Thread by @Sherrell_Dorsey

Though I decided to make the hard decision to close the @weareblktechclt space, I am grateful for the outpouring support from community and true supporters whose lives we touched. Folks who prayed for us, brought their babies into our space, gave back relentlessly to our cause.

Sometimes the hard thing about hard things is making strategic decisions to end the suffering. To extract ourselves from unnecessary hardships.

In this case, we were spending a great deal of resources and time simply trying to operate a physical space.

In an effort to activate space consistently, we created jobs, cultivated community, hosted government officials, turned compelling conversations into safe space for discourse and discovery on the Black experience in #CLT.

I am not sorry about any of the sleepless nights, the weekly trips from NYC to CLT in grad school to support my team in the #BLKTECHCLTHQ operations.

I am sorry about naïveté.
About expecting true investment in our work.

Instead, we were asked to tap dance for survival.

Major corporations who quite easily passed over 6-figure checks to lackluster initiatives ran by white boys with large platforms and big mouths and flimsy mission statements, but couldn’t understand why would possibly need real dollars to continue stretching our impact.

What is clear is that my team, 3 black women, and a young black MBA grad who joined us over the summer, sacrificed our time, our families, our expertise, and our hussle to hold together BLKTECHCLT.

And then we got smart.

Our work continues. We will continue to lead gatherings, data collection on our local Black technology talent landscape. We will continue to fight to make visible what the city pretends to not recognize: Black genius and capacity.

But we will do it smarter and more efficiently.

We will not tap dance for less than the best efforts of the companies and recruiters who talk diversity and pipeline building but have yet to comprehend why they must make ACTUAL investments into the work to realize this change.

I’ve thought about being petty. About calling out the major corporations who stand on stages to tout how much impact they’re having but who have, for the last two years, wasted our time in lengthy discussions and promises to support our work, in all of their southern charm.

I am still processing.

I am still turning over my emotional faculties on the trauma that is having deep success, sacrificial impact, and still asked to martyr my time and livelihood to convince fiscally powerful entities that our work not only matters, it is necessary.

What is clear and has become cemented for me even more, is that until we own our own, we can’t be free.

One day I’ll process through it all. The days I sat in board rooms with gatekeepers who talked down to me before I had to flex and remind them that I’m not from around here.

I don’t care about your sweet tea.

I’ll tell the story of telling grinning white corporations that walked through my door using language like “low income” and “underserved” and “minority” to devalue our people and our team to kick rocks.

Because this wasn’t about charity, it was always about investment.

I’ll tell the story of trying to make a long-term plan to secure our physical survival and how those plans foiled under poor leadership and management of our partner and yet we were blamed and labeled in coded language as the “angry black women”.

Yes, I am angry.

Because the physicality of fighting and working hard to earn half as much and to be treated as a mere photo-op side show is depleting. It’s dehumanizing.

My closest friends are powerful, well-educated Black women who recant workplace horrors of similar taste.

When they speak up and inject critiques of the morality of internal operations and culture, they are ostracized. So was I.

But this is our work.

Because the Black women that came before us did not live in vain. They inched us forward.

And our work today is to do the same for the generation coming behind us.

Bold though healing from the brokenness. We forge.

Whole vibe on new.

Lessons learned.

Leveraging new ways of building to circumvent the bullsh*t that is lifting voice and narrative and community.

Putting up with no more dishonesty in the work.

Making smarter decisions about focuse and time.