Welcome to The Overlap, a monthly newsletter on the intersection of product and organization design.
With the murder of George Floyd, I've been doing my best to listen, check my privilege, and understand what I can do to be a better ally and antiracist.
This issue is about why we need to fix racial biases in our technology. Even though this is a newsletter about the overlap between product and org design, it would not do this moment justice if we didn't talk about the one thing that both product and org design overlap with: race.
The takeaway: Technology scales systemic racism if we leave it unchecked. As product managers and organizational designers, we have a responsibility to hold our organizations accountable at hiring equitably and designing inclusively.
A secret from the public
After the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department began a secret initiative with IBM to "prevent terrorism." The initiative? Software that allows the NYPD to search for people in surveillance footage by race.
From The Intercept:
With access to images of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers offered up by NYPD officials, as early as 2012, IBM was creating new search features that allow other police departments to search camera footage for images of people by hair color, facial hair, and skin tone.
IBM used NYPD’s surveillance footage to develop this technology. And both parties kept this project a secret as they knew that the public would not think highly of it.
Asked about the secrecy of this collaboration, the NYPD said that “various elected leaders and stakeholders” were briefed on the department’s efforts “to keep this city safe,” adding that sharing camera access with IBM was necessary for the system to work. IBM did not respond to a question about why the company didn’t make this collaboration public.
We already know that our criminal justice system is a problem. Black people are incarcerated in state prisons more than five times the rate of white people.
And we already know how much the NYPD sucks. Just look how they beat down protesters, pepper spray state senators, and drive through peaceful crowds. As protesters say, “no justice, no peace, fuck the racist ass police.”
But IBM?! An industry-leading company we all know and love? What happened here?
This is just one of many examples of technology being oppressive to people of color. There are automated risk profiling systems that disproportionately identify Latinx people as illegal immigrants. There are credit scoring algorithms that disproportionately identify Black people as risks and prevent them from buying homes, getting loans, or finding jobs.
There are passport systems that show error messages to Asians because “subject eyes are closed.”
There are many reasons products carry racial biases. Prioritizing capitalism over fairness, like with IBM, is one reason. Another is tech's lack of diversity: if most people in tech are white males, how can we expect our products to be inclusive and equitable? The biggest reason, I’d guess, is that these problems are a microcosm of systemic racism. Society defines, frames, and represents people of color as “the problem,” and we design with these assumptions.
It’s ironic that us product people preach these things:
“empathize with the user”
“check our assumptions”
“understand our audience”
Yet we:
Avoid talking about race at work
Don't call out microaggressions
Have seen no improvement in the amount of Black and Latinx folk in tech
Pay Black folks in tech $10k+ less than white and Asian folks
We need to change this.
If we design products that make it easy to oppress, we exponentiate racism's impact. Technology doesn’t just become a part of the problem. It scales the problem.
We must hold our organizations accountable for designing products equitably and inclusively. We must challenge our company’s hiring processes and hold them to what they say about wanting to be more diverse. We must design products that solve the problem instead of scale it.
Technology scales racism and oppression if we aren’t conscious, deliberate, and humble. Let’s stop making the same mistakes. Let’s acknowledge our blindspots and design products that help dismantle racism.
What I’ve been reading
So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
In this book, Ijeoma talks about how much white privilege has affected her as a queer Black woman. This is a straightforward, real, and actionable read on systemic racism. Well worth your time.
My #BLM Booklist by Tracy Chou
I resonated with Tracy’s point on how books are her default way of processing difficult situations and finding a way to progress herself. Of course, being more informed is just the beginning of taking action towards helping make deep, sustained change.
“As # BlackLivesMatter became the rallying cry heard across America, I started reading. I’ve been reading for a while, now. But six years later, as the never-ending, brutal, unnecessary deaths of yet more Black people at the hands of American police have sparked protests across the country and around the world, I have to admit, I still feel horribly useless, and guilty for my complicity. The world hasn’t progressed, but can I say that I have, either?”
Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo by Natasha Iskander
"…disciplines that rely on empathetic engagement for data collection stress the importance of paying attention to the researcher’s identity and political positioning. The design thinking method does not stipulate rigorous attention to positionality, however. This omission signals that the designer, as creative visionary, is somehow suspended above the fray of bias, blind spots, and political pressure."
This supports what I mentioned above: it’s ironic that we preach empathy when majority of the industry is white. We can’t truly empathize with our users if we aren’t examining our own identity and privilege.
My company, Sanctuary Computer, changed our website into a list of Black organizations combating systemic racism, police brutality, the criminal justice system. You can even add this to your site.
A clean site that highlights accomplished Black designers. The goal is to inspire new designers, encourage folks to diversity their feeds, and help hiring processes.
Bombas CMO Kate Huyett created this awesome for Black people looking to break into the marketing and tech industry. It's a resource of professionals who are offering their time to help. You can add your name to this list here. (Thank you Christine Kim for sharing this!)
Allyship & Action Summit (free & tomorrow!)
Tomorrow (Thursday), 1-5pm EST. An educational conference on anti-racism in the ad industry. It's got a quality lineup. And it's free. Thank you Flick Eriksson for sharing this.
Take action. And be well.
–tim