Category: Opinion

Reading The South Through the Lens of Caste

Posted on by Scott

I recently finished reading Adolph L. Reed, Jr’s memoir of life in the Jim Crow South and afterwards.  Having read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste just before (and The Warmth of Other Suns years earlier), I went into Reed’s slim volume looking for points of agreement and points of conflict  between it and Wilkerson’s previous works.

I hadn’t read any of Reed’s book-length work prior to The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, but from a few of his articles I understand him to be a left-wing critic of anti-racism and identity politics.  The memoir focuses far more on the way Jim Crow functioned in practice than on criticism of anti-racism and identity politics in the present.  Like Wilkerson’s previous works, Reed’s memoir highlights the arbitrary nature of the penalties to blacks people for challenging the social and legal structures of Jim Crow.  The capriciousness of enforcement is heightened by Reed’s stories of travel from points north to places where Jim Crow governed expectations of behavior even after it was officially repudiated.  As depicted by Reed, the level of effort black people had to go through to comply with the strictures of Jim Crow was substantial, and a thing he only realized in retrospect. 

Reed doesn’t soft pedal the apartheid system Jim Crow was in the least, nor the nature of the chattel slavery system that preceded it. He quotes at length from the infamous Cornerstone Speech, references other ordinances of secession from southern states,  and makes clear that the South shot first with the aim of preserving slavery.  White supremacy clearly undergirds both slavery and Jim Crow in Reed’s telling.  But ultimately, Reed’s memoir reinforces his “class-first” worldview and that of others on the left (including his preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders). 

Reed’s account of life under Jim Crow and afterwards is very enlightening. His lived experiences across decades and regions of the United States are both broad and deep, including New York City, DC, and parts of Louisiana (including New Orleans), Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Georgia. That said, I think there are limits to the power of the Jim Crow experience to explain the present. Reed’s book was published just last year, in the wake of a Trump presidency (a direct repudiation of the nation’s only black president) Trump’s role in encouraging an insurrection to remain in power, and the continuing engagement in overt appeals to white nationalism by numerous GOP pols and those in their orbit. I find it difficult to square these facts with assertions that “race essentialism” on the part of black folks is the real problem.

Wilkerson’s Caste, published in the summer of 2020, does a better job of capturing the subtleties and nuances of how we engage with each other by broadening our vision beyond race (race and class, instead of race or class). I still remember her interview with Terry Gross, and being initially skeptical of the book because of her response to the question of why the apartheid system in South Africa was not included in the book.

My response on Twitter in a thread with Thomas Chatterton Williams regarding Wilkerson’s Caste

Actually reading the book revealed not only a larger number of commonalities between the way race and class interact in the U.S. and the way caste works in India than I realized, but a wealth of research in the U.S. during Jim Crow which studied it from the inside and called it a caste system. Some of the takeaways on Caste I took note of separately (so as to keep the copy I borrowed from the public library as pristine as possible):

  • Dalits had an equivalent to the sharecropping system some black farmers endured
  • W.E.B. DuBois and Bhimrao Ambedkar corresponded at least once regarding the similarity of the position of their people in their respective countries
  • Madison Grant (a popular eugenicist of the early 20th century) saw India’s caste system as a model to be emulated
  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was seen by Indian untouchables as an American untouchable
  • Among the earliest of the people to use the term “caste” to describe segregated schools in Boston was abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner.
  • Gunnar Myrdal (Swedish social economist) and Ashley Montagu (British-American anthropologist) used the term “caste” to describe the the way black people (and others) were treated in the U.S.

While I have seen pushback elsewhere regarding aspects of Wilkerson’s book (mainly people attributing causes other than racism to the personal experiences she recounts in the book), the only place I really disagreed with Wilkerson’s book was the suggestion that the indigenous people of America were exiled from the caste system. From reading The Great Oklahoma Swindle, I learned (among other things) that the Five Civilized Tribes fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War and owned black people as slaves.

Wilkerson’s book is a lot longer than Reed’s, but no less valuable to the reader attempting to increase their understanding of the American experience for black people. Reading them close together in time provoked thoughts and revealed insights I suspect I would not otherwise have had.

From “Quiet Quitting” to Loud Layoffs

Posted on by Scott

One of the more loathsome inventions of the business press in this pandemic-impacted era of work is the term “quiet quitting”. Ed Zitron is far more eloquent than I in expressing his fury regarding the term. But here is my own response to an article about a CEO complaining about the backlash he received to a LinkedIn post about firing 2 engineers who were working multiple full-time jobs:

“The Business Insider piece is kinda trash because they let the CEO posture and moralize. There’s an obvious double standard for what CEOs are allowed to do versus regular workers and they didn’t interrogate that at all. Perhaps some people work parallel jobs to make ends meet, but there are definitely folks taking advantage as well. The collusion of the press with business to invent this concept of “quiet quitting” still makes me angry. Having seen and been subject to layoffs [myself], stingy benefits, and being underpaid relative to my experience and skillset for a good chunk of my career, it’s laughable to me that these companies expect loyalty for how little they offer in return. Even though I wouldn’t do the parallel jobs thing myself, I can see how people rationalize it. They’re just being as transactional with employers as employers have been with workers for decades now.

me in an online chat with friends from October 2022

Fast-forward to today and the news is filled with layoff announcements. PagerDuty literally quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr as part of a blog post laying off some 7% of their workforce. Friends of mine at 2 other companies regularly in the news are now out of work. My own employer laid off a little over 2% of the workforce. While I am still employed, a number of people I’ve done great work with over the past 5 years are now out of jobs. As far as I can see, these layoffs do not have a thing to do with performance. And given the profit numbers some of the most prominent companies in layoff news have posted over the past couple of years, these are not cuts needed to ensure the survival of these companies.

Ed Zitron’s take on what should happen to the CEOs laying off all these people seems extreme at first, but is it really? Microsoft posted record results for fiscal 2022, but they’re still laying off thousands. Is it really the fault of all those workers Google, Facebook, and others hired during the depths of the pandemic (as if consumer habits were going to remain that way forever) that the pandemic loosened its grip and consumer behavior moved back toward pre-pandemic norms? Perhaps we aren’t being skeptical enough, or critical enough of cuts of this size and scale. As often as we’ve heard about and/or read about “the business cycle”, CEOs who make the kind of money they do ought to know better than to assume that

I survived more than a few layoffs back when the internet bubble burst (leaving an internet consulting firm for a new role just months before it declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy). The company I joined, a telecom equipment manufacturer, turned out to be at the height of its headcount. Over the 4 years I was there, they shed well over half their workforce (even as they acquired failing competitors). The friends of mine at those companies that lost jobs never seemed to lose them because of performance. The RIFs I would be on the wrong side of in later years never seemed to be either. In a world of work that long ago replaced pensions with 401(k)s, we are just numbers when push comes to shove.

Not every company is as honest as Netflix in modeling themselves after a professional sports team, and all that entails about the short shelf life of the average player. I’ve been working more than long enough to know that any company that refers to itself as a “family” is a company not to be trusted. This season of layoffs is just the latest reminder that what matters most in life are the people who matter to you and the people who treat you like you matter in return–regardless of the work you do for a living, be they family or friends. When it comes to work, we should enjoy it and do it well, but not at the expense of what matters most. If we’re going to give loyalty, let it be to people who have earned it and reciprocate it, not to institutions.

The [Tech Bro CEO] Strikes Back

Posted on by Scott

What Elon Musk is doing to Twitter right now is what happens when someone with the same ideology and worldview as James Damore has enough power and money to be in charge of a company instead of just a worker. When I first wrote about Damore a little over 5 years ago, I wrote about the ways in which the ideas in his muddled, poorly-written manifesto were easily disproven. Subsequent years have demonstrated that Damore’s worldview has plenty of representation not merely within the rank-and-file of tech companies, but at the very top as well. While Damore did not use this term in his manifesto, with today’s perspective it’s clearly recognizable as an a long accusation about the ways in which the Google in 2017 was too “woke”. His manifesto is still available online, along with much of the criticism of it, but for the purposes of this piece I will summarize the tech bro worldview this way:

  • The status quo composition of our companies, with its relative lack of women, black people, brown people, etc is the “natural order” of things
  • Diversity initiatives require a “lowering of standards” and are therefore not meritocratic 

The tech bro worldview bears enough similarities to the worldview of those who lead businesses outside of tech, hold political office, lead certain of our religious institutions, and those who populate newsrooms and shape popular opinion that Damore’s manifesto even found a defender on the opinion page of the New York Times. Despite Brooks’ call for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to resign, the National Labor Relations Board found the company acted lawfully in terminating Damore’s employment for violating the company’s code of conduct (an unsurprising outcome in my view, given the way at-will employment works).

There is plenty of evidence to debunk both the “natural order” and “lowering of standards” assertions (to say nothing of the idea of meritocracy itself). Nor can the timing of this particular conflict realistically be separated from what was happening in our politics at the time. But let us proceed to another example of how these false assertions nevertheless shape the thinking and actions not just of rank-and-file tech bros, but of those who typically lead them.

Fast-forward to April 2021, and I’ve been asked to be a co-panelist for a discussion on the intersection of race and technology. This discussion occurred just a day after Jane Yang (a now former employee of Basecamp) wrote an open letter to the founders while on medical leave. Yang was responding to the decision of the CEO (Jason Fried) to ban “societal and political discussions” from the company’s internal chat forums. Yang’s letter painted a picture of Basecamp’s leaders that looked very familiar to me from my own experience with similar people in the industry. The letter is well-worth reading in full, but here is paragraph that makes it clear Basecamp’s leaders were no different than those at other companies they’d criticized for years:


“But there were also some yellow flags. Whiffs of smoke that I was starting to pick up on. Your disproportionate, chilling response to a retrospective that you asked for. The whispers of how you had handled a prior company discussion when someone raised the able-ist language in the title of a recently published company book. The continued mourning years later of an executive who had centered the employees as her job, and then was summarily fired for not living up to the additional expectations of working miracles in marketing. The quiet departures of women and people of color, all of whom held their heads up high and left a better place behind than they found it.”

from Jane Yang’s open letter to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Fried and Hansson also announced the end of committees (including a committee for diversity, equity, and inclusion) and the end of 360 reviews (among other changes). As it turned out, Fried and Hansson were dealing (quite poorly) with an internal reckoning over a long-standing company practice of maintaining a list of “funny” customer names. The founders knew about the existence of this list for years, and predictably, the names that Basecamp customer service reps found ripe for mockery included Asian and African names. Particularly because of how public and opinionated Fried and Hanson have been regarding workplace culture–to the extent of having written five books on the subject, including a New York Times bestseller–and held up their own company as an example of how to do things better, it was (and still is) quite difficult to ignore the rank hypocrisy of their choice to shut down internal discussion of a significant cultural failure that they allowed to persist for years. The company all-hands called by the co-founders to try and mitigate the blowback from their decisions instead resulted in the departure of one-third of the entire company.

Over time, marginalized groups (and some of their allies) have mastered online tools and social media and leveraged them to amplify their voices. We saw that mastery at work in the responses to Damore’s manifesto. At Basecamp, marginalized people used these tools to challenge the worldview of the company founders. Fried and Hansson’s attempt to squash the backlash by fiat failed miserably.

While Coinbase didn’t figure prominently in our panel discussion at the time, that’s one of a number of companies whose lead Basecamp was following in being “mission-focused”, and supposedly apolitical. So discovering that barely two years later, CEO Brian Armstrong has decided that politics is ok when it comes to tracking the “crypto-friendliness” of politicians prior to the recent midterm elections here in the U.S. was … interesting to say the least. People and companies advocating for cryptocurrency have been far from apolitical when it comes to targeting black and brown investors, so the same groups targeted by unscrupulous operators in the mortgage space prior to the crash of 2008 have piled into crypto in disproportionate numbers relative to other investors–and have taken disproportionate losses as cryptocurrencies have plunged in value and multiple crypto companies have gone bankrupt.

Now we’re just over a month into Twitter’s takeover by Elon Musk–a takeover entered only because he faced certain defeat in Delaware Chancery Court. Musk has fired half the staff in layoffs so haphazardly executed that he ended up trying to rehire those not correctly identified as critical. He undermined the company’s current verification scheme by pushing the launch of a feature enabling anyone to be verified by paying $8/month, only for numerous pranksters to pay the fee and impersonate numerous brands on Twitter like Eli Lilly. Musk’s ultimatum to remaining Twitter staff to be “hardcore” or be gone resulted in a wave of resignations much larger than anyone anticipated, not unlike Fried and Hansson’s attempt to mitigate the damage from their attempt to squash internal dissent. The same thin-skinned reaction to criticism displayed by Fried and Hansson has been even more on display from Elon Musk. He’s fired those who tried to correct his ill-informed assertions regarding the ways the tech behind Twitter actually works–and mocked the skills and intelligence of the people he fired after the fact. Musk blames “activists” for the precipitous drop in ad revenue instead of being accountable for his own poor decision-making.

The reaction in various quarters to Musk’s floundering incompetence as CEO of Twitter has been very telling. According to the reporting of Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer, some tech CEOs are hoping Musk succeeds. The same Hansson who not long ago “encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s exploration of the racist nature of mass incarceration”, is now writing tributes to Elon Musk cheering the likely end of affirmative action in higher eduction. Hansson even touts John McWhorter’s Woke Racism these days, and speaks favorably of the likes of Glenn Loury and Bill Maher. Loury and McWhorter are regularly quoted by white conservatives too cowardly to share the stereotypical views of black people they already believed anyway without a black conservative to hide behind. We’re already starting to see layoffs across tech, and as economic conditions change and COVID-19 (hopefully) recedes, these CEOs almost certainly see an opportunity to re-establish their worldview within their spheres of control without having to account for marginalized people. That desire is almost certainly behind the persistent belief in some quarters that what Elon Musk is doing is on purpose.

There is plenty of criticism that can and should be leveled at Mark Zuckerberg (particularly his continued pursuit of the failed metaverse strategy and cavalier approach to customer privacy). But when it comes to how to handle layoff news, he delivered a masterclass in how to handle layoffs professionally not long after Musk’s deliberately cruel and haphazard ones. Other tech CEOs rooting for the man who treats his employees the worst will definitely be a trend to keep an eye on as time progresses.

Tell Me About Yourself–Engineering Leader Edition

Posted on by Scott

The following tweet starts an excellent thread of questions that I’m taking as a starting point for this post looking back over the past 5 years with my current company:

When was the last time you promoted someone on your team?  How did it happen? My organization works in a way that promotion decisions are actually approved (or rejected) at a much higher level than mine.  But I’ve advocated successfully for promotion for two of my direct reports, both during the pandemic.

The first was a recent college graduate who spent the 18 months of his professional career on my team.  While I wasn’t his manager for the entirety of that time, I encouraged him to work on communication across various channels (Slack, email, documentation, pull request comments, etc).  I did what I could to put opportunities in front of him to grow and showcase his skills.  What he did on his own (in addition to pursuing a master’s degree in computer science on the side) was earn AWS certifications.  He passed 4(!) in a single calendar year.  So when it came time to year-end reviews, there were a lot of accomplishments to point to as well as positive feedback from people outside our team from their experiences of working with him.  He was the first direct report I had who earned the highest possible year-end rating: exceptional, and the first promotion (to senior engineer).  He’s still with the company today, and received another promotion (to principal engineer) in the same cycle I received a promotion to senior manager.

The second promotion was for someone who had been with the company longer than I had.  From what I was told she had been submitted for promotion once or twice before but had not been selected for promotion.  She was (and is) one of those engineers who leads much more by example than by talking.  Having observed over the years that the review process tends to overindex on software engineers that present well, I became the person in meetings who consistently pushed people to consider written communication as well as presentations in judging the quality of an engineer’s communication.  I also recommended she take the technical writing courses offered by Google.  These steps, plus highlighting her numerous critical contributions to the team’s success during another year-end review cycle appear to have been enough to get her promoted to principal engineer.

Why did the last person in this role leave?  It’s been long enough that I don’t actually recall why the previous leader of the team moved on.  I presume they found an opportunity with another company.

How do you nurture psychological safety in your team?  Regular one-on-ones (I follow a weekly cadence for these) has been important to nurturing psychological safety.  Because I joined the team to lead it after work-from-home began, Zoom meetings were really the only avenue available to build the rapport necessary for my team to trust me.  I also started a technical book club with the team, with the intention of giving my team exposure to software design and implementation principles outside the scope of our current work, along with providing opportunities for each member of the team to lead discussions and explore ideas.  It seems to have had the additional benefit of building everyone’s comfort level with, and trust in, each other along with all the other things I’d intended it for (including ideas originating from book club showing up as production enhancements to our software).

When was the last time you supported a direct report’s growth, even if it meant leaving your team or company?  In my previous department, I had staffing responsibilities for two teams for awhile: one composed entirely of contractors in addition to my own team.  In helping a scrum master friend of mine diagnose the causes of the contractor team struggling to be productive, I concluded that the main issue wasn’t technical expertise but the lack of a leader to help remove impediments and connect them with others in the organization who could help their tasks move forward.  I proposed this as a leadership opportunity for one of my direct reports and got buy-in from higher-level management.  He was so successful in the stretch opportunity I created, he got promoted after leaving my team.  Not long after that, he left our organization to join Amazon as an engineering team lead in Seattle.  He’s currently a principal software engineering manager with Microsoft in Atlanta.

Can I speak to some women on the team to hear more about their experience?  Two of the engineers on my current team are women.  If all goes well, another one of them will be promoted to principal engineer by virtue of her performance over the past 18 months.  While it will likely mean losing her to another team, her getting promoted and gaining new opportunities that my team’s scope doesn’t provide is more important to me.  I see it as another opportunity to build up another engineer in her place.

Your Mastodon Experience May Vary–And Not Always in a Good Way

Posted on by Scott

While my own experience on Mastodon has been a positive one so far, my experience is by no means universal.  As more prominent accounts from Twitter have joined, particularly those of black folks (and especially black women) I’ve followed there for awhile, they’ve begun to share details of consistently negative experiences on Mastodon.

Her experience has been difficult enough that the Mastodon post sharing that she was taking a break from that platform linked to the tweet above.  It’s hard to imagine a more damning indictment of how a platform treats people from marginalized communities than posting that criticism on Twitter, a site that has done far less policing of slurs against black people in the wake of Elon Musk’s purchase.  Trying to summarize her thread wouldn’t do it justice, but if there is any common thread between her negative experience and that of other black people on Mastodon it is around the content warning feature (abbreviated CW as shown below).

Mastodon posting window with CW button circled in red

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s objection to the name of the feature is a function of being a rape survivor.  The other pushback I’ve seen most often is around the use of the feature for posts regarding racism.  Elon James White, who I first started following during his coverage of Ferguson in the wake of the protests of Michael Brown’s shooting death by police officer Darren Wilson, refuses to use it for discussions of racism.  Mekka Okereke, director of engineering for the Google Play online store, has a more nuanced viewpoint, which separates whether or not white people want to hear about racism from what is effectively a mislabeling of the feature.  He summarized his feelings on this as follows:

Feels very very much like “Ban teaching civil rights, so white kids don’t feel bad.”

When I did a bit of searching to try and learn more about content warnings and trigger warnings in their original context, it seems that the original scope of such terminology was limited to things that could cause someone to recall a traumatic experience they had.  My primary takeaways from one piece in particular was that broader, more casual use of the term “triggered” ended up both being conflated with people being “too sensitive” and conflating trauma with mere discomfort.  “Conflating trauma with mere discomfort” ends up being a great summation of the way far too many white people still respond to black people merely describing the racism they’ve survived.

Mastodon (and the Fediverse)’s turn in the spotlight, and the negative experiences of at least a few black people on it I follow make it a microcosm of both the best and the worst aspects of tech more broadly.  A few of the best aspects: software a young man named Eugen Rochko first started writing in 2016, has held up rather well all things considered against a significant increase in usage and attention.  It’s open source, so not only can you see how it works, you can suggest changes, or even make a copy of it and make changes yourself if you have the time and expertise.  It uses a decentralized social networking protocol that doesn’t just interoperate with other Mastodon servers, but with other social networking applications that use the same protocol.  Despite the good–which is significant–Mastodon is just as susceptible to some of the negative aspects of the for-profit tech industry it intends to be an alternative to.  The most obvious negative aspect is the gatekeeping.  Despite beginning my professional career just a few years after the founder of Mastodon was born, it would take over 15 years of that career before I would find an employer where there was more than one other person who looked like me writing software for a living.  Software engineers who are Hispanic or Latino aren’t that much less rare than black software engineers.  Today, the percentage of women in technical roles is projected to be around 25% by the end of this year.  But the history of computing predates the machines that do it today, and a much higher percentage of those literal human computers were women.  Those women who do persevere through the gatekeeping that would prevent them from entering the industry ultimately end up leaving at unfortunately high rates because of the hostility to women that still persists in too many work environments.

Tim Bray (co-author of the XML spec and contributor to numerous web standards), shared this piece as one of his first posts on Mastodon.  I have no doubt that he meant well, and that the author of the piece meant well, but when you title a piece “Home invasion” when talking about new users of a platform you’re used to, that comes across as incredibly hostile.  The same author that talks about trans and queer feminists building the tools, protocols, and culture of the fediverse makes not a single mention of people of color in his piece–not unlike the commercial tech companies in general, and Twitter in particular that are among the targets of his critique.  The entire piece is worth reading in full to understand the author’s perspective, but I will pull quote and highlight one paragraph that seems most emblematic of the blind spot that some veteran Mastodon users appear to have:

This attitude has moved with the new influx. Loudly proclaiming that content warnings are censorship, that functionality that has been deliberately unimplemented due to community safety concerns are “missing” or “broken”, and that volunteer-run servers maintaining control over who they allow and under what conditions are “exclusionary”. No consideration is given to why the norms and affordances of Mastodon and the broader fediverse exist, and whether the actor they are designed to protect against might be you. The Twitter people believe in the same fantasy of a “public square” as the person they are allegedly fleeing. Like fourteenth century Europeans, they bring the contagion with them as they flee.

To see yourself (as a new user of Mastodon and a long-time user of Twitter) be described as someone bringing contagion hits a lot differently when you’ve endured racism in real life as well as online, and when you’ve had to overcome–and are still overcoming–so many barriers in both places merely to be included, much less respected.  And were the author to be called on this huge blindspot publicly, I have no doubt that he would respond with the same sort of defensiveness that Dr. Prescod-Weinstein described, and that Timnit Gebru, another recent joiner of Mastodon has also described.

As I said at the start of this piece, my own experience with Mastodon has been a positive one so far.  Some of it is a function of having participated in online communities for decades (as far back as the Usenet newsgroups days), and even becoming a private beta tester one of the newer ones (StackOverflow.com) before it went public.  But those communities too had their gatekeepers, mansplainers, and jerks.  Certain open source projects are unfortunately no different in that regard either.  There’s something to be said for understanding the pre-existing culture of a place–even if it is virtual.  That said, the idea that culture is static–and should remain so–is a perspective that it seems some Mastodon veterans would do well to change.  Otherwise, they risk perpetuating the same harms as commercial social media–just without the financial rewards.

Waiter, there’s a [brown person] in my [fictional world]

Posted on by Scott

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power finally debuted on Amazon Prime, and right on cue came the complaints from white fans of Lord of the Rings about “wokeness”.  What seems new about this latest iteration of the “waiter, there’s a [brown person] in my [fictional world]” phenomenon is the deliberate decision of the mainstream media to legitimize these complaints about said fictional world.  The tweet below is a great summation of the journalist malpractice being engaged in here.

When you lead off a piece with complaints about a fictional world with the deputy managing editor of redstate.com, that’s bad enough.  But it’s even worse when you conflate fans of Tolkien with actual scholars.  Running a story like this–which elevates the weakest of arguments from people with thin credentials at best–seems to be a preview of what we can expect from the new, “neutral” CNN.

I’ve written only briefly about Star Wars being my earliest fandom.  But nearly as old as my Star Wars fandom is my love of The Lord of the Rings.  I came to it first through watching the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit in the early 80s, then the books.  The Lord of the Rings definitely contributed to my becoming a D&D player later on (and a reader of many other books in the fantasy genre).  In college, I took the comparative mythology class taught by Dr. Verlyn Flieger (a well-known Tolkien scholar) because it gave me an excuse to read The Silmarillion for credit instead of just for fun.  It’s been nearly 30 years since I took her course, but I still remember it because to her credit she gave us what would later be called a trigger warning regarding the depictions of Gollum in Tolkien’s work (which wasn’t perceived as racist by many people then, but likely would be now).  I don’t recall if she gave us a similar warning regarding the descriptions of orcs, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did.  N.K. Jemisin (the 1st and only sci-fi author to win 3 consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel in the genre) has definitely made that criticism of Tolkien’s description of orcs.

When Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, my fellow Tolkien nerds and I made sure to see all three movies at The Uptown, the best theater in the area at the time.  I bought and watched the extended editions of all three movies on DVD, and am overdue to add to my collection whatever 4K version of the trilogy my XBox One X will play.  I even watched the not-as-good Hobbit trilogy.  The books of the trilogy, The Silmarillion, and an old copy of The Tolkien Reader are on a shelf in the home office where I’m writing this right now. I’ve read The Children of Hurin (a copy from the public library anyway), but have not yet added a copy to my collection.

Richard Newby is a longstanding member of the black Tolkien nerd tribe, and he’s written the only piece worth reading on this subject.  So rather than write an inferior version of what he’s already written, I’ll write more broadly–because these complaints from white fans aren’t new.  Moses Ingram had to deal with these same people when they objected to her presence as an inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi.  At least Disney (and her co-stars) seemed to have learned something from their failure to stand up for John Boyega when he first showed up as a black stormtrooper in The Force Awakens.  Disney failed Kelly-Marie Tran in a similar way.  Marvel has attracted much of anti-woke ire in recent years, for everything from Black Panther, to She-Hulk, The Eternals, and Ms. Marvel.  Steve Toussaint gets cast to play Corlys Velaryon–cue the anti-woke whining.  Now it’s Sir Lenny Henry’s turn, and Ismael Cruz Cordoba’s turn to contend with toxic fandom.  Toxic fandom can suspend disbelief for magic, dragons, laser swords, faster-than-light travel, and time travel–but not for brown people–human, elven, dwarven, or harfoot in this case.  Even as I write, these sad know-nothings are arguing on Twitter about “the author’s vision” with the likes of Neil Gaiman–who in addition to being a great and prolific fantasy author himself (American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and countless others)–has such a deep knowledge of Tolkien’s work that Christopher Tolkien personally thanked him for explaining a reference his father had written years before.

Before the internet, being a black fan of science fiction and fantasy was a lonely pastime.  Depending on where and when you grew up, you might not have had many other black kids as classmates at school or friends at church to begin with.  Add to that an interest that not many other kids might have and you had to be prepared to like or love that thing on your own.  You had to cultivate an appreciation for these stories despite the absence of characters like you playing parts in them at all (except as stereotypes and/or foils for whoever the hero was).  You don’t realize that’s what you’re doing as a black fan of these genres (because you’re in middle school when this starts, or younger), you only see it in retrospect when you’re an adult.  I was most recently reminded of that mental work when I watched Lovecraft Country, and again when I rewatched the Far Beyond the Stars episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these stories impact me the way they do, both set in the 1950s United States, when black people continued to be treated as second-class citizens at best.  Decades after these stories were set, self-appointed gatekeepers are still trying to keep us out of “their” genre–despite the fact that we know and love as well and as much, if not more than they do.

When I listened to this episode of Throughline, and heard how the work of Octavia Butler impacted–and still impacts–the life of an NPR co-host (who is originally from Iran), it reminded me of how thrilled I was to read Wild Seed and know that someone who looked like me had written it.  I only watched it in syndication, but still remember how important it was to see Nichelle Nichols play Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek.  Seeing Billy Dee Williams play Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn play Geordi LaForge and Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Avery Brooks play Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really mattered–not just to my childhood, but into the present.  Deep Space Nine in particular has yet to equaled, much less surpassed in the genre, for its positive representations of black manhood, father-son relationships, even romance between a black man and black woman who are peers (Captains Sisko and Yates).

Today, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and other black authors are putting out some of the best work on offer across the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.  Twitter hashtags like #DemDragons allow black fans of these shows to enjoy them together in near real-time.  Facebook groups and private chats (and their moderators) do the work of keeping toxic fans away.  And even when Hollywood makes mistakes, like firing Orlando Jones from American Gods, or policing the language black writers use, we are finally getting to see ourselves more and more in the work of this genre–and the work is better for it.  Studios and fans are fighting back against bitter review bombers.  And while such defenses shouldn’t have to be made, at least they are being made.  Toxic fandom may not like us in their fictional worlds anymore than their real ones, but we aren’t going anywhere in either one.

Who Is Worthy of Forgiveness?

Posted on by Scott

Plenty of people aired (and are still airing) their opinions regarding this question in the wake of President Biden’s long-anticipated decision to cancel some federal student loan debt.  But when I skip the “free at last” responses (from those grateful for the federal student loan debt relief) and dig beneath the specifics of the various responses, they are ultimately judging whether or not the recipient of the debt forgiveness is worthy of receiving it.

Quite a few of our fellow Americans believe those who are getting some (or all) of their federal student loan debt forgiveness are unworthy–undeserving.  Those responses sound a lot like “what about those who already repaid their loans?” and “it’s not fair”.  Publicly expressing my happiness for those eligible for debt cancellation on Facebook prompted 1 negative response from my friend list along exactly those lines.  Sadly and predictably, there are many Christians in that chorus, despite what we claim to believe about forgiveness–despite being undeserving–and what the Bible says about forgiveness, debt, and debtors.  We claim to believe in a Bible with multiple verses about cancellation of debts after 7 years and in a jubilee year and this is how some of us choose to respond?  It’s beyond merely sad, but a poor representation of what Christianity is supposed to stand for.

Ironically, the bulk of the opposition comes from people who very likely supported the Republican president and the Republican Congress who passed the law which made Biden’s action possible:

What really highlighted the fact that this federal student loan debt was really about the worth of the people receiving the relief (instead of the fiscal implications) is the response of critics to being called out as hypocrites by a thread from the official Twitter account of the White House:

Half a dozen Republican congressional representatives were found to have received hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars of forgiveness for Paycheck Protection Program loans. Leaving aside the absurdity of congressional representatives applying for and receiving these loans in the first place, this shabby defense really stood out:

This particular defense reminded me of Mitt Romney’s 47% insult about Obama voters when I first saw it. But after some more thought, it occurs that a better analogy for what David French is doing here is being like the older son in the story of the prodigal son. French (and at least some other self-proclaimed conservatives) see themselves as responsible, faithful, yet neglected while those receiving debt forgiveness are undeserving profligates. Here’s Ted Cruz making essentially the same argument in a far less subtle and far more deliberately insulting fashion than David French:

But when I actually looked for information regarding whether or not the Paycheck Protection Program we’re being told to view as disaster relief actually served that purpose, what I found was not very encouraging. Only 25% of the PPP loans actually protected paychecks as intended. Of the 77% of businesses which received funds, nearly half cut staff anyway. Just one investigative report by Fox43 News in Pennsylvania found numerous examples of this. Despite this (and numerous instances of PPP loan fraud, including $268 million recently recovered by the Secret Service) some 94% of PPP loans granted by the federal government have been forgiven in full.

I found this summation of the way that federal student loan forgiveness will actually work in practice particularly compelling:

And that’s before you get to student loan forgiveness programs that predate Biden’s latest action by years.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz makes a persuasive argument that this program will help the economy instead of harming it. He also turns the discussion to a much more useful place than whether or not the recipients of the forgiveness are worthy, but to whether or not it is beneficial to the country at large. One of the online friends I discussed the loan forgiveness plan with had the following thoughts on it:

I’ve noticed that American discourse tends to frame universities as a place that hands out goodies individuals (access to jobs and prestige) vs a place that expands the human capital of the nation. One way to look at Biden’s plan is it releases a lot of highly educated people to do more risk taking things like open businesses and more altruistic things like work for non-profits. It’s not just good for those people but possibly everybody else in society.

This comment gets at the heart of a very particular way in which too many of today’s political leaders fall short when compared to their predecessors. Instead of elected officials (particularly those in the GOP) using their positions to govern in a way that benefits as many people in their particular sphere of responsibility as possible, many choose instead to validate and amplify a false individualism. They deliberately heighten the “us vs them” dynamic that already exists in the country to retain their own power, defining more and more Americans (those eligible for student loan forgiveness in this case) as an unworthy “them”. However imperfect Biden’s debt forgiveness plan is, it at least attempts to do something for the benefit of a broad set of Americans who can use the help.

What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why

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What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why

Another excellent piece by Dr. Ted Johnson that makes sense of the disconnect between the voting patterns of black Americans and their personal views.  Johnson touches only briefly on the ways in which black distrust of medical and governmental institutions is informed by a long history of abuses visited upon black people by those same institutions.  It’s bad enough that maternal mortality in the United States is among the worst in the developed world.  The rate of maternal mortality in the US for black women is even worse.  The end of Roe v. Wade will certainly reduce the availability of safe, legal abortion care and will disproportionately impact poor women, black women, and other women of color.

Social “Firsts” and the Supreme Court

Posted on by Scott

A few days ago, Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States at the end of the current term.  Because Joe Biden pledged to nominate a black woman to the nation’s highest court if he became president, he now has an opportunity to make good on that pledge.  Predictably, we began to hear and see a lot of high-minded (and hypocritical) commentary about how Biden should be choosing the “most-qualified” justice–regardless of their skin color.  Our attention span as a country is so short, we’ve already forgotten that Trump’s rise to the presidency was powered at least in part by publicizing a Federalist Society-authored list of high court nominees he would choose from if the opportunity presented itself.  We’ve already forgotten that Ronald Reagan promised to name a woman to the Supreme Court.

But the history of using the Supreme Court to accomplish social firsts stretches back much further than we might suppose from current commentary.  This thread by David Frum takes us all the way back to 1887, when President Grover Cleveland appointed Lucius Quintus Lamar to the high court in a bid to gain the support of conservative white southern Democrats for re-election.  Read Frum’s thread in full to get a complete sense of how unrepentant a Confederate Mr. Lamar was.  This dubious social first—the appointment of a traitor to the Union to nation’s highest court–would prove very important for a reason not fully touched on at all in Mr. Frum’s thread.  1887 marked the year the US federal government fully abandoned Reconstruction–and the nation’s black citizens to decades of voter disenfranchisement, terrorism, property theft, murder, and Jim Crow laws.

No discussion of the Supreme Court and social firsts would be complete without mentioning Maryland’s own Thurgood Marshall.  He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from 2 HBCUs (graduating 1st in his class from Howard Law because the University of Maryland School of Law was still segregated).  Out of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, Marshall won 29, losing just 3.  He served as a federal appeals court judge for the second circuit for a number of years prior to becoming the nation’s first black solicitor general.  Some months of his tenure as an appeals court judge were served as a recess appointment due to certain southern senators holding up his official appointment, including the same segregationist James Eastland that Joe Biden recalled a civil relationship with.  He would win 14 cases on behalf of the government in that role, losing just 5.  Among his peers both at the time and since, there may not be a more successful justice at winning arguments before the Supreme Court prior to becoming a member of it.

Discussing the legal and rhetorical brilliance of Thurgood Marshall requires discussion of his successor.  Few nominations to the high court are a better demonstration of the hypocrisy of many of today’s conservatives regarding “qualifications” (including those who oppose Trump) than the absence of such concerns being raised when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court.  In contrast to the years served as an appellate court judge and solicitor general by Marshall, Thomas was an appellate judge for the DC circuit for just 16 months.  Thomas graduated in the middle of his law school class at Yale in contrast to Marshall’s 1st in class at Howard.  The White House and Senate Republicans apparently pressured the American Bar Association (ABA) to give Thomas a qualified rating even while attempting to discredit the ABA as partisan–and this is before Anita Hill’s interview with the FBI was leaked to the press and led to the re-opening of Thomas’ confirmation hearings.  The same GOP that loves to quote that one line from that one speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not have cared less about “the content of [Thomas’] character”.  They cared that he was both conservative and black.  The way the Senate treated Anita Hill during those re-opened confirmation hearings would in retrospect be a preview of the treatment awaiting future black women appointees to federal roles.

How Thomas fared during his confirmation hearings almost certainly animated the treatment of Lani Guinier after her nomination to become assistant attorney general for civil rights by Republicans.  Her treatment by them, conservative media, and by the White House who nominated her was utterly shameful.  Conservatives lied about her positions.  The same Joe Biden who contributed to the poor treatment that Anita Hill received before the Senate Judiciary Committee he chaired 2 years earlier, reported “grew lukewarm about Guinier”.  President Clinton would ultimately withdraw the nomination in the face of lies and distortions about her writings.  His administration had apparently instructed her not to make any public statements about until after he’d already decided to withdraw her nomination, enabling her opponents to smear her in the press and her “allies” to get cold feet about supporting her.  Particularly now as a wave of anti-CRT legislation, book bans, and attacks on affirmative action gain traction around the country (especially in light of Guinier’s recent death), it is important to remember that Guinier only got to make her case to the public in one interview with Ted Koppel–and the public received her views well.  She never got the Senate hearing that even Robert Bork got for his extreme views because Bill Clinton–her friend from Yale Law School–pulled her nomination instead.

Not even two weeks have passed since the annual hypocrisy-fest that is MLK Day, and a significant majority of Americans surveyed seem to have decided once again that black women should wait for what should be theirs.

The attacks on the first black woman Supreme Court nominee will be fierce (if Biden follows through on his commitment).

When it comes to the Supreme Court and credentialism however, perhaps the best example of the double standard that seems to exist for women generally is the brief nomination of Harriet Miers.  Conservatives in particular dragged this woman for her lack of elite education (she earned degrees in mathematics and law at Southern Methodist University).  Only in looking back did I learn that Harry Reid (Senate minority leader at the time) actually recommended Miers as the successor to O’Connor, and that other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hoped to see nominees from outside the federal appellate court system.  Perhaps because Reid earned his law degree in George Washington University’s part-time program, he didn’t put as much stock in an Ivy League pedigree as he did in bringing the perspective of an experienced practicing lawyer to the Supreme Court.  Potential conflict of interest concerns raised by Miers’ relationship with President Bush and his staff might ultimately have sunk her nomination anyway had she not withdrawn it.  By contrast, Clarence Thomas has ruled in numerous cases where he had clear conflicts of interest with little or no criticism from his supporters on the political right.

Considering the sorts of cases which will soon come before the Supreme Court, we should remember that as an institution it has been used as often as a tool to remove and restrict rights as it has to grant them (if not more so).  The aforementioned appointment of Lucius Lamar is not the only time that the Supreme Court has been used to undermine full citizenship for black people in the United States.  Before William Rehnquist became associate justice (nominated by Nixon), then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (nominated by Reagan), he was a “poll watcher” in Arizona under the auspices of Operation Eagle Eye, a nationwide campaign by the Republican National Committee to suppress black votes.  This 2021 piece by Charles Pierce makes a convincing argument Rehnquist tried to pass off his personal opposition to the ultimate outcome of Brown v Board of Education as that of the justice he clerked for (Robert Jackson, Jr).  In this memo, he defended Plessy v Ferguson as good law, and likely lied about it in both of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.  From the time he became one of Rehnquist’s law clerks, to replacing him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts has had the Voting Rights Act in his sights as a law to be weakened (if not destroyed).

Contrary to the polls (and numerous previous demonstrations of an utter lack of spine), Lindsey Graham has emerged as a supporter of the idea of a black woman nominee to the Supreme Court.  Current US District Court judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina being a possible nominee certainly doesn’t hurt.  If the current shortlist is any indication, any of the black women Biden selects from it will be just as qualified–and likely more so–than any of their colleagues at the time of their selection.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden chose Breyer’s former clerk (Ketanji Brown Jackson) to succeed him.  But as a state university graduate myself, part of me hopes that someone with at least one degree from outside the Ivy League gets selected.

Two Tales of Tech Recruiting

Posted on by Scott

In an industry that has had (and continues to have) persistent problems when it comes to how it hires and treats black people within its ranks, few things are worse than a black woman announcing on social media that she short-changed a candidate of $45,000 because “I personally don’t have the bandwidth to give lessons on salary negotiation”.

I’ve worked with both contract recruiters and full-time recruiters in 10 years as a manager staffing software engineering positions on multiple teams and none of them low-balled any candidate I chose to extend an offer because I intended to keep those folks for as long as I could. The alternative–losing good people to companies that can poach them simply by offering more money–meant not just losing their skills, and having fewer people to divide the same amount of work between, but my employer incurring costs trying to backfill the open position. Especially in a market where the competition for talented people is more and more challenging, the last way any company should start a relationship with a new employee is by undervaluing them from the moment they join.

A position I only filled a couple of weeks ago had been open for two solid months before that. Rather than risk losing a good candidate over $10,000, I requested an exception to offer a larger signing bonus. With the exception granted, we made a best and final offer that he accepted. The onboarding process is going smoothly, and since we’re paying him what he’s actually worth based on the geography we’re in and what our competitors are offering, he will be harder to poach with just money.

Fortunately, there are good examples of recruiters doing well by the people they recruit.

Unlike the first Johnson, this one probably built a significant amount of goodwill and trust–not just between herself and the candidate, but between the candidate and the company she will be working for. In an industry where software engineers are encouraged to switch jobs every couple of years, this company has a good chance of growing this junior software engineer into a senior software engineer–perhaps even a engineering leader–because a recruiter put their best foot forward.

As is sometimes the case on Twitter in cases like this, someone tagged the company Mercedes S. Johnson is recruiting on behalf of–and someone responded requesting a DM with more information. The tweet that actually led me to this whole story was about doxxing and how Ms. Johnson shouldn’t lose her job over the post. I’ve written about at-will employment and cancel culture before, and people have definitely lost their jobs for less than what this woman bragged on Twitter about doing. As of this writing, she was still defending her action.

If you work in tech recruiting and the opportunity presents itself, choose to be a Briana instead of a Mercedes. Both the companies you hire for and the candidates you recruit for them will thank you.