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It’s Time We Dealt With White Supremacy in Tech

‘Make the hire. Send the wire.’

Tiffani Ashley Bell
Marker
6 min readJun 5, 2020

The exit sign for Sand Hill Road on Highway 280 in Menlo Park, CA. Sand Hill Road is home to many Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Photo: Mark Coggins/Moment Open/Getty Images

A man was lynched last month.

Whether we wanted to be or not, the video recorded by a courageous 17-year-old bystander plopped us all right on the sidewalk, too, as witnesses to George Floyd’s murder. And thanks to being right there with him, yet powerless in that moment to save him, we were all confronted with this country’s sordid history of police brutality, gross abuses of power, racial profiling, and white supremacy as they all pinned George down by his neck under that police officer’s knee. Knee. Noose. Knee as noose.

A man was lynched last month.

And now, here we are this week after the country erupted in protests, the president teargassed protestors for an extraordinarily awkward photo opp, and the man who took a knee on George’s neck was finally charged with murder. Will this be the moment this country changes? And if so, why? How?

As with a lot of the problems George’s murder (and Breonna Taylor’s and Ahmaud Arbery’s) resurfaced, the how comes down to a matter of will. What are we willing to do?

What are we willing to do differently to dismantle white supremacy in the technology sector and because of…

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Marker
Marker

Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Tiffani Ashley Bell
Tiffani Ashley Bell

Written by Tiffani Ashley Bell

Founder & Executive Director at The @HumanUtility. @HowardU @ycombinator alumna. HKS Fellow. Investor. In 2021, at @StanfordGSB. Water is a human right.

Responses (32)

What are your thoughts?

Articles like this just hurt to the core as the same groupthink is perpetuated across the black tech diaspora bubble. Hello from the outside. I am here to say we all don’t think this way, but unfortunately majority rules… pun intended. Time and time…

I work for one of the biggest US tech companies. 80% of the managers here have South-East or East Asian background. From what I know of other companies, things look pretty similar. “White supremacy in tech” simply does not exist.

STOP THIS NONSENSE NOW