Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

Hey, uh, programmers?

We need to sit down and talk for a second.

It's about social justice and change and privilege and all that stuff. But please bear with me. I am going to try to be gentle. But it's going to be uncomfortable.

A thread.

So I need to start with this: a lot of what I'm about to share, I learned the hard way—that is, by realizing that I was wrong about it, and had been operating like that for a long time.

So I'm not saying I'm some grand teacher; I struggle with this stuff too. Anyway, here goes.

I've seen the following with the COVID response and the worldwide racial justice protest.

Programmers jump in like "What TECH thing can I do to help? Can I build an app? Can I write a machine learning model to help?"

And the intention is appreciated.

But.

The way we do that is often ineffective.

I have seen 5 separate mutual aid apps built in separate stacks by separate groups that don't know about each other.

I have seen 7 COVID apps that all do the same thing.

Folks jump into the IDE without talking to each other.

Why: we have a highly individualist culture. That individualism, believe it or not, is an element of white supremacy culture (hereafter WSC).

We have no time to talk, and we build without doing so, because we have this huge sense of urgency. Which is also an element of WSC.

It results in duplicated effort. But it ALSO results in solutions that don't match the needs of the folks who are in need. And then we end up with lots of solutions, none of which do the needful.

And 100 programmers feel like heroes, but nothing is actually solved.

I love the musical "Wicked." I have, on three separate occasions, considered getting an Elphaba tattoo.

There's a song in that musical called "No Good Deed." This part of the lyrics absolutely arrests me:

And I think we need to think about this. We, and those of us with racial privilege especially,

We have this thing about being in charge.
We have this thing about being the hero.
We have this thing about centering ourselves.

And we have to get over it.

We can't swoop in and save the world alone with our coding superpowers and our superior intelligence.

We need to be okay with sitting down and listening to other people.

We need to be okay with being just one brick in the wall of the solution that the community needs.

Maybe the COVID relief effort doesn't need you to swoop in and build the Next Big App.

Maybe it needs you to wear a mask, and stay inside, and do a grocery run for your neighbor.

You know—normal, non-heroic things that everyone needs to do.

Maybe the racial justice protests do not need you to code the "Uber of Groceries" (by the way, if Uber is your model for your social justice thing, you're already whiffing it).

Maybe they need you to read a book, or give up your seat at the table to a black technologist.

Or maybe they DO need you to help with an app! Great!

But you can't know without connecting, and sitting down, and listening.

And you also need to be prepared to hear the news "yeah, we don't need you to be our hero. We need you to do XYZ unglamorous thing, please."

Because movements actually don't need 200 programmers working on the COVID app, or the racial justice app.

But they do need many more than 200 people doing the unglamorous things like learning, and listening, and caring for their communities.

All right, so, there's another thing. I suspect I'm gonna catch hell for this one, because I'm looking especially at FAANG people and Microsoft people right now.

We, programmers, also have to consider that a lot of what we have, we got from the system we're fighting.

Those sky-high salaries for programmers at those companies? They're paid for with contracts with the military, or ICE, or CBP. They're paid for with the sale of people's personal data in ways that harm them.

As in, you are paid your $240k or whatever, because of those contracts.

That's true even if you don't work directly on those contracts, because your labor and your labor advocacy contributes to the profitability of the company that has decided that those business practices are OK or desirable.

We really need to consider, if we're doing that...

...if we're complicit in that, do we really need to be up on Twitter speaking like we're ANY kind of authority about what we, or anybody else, should be doing right now?

Because EYE had a moment in MY career where I really needed to think hard about that.

And I made a choice to leave a company because they took a contract that would get black and brown people killed.

I derived a lot of my legitimacy and clout from that company. People STILL respect my opinion more because I worked there.

In that particular case, I wasn't getting paid some monumental amount. But that happens too. And not being complicit means giving that up.

That's a serious question that programmers need to address before doing anything else in a social justice movement, honestly.

What has my complicity allocated to me that isn't really rightfully mine?

Why am I okay with that? Am I gonna do something about that?

This is uncomfortable because we want to think of ourselves as good people, but it's not just about us.

We're not lone actors. We are parts of a system.

And when that system does the opposite of the thing we claim we stand for, we need to acknowledge our complicity...

And honestly, even BEFORE trying to embed ourselves in social justice efforts, DEFINITELY before trying to be some kind of vigilante lone heroes...

We need to address, and figure out how we're gonna fix, the harm we have caused by being a part of the system we're ALREADY IN.

And addressing that harm, frankly, programmers, is gonna mean sacrificing clout, "legitimacy," money, and other things we like and want.

And yes, I've heard every single argument about "reach" and "net positive impact," and none of them absolve us of this responsibility.

So we all need to take a seat and listen.

Because we're not the heroes. If this story needs heroes, our complicity in the systems of oppression make us unqualified to be those heroes.

We need to submit ourselves, learn, connect, and follow someone else's lead.