have a kind of stain on their tech credentials because they appear to be caring about something that doesn't effect the compiled binary.

(@Robert Butler and @Zubairq — please see this new thread in meta, and post further thoughts about a hypothetical controversial channel there)

Another thing that makes me laughsigh is when people advocate for tech's alleged meritocracy by citing companies like Apple and Google that were "started in a garage". It's probably a bit different in the USA but in the UK, especially in a city, having a garage is a massive class signifier.

Garages are different in the US. Still with Google we're talking a pair of PhD students. And with Apple, well, that's a Silicon Valley before my time.

I would be careful saying garages are different in the US. Garage implies single family dwelling with a driveway that can be used as a startup space. There are a lot of pretty significant signifiers in garage alone, even in the US.

Reading through all the comments here I really appreciate all the well considered comments from Ivan and others. I guess all I can say is Edward and all of us (I say offensive stuff too without realizing sometimes and I am sure we all do) should maybe think of this as an opportunity to improve our communication by putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and double and triple checking text before we send it in the mistaken belief that everything we have in our heads is so important and correct that the whole world needs to know

@Will I finally finished the Morgan Ames paper you posted. Really fascinating. I have had a tangential awareness of Logo as this very evidence-based and well-tested pedagogical tool, and having that examined and criticized was very eye-opening. I’ll definitely be seeking out more of his her research. It’s really got me thinking about how much I have internalized the MIT ethos (had no idea it developed there), and view certain ways of using a computer as legitimate. Thanks for posting it 🙏