CHANTE: Hello everyone. This is Chante Thurmond, back with another episode of Greater Than Code. I am back with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: And I am here with my friend, Coraline Ehmke. CORALINE: Hey everybody, it's great to be with you today. We have a really amazing guest today. My friend, Kim Crayton. Kim is known for her work of coaching tech leaders, in companies and non-profits, for improving profitability and innovation by operationalizing core organizational values and identifying hidden organizational barriers to inclusion. She has spoken at over 50 conferences on these issues, and has worked closely with members and leadership in the Clojure, Node.js, Python, JavaScript and Selenium communities, as well as at organizations like GitHub and Mozilla. Recently, she's been working with MailChimp, Sinnerschrader, Ableton, Selenium Open Source Project, Unplug Studios, and Ti.to. Kim, we are so delighted to have you on the show today. Welcome. KIM: Thank you for having me. CORALINE: Our traditional first question to get the conversation started, Kim, what is your superpower and how did you develop it? KIM: My superpower has been a black woman in tech with a strategy and a platform. Part of that was DNA. It was just how the card is laid out. But the strategy and platform have come from years of being an educator as well as a researcher, and completing a doctorate of business administration focusing on technology entrepreneurship. CORALINE: That's amazing. You have [inaudible] credentials. KIM: Which I'm sick of having to repeat to people in tech. [Chuckles] CORALINE: Yeah. REIN: If you all don't know, Kim Crayton is nothing to fuck with. [Laughter] CHANTE: Now they know. KIM: No, they would have figured it out soon. [Laughter] CHANTE: Kim, I'm a black woman and in tech as well and I feel like when you just said that, that just hit home for me because I feel like I'm always having to cite my credentials and basically validate why I'm here in this space. Can we talk a little bit about that in terms of your experience? KIM: [Laughs] Okay. When I came into this space, I had an interest in technology, but no one in my community was talking about being a producer of tech. I was just a consumer of tech. So I spent some time figuring out what producers of tech were doing. And in that time I decided I need to learn the language of tech, so I'm learning to code. And this is when I first started speaking in tech because I got sick of people talking about how easy it was to learn the code. And I'm looking at these curriculums and I'm listening to people. And as an educator, there is nothing easy about learning to code. There's nothing easy about the learning process. And so as an adult -- my masters is in training and development. So I understand about adult learners. And so as we continue to tell adult learners that something is easy and they can't accomplish it, particularly people in marginalized groups who already have, like I said, no one in my community is talking about producing tech, so I don't have role models. I don't have people saying, "Hey, you can do this." We internalize it and say, "Hey, there's something wrong with me if this easy thing, I can't do this." And so I started speaking about mentoring. Then once I figured out the code thing and I was like, "[He has enough of these] jerks doing this crap," I have some skills that this space needs desperately and I refuse to let them dictate my value. Because that's another thing that I saw and that speaks directly to your question. I knew I had a unique set of skills, particularly about how to build businesses because most of the companies, and I call them organizations in this space, are not businesses. What they are, are products and services that they've been able to scale. They have no policies, procedures or processes in place to make them a business. They did not know how to measure anything. They did not know how to manage anything because there's nothing there. And so, I refuse to let this space of dominated whiteness, white men, white dudes who are, I say it constantly, pretty goddamn mediocre to me, tell me what my value is. And so, I spent 2017, I spoke at 19 conferences, I keynoted five because I was going to tell you what my value was. And this also comes from the space of how we use the word technical incorrectly. I got sick of spilling out conference CFPs and only thing that is considered technical is if you're talking about a technology. Those are two different words and we need to stop using them interchangeably. I have a set of technical skills that most of the people in this space do not have. I have a set of technical skills that is a long time before some AI or anything's going to be able to replace what I do. And so, I'm highly technical. I am the technical where I have to deal with humans, I have to deal with people's emotions and feelings. And so, I am highly technical and that's one thing. And then the other thing that I've been talking about here lately is just blatant racism. We're just going to talk about just the blatant racism that we see within this space that no one wants to talk. No one wants to name a thing, a thing. We talk all around it. And one of the reasons before we got on this show I said I was pissed is because Kamala Harris ended her campaign yesterday. And that if you go on Twitter, you will see black women mourning and it's not because she suspended her campaign, it was the thing that's in the narrative that white supremacy and white folks around this country were allowed to say to decimate her campaign and to position her as incompetent, which she is not, unorganized, which she couldn't be to get to the highest levels of government, and all these other negative things. And it hit us in the gut because this happens to us every freaking day at the job. So what it told us, even those black women who want to still just like, "Yeah, no. Ahhh. Uhh," back and forth. What this told us in a very clear, very clear and very public way is that it doesn't matter your credentials. It doesn't matter what you come in the door with because whiteness is given the benefit of the doubt and is allowed to prove itself. And we have to come in the door knowing everything, not only our jobs but everybody else's jobs. And so, this is why I give no fucks. This is why I have no problem with cussing people out on Twitter. I have no problem because I know what I got, I know what I have, I have my lived experience. I come in the door with my lived experience and thousands of dollars in school debt, years of all of this stuff and actively working with tech leaders to move their businesses into a space of diversity, which is about recruitment. And the point that if they fail on that, because many are failing there. But where they patently fail is on inclusion, which is about retention. So this is where, and so people say your inclusion and diversity [inaudible]. No, I'm not. I'm a business strategist. But damn, I can't even get to the business strategy because we don't have inclusion and diversity dealt with. That should be the bedrock, the foundation of your business. And if you don't have that now, I've got to start from scratch. CHANTE: Girrrrrrrl! I'm just kidding. [Chuckles] No, you're taking the words right out of my mouth. So I mean, thank you so much for that answer because everything you said, I've been feeling. I cried yesterday when I found out about Kamala Harris and it was for all the reasons you just mentioned. It wasn't even because I was going to necessarily endorse her publicly. It was just that, are you fucking kidding me? That we have, once again, it was really bad when it happened with Michelle Obama. I couldn't believe the things I heard and I read about her. It was horrible. And then I saw the same thing happening with Kamala Harris and it was like, "Wow!" So to your point that we have to overly validate, overly qualify ourselves constantly against a system that wasn't really built for us. And -- KIM: No, I'm going to stop you there. I'm going to stop you there. The system was built for us. The system was built to harm and oppress us. CHANTE: Thank you. KIM: So, the system was built for us. CHANTE: That's true. KIM: It was not built for us to be in roles of power and privilege. CHANTE: Thank you. Yes, yes. Thank you for clarifying that. I was going to say it was built for us to not necessarily be a part of the top. We're here to provide the economic growth and structure in terms of slavery and labor. And unfortunately that has just carried over. And I do the same exact work that you do, just differently. And I actually have a tech recruiting background and to your point about not being able to get to that conversation, which is why I had to actually get into the diversity and inclusion stuff because I just couldn't get to the real work that I was trying to do with technology companies. So I think you're teeing up the conversation as I probably would and touching on lots of things that are near and dear to my heart. And I don't want to hog this, but I just have to say that I just really love the energy that you brought into this conversation already. I know you said you started off this morning not feeling so great, but wow, thank you. KIM: You're very welcome. Yeah, it was on Twitter this morning and very few of us got much sleep last night. But what came to my mind when I woke up though was the song Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing because black women are the moral compass of this country and we will continue. This is not the first time this has happened to us. This is the most public way it's happened to us. Let's not forget Stacey Abrams, who they stole that election from. CHANTE: I was going to say her too, because yeah, when you were talking, I was thinking about Stacey Abrams. REIN: Also, if you want to see how mediocre white dudes are, go find the ones that Kim's mentioned. [Laughter] REIN: You don't have to go far. Yeah. They are there lining up. KIM: Almost. Well, I've locked down my DMs, I changed my settings. So only people who follow me can respond, but for some reason, Twitter, I need you to fix this shit. There are people who I've blocked who are commenting on my threads and I can't see it, but they're commenting. And I'm wondering how these people are. So, people in the community has that causes in community are responding to them and then I go see. And I'm like, "This is somebody I blocked. Why the hell are they even responding to my content?" So Twitter, instead of fucking around with the like button and all that stuff, can we get you to do some shit that keeps me safe? CORALINE: Yeah. People have been calling in for that for a long time and Twitter is completely tone-deaf. Kim, I've had the honor of seeing you speak before and to Chante's point, your energy is super inspiring. And of course, it attracts a lot of vitriol. And that reminds me, I wish I remember who said this, maybe someone else remembers, when people show you who they are, believe them. KIM: Maya Angelou told Oprah Winfrey when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. CORALINE: Thank you so much. KIM: And that's why I have a hard line and people don't like it. All whiteness is racist by design and cannot be trusted by default without consistent demonstrated anti-racist behavior. So, I'm one of those people. I have over 8,000 followers. Trust and believe that every time I get a new one, I'm looking at their timeline, I'm looking at what they tweet because I don't need you. When I first came on the block, the educator in me was like, "Oh, let's have conversations. Let's keep everything open." I am so happy being in my echo chamber. I don't need that crap because what I saw with the incident that happened recently was that one to two degrees of separation from your "friends" are actively willing to cause me harm. REIN: The thing that I've noticed, and Kim, you can tell me if I'm on the right track here, is people don't have to wake up in the morning thinking, "I'm going to go do a racism." They wake up in the morning thinking, "I'm not going to hire her," not knowing why. But they don't respect the skills of women or black people or black women the same way as white people. It's not because they think they're being racist, it's because they're enacting this system that they were socially conditioned and brought up to behave that way. KIM: And that's why I say it's by design and that's why I speak of whiteness and not individuals, unless the individual pisses me off. When I speak of whiteness as a construct as like you speak of blackness as a construct. No one asked me what kind of black I am. When you cross the street, when you see black people, you're not sitting up there asking what kind of record they have. You crossed the street because you see blackness. So to put it on equal level, I talk about whiteness in the same way. REIN: The thing I want to get across to people who look like me is even if you don't think you're a racist, that's not a defense. KIM: Well, who cares what you think? This is why I draw the hard lines. I'm not debating this with you. This is not a debate. So you either engage how I set the parameters. This is basic classroom management for me. I'm the educator, I'm the teacher. I'm not going to let students dictate what the rules are for my classroom. They may have some input, but I make the defining line of what that is. You don't get to say as a white person in the United States who has benefited. I don't care if you've been poor or you've been rich from the labor of black people, of enslaved Africans and the annihilation of indigenous native Americans. You don't get to have that conversation. You don't get to define it. And see, that's another thing about whiteness. You're so used to being the default that you've defined everything. So when I challenge you and say, "No, no, no, no. I'm defining here." That's when you get the push back. That's when you want to talk about civility. That's when you want to do all of that. Let's be civil. Fuck civility. And that's one of my #causeascene shirts - fuck civility, because civility is optional for white people and it's the expected behavior of people of color because it allows white supremacy to ingrain in us internalized white supremacy and anti-blackness so that we manage our own behavior so that you don't have to deal with us. CHANTE: Can we just be best friends now, Kim? Let's just get to the point here. Come on, now. [Laughter] CHANTE: I need to hang out with you every day. KIM: Well, I tell people I need to come with a PSA because once you know, you can't unknow. And once you know, and now you have a choice whether you are going to be anti-racist or you're going to be complicit and actively. So to me, it's just everybody. White people aren't a spectrum of racism or racist. You either on the active, on the end of being actively white supremacists or actively anti-racist. That's it. That's all I need to know. CHANTE: And PS to that, it's not just white folks, it's black folks too. It's people of color. KIM: No, I'm gonna challenge this. CHANTE: Okay, go ahead. KIM: Because I'm going through Dr. Kendi's book right now, How to be Anti-Racist as the book club selection. He believes black people can be racist. I ascribed like most social sciences that they cannot be racist. We can have internalized white supremacy, we can have anti-blackness and we can exhibit racist behaviors. We do not have the power structure. And I talk about on the systematic level. So even in Kendi's book, when he talks about this -- you brought it up because I've been breaking this down. So even in Kendi's book when he talks about it, he equates again. He puts blacks on the same level as whiteness. That is not possible. The only power black people have is the power that whiteness has given it. And he can take it away at any moment. So, if my power is given to me by somebody else, I don't have inherent power. So, no. Black people can be shitty as fuck. I don't want to be in a room with Candace Owens. I don't want to be in a room with them, Diamonds and Pro, whatever the hell their name is. I don't even want to be in a room with Omarosa. But what I can tell you about Omarosa though is y'all underestimate her so much and saw her as not a threat that this black woman was able to get in the situation room with not only audio, what video proof that you guys were shitty. So no, I don't have to be in the room with them. But what I'm not going to do is say they're racist. They are [assimilist] and that's how the system has set them up. But we don't have inherent power. So in the book, he talks about how when Obama was president, he had a black AG and he had a black Secretary of State. With Mitch McConnell, you can't get shit done. That's why with even the Kamala Harris, to me it wasn't even about her policies. I had already put that out of my mind. There are over 200 pieces of legislation sitting in the Senate that he will not act on. So I was like, "Whatever! Whoever's getting here, you ought to have already talked about all these things. Ain't none of this shit gonna happen." So my thing, I was looking for anti-racist candidate. That's what I'm looking for, looking for anti-racist candidate. But even in then when he talks about Obama, you act as if Obama, and I can't even think of his AGs right now, the name is escaping me. You act like they had inherent power. If they had inherent power, they would have been able to do whatever the hell they want to do. They don't have inherit power. They have the power that whiteness bestowed on them. And when they got uncomfortable, whiteness blocked them. They couldn't do nothing. And eight years, all he was able to do was a healthcare plan. That's it. CHANTE: And barely. KIM: Yes. CHANTE: Well, to your point that when you define it that way, which I think is actually a really critical point here, and one of the things I had talked a lot about in my diversity and inclusion equity accessibility training is that we need to set up the conversation so that we make sure that our definitions are the same. KIM: Okay. So, Coraline knows I start every talk with definitions. CHANTE: Good. CORALINE: Yeah. KIM: Because again, the educator in me. I need everybody on the same page. I don't need your 30 minutes and tell me you don't know. No. I always define privilege, underrepresented, marginalized, diversity and inclusion. Those are the things I outline and talk about right up front. And now increasingly, I'm just defining what racism is and what racism isn't before I even get into any of the business stuff that I talk about, because no one's talking about these things. You have Elizabeth Warren talking about the billionaires and how she's going to tax the billionaires and they're gonna have education for all and healthcare for all. They have that conversation. And then on a whole nother set, they separate themselves and then they want to talk about the differences in race and class. No, no, no, no, no. Those conversations need to be together. And if you're not having those, because those are not separate conversations. If you're not having those conversations together, you are going to cause me harm because in your head as a racist, you see them as separate things. CHANTE: One of the things -- so I have a nursing background, Kim. So the way in which I see the world is usually through this sort of public health lens where we have these 10 to 12 social determinants of health, which are the things you just named. We talk about all the things that basically go into making a person be defined as well-being and healthy and happy or not. These are things I always say, "You can't really separate the fascia from the fat and the bone and the tendon. It's really hard to, it's all mixed in together." It's like creating a beautiful soup and then saying, "I want to take out the spice." Too late. You already put it in there. KIM: Yup. Just like you said, the fascia, that thing, that fascia is connected to make that thing work. CHANTE: Yes. You know what I'm saying? And so, just as we are a complex and adaptive system, as humans, we are in this complex adaptive system of the socially constructed around whiteness to your point, which is why it's so fucked up, which is why it's so hard to get away from. That's how this modern world was built on this colonial view. So, I think this is super important and I want to segue into something that I really want to talk about. Then I'll shut up and let everyone else speak. KIM: No, no. Before you say that, I want to say this. This is why next year I'm writing the book - Redefining Capitalism Without White Supremacy: The Economics of Being Anti-Racist. CORALINE: I cannot wait to read that. CHANTE: Let me get a pre-order. [Laughs] REIN: I will be reading that immediately. KIM: That's the book. Because people want to talk about capitalism as if it's some evil thing. Capitalism like communism, like Marxism, like socialism is a theory. All of them are rooted in white supremacy. So until we deal with all of that, we're not changing anything. CORALINE: I really hate the way that a lot of people frame the struggles that I have observed black having as a class issue and they try to like gloss over the racism, gloss over the system of white supremacy by redefining the conversation as about class. And I find that [crosstalk]. KIM: Well, it benefits whiteness to do that though, because then whiteness can extrapolate that race and talk about class. So this is why -- and I know you had another question, Chante -- but this is why white feminism is so detrimental, it's bullshit. And I've been doing these talks, when whiteness comes into a room, I don't care what your marginalization is. If [inaudible] whiteness, your marginalization is ignored. I've seen it with white trans women coming into black and brown spaces. I've seen it with white passing Jews. I see it with Buddha judge. No one cares that you're gay when you are a white man, 37 and [inaudible] it as the most intelligent person in this race. No, no, no, no, no, no. When you have the exact same basic qualifications as a Latinex and a black man -- REIN: Worse credentials. KIM: Well no, I said basic. REIN: Yep. KIM: We're talking about just bottom level. Let me break down white feminism to you and this is another gut check I had to do because when I really got it, it broke my heart. CHANTE: Please do, I can't wait to hear this. Go, go. KIM: I had a problem with white feminism in the first place because when whiteness is in the room, it centers itself and it only wants to talk about sameness. So, the first failing of white feminism is it wants to talk about gender only. And this is why you have turfs because they will only talk about the things we have the same. So if you don't have a womb and all that stuff, then you're not a woman. That's one of the things. That's a problem with that. And it tries to force women of color to only talk about those things we have the same. This is the patriarchy. Well, I'm going to tell you. When I walk out the house, I'm not afraid of the white patriarchy. It's the white cop that I'm afraid of. So you want to take out the race part, you want to take out anything that makes me different. And that erases me because the thing that makes me different is the thing that makes me me. So that's the first thing. And I thought that was bad enough. But when I broke down the second thing is, and I was having a conversation with my podcast with a guest and I almost started crying, is that whiteness does not see us as even human. So how in the hell can you advocate for me when you you will never see me as your equal. I am sub, I am an animal to you. I am a creature to you. This is why the Kamala thing has broken our heart because that's what we just saw. We saw white liberals, white progressives, mainstream media turn a brilliant woman regardless of what you believe in her politics, you treated her as if she is the mammy back in slavery, that she's there to take care and feed your babies, to take care of your household, but she better sit in the corner. She forgot her place. She's there for [inaudible] rape, but damn, did she say something about that rape. That's why this whole experience has been so painful. And you can kiss my ass about white feminism, any kind of feminism at this point. I have very, very strong issues about why women particularly, and I'm just going to stay in the tech space, but just in general, because white women literally [inaudible] white supremacy. CHANTE: It's relevant though to the tech space. KIM: Yes. CHANTE: It really is because if you go into the tech space and we see these different affinity groups that white feminist women are running, and I actually had the same exact issue I'm bumping into. I'm like, "Wait a minute, the language you're using and the things you're centering on, that's not jiving with me. You know what I'm saying? And so it's really hard for me to take your check when you want to do whatever with your inclusion thing, if that's what you're coming to me with. KIM: And white women are now the default diversity in tech. White women aren't diversity in tech. They have the ability to center whiteness. Again, when you center whiteness, your marginalization is erased. CHANTE: Here's my question as a segue into the technology space. So, what do we do now? I mean, the way you're breaking it down is so clear. You know what I mean? To me, there's no really arguing about this stuff. So, what are we supposed to do? KIM: [Chuckles] Okay, you hire me. This is when I'm talking about business. And this is another thing that was so funny when you said, people come up to me and just go in my mentions, these idiots think that this is my job. Like I spent all my time on Twitter for real. This is a strategy, dumb asses. I am a strategist. I go on Twitter, do my thing, and go soak in the tub, whatever. I'm not taking this personally. You mean absolutely nothing to me. I don't have to live with you. I don't have to communicate. I don't even know you. It may not even be who you are and some persona. The ones who are anonymous are just the greatest. They're just like, "Oh, your balls are so big. You just have to be anonymous." But that's a strategy. I need to scale what I do. So Twitter helps me scale what I do. I've tried different platforms, like LinkedIn is a waste of time. There's a bunch of dumb recruiters. Facebook doesn't work for me. Twitter is where I go to be informed. And so, that's how I get my customers. And what my end goal, my strategy is to change the hearts and minds of business leaders. So what I do is I work with Ti.to right now, the event platform that does ticketing for conferences. I've had a contract with them for all of 2019. And what I'm doing with them is helping them to see again that they didn't have a business, what they had was a scalable product or service. So we've gone in and we've done jobs, we've done all kinds of things that many of these companies who are doing this work don't have. And they write about it every two weeks. They do a blog post every two weeks because we want to scale this information. They're in Dublin, so I challenged them on a lot of things. There's a lot of people who think, "Oh, this is just a US issue.:" Nope, this is a whiteness issue. This is global. When you see Africans and Asians bleaching their skin, this is global. So my job is I'm going to let Amazon do what Amazon do. I'm going to let Microsoft do what Microsoft do. I'm gonna let Apple do, they're too big for me. Too many moving parts. I ain't got time for them. There's not enough money in the world for me to work with them people. But there are thousands upon thousands of small to medium sized business where the real innovation is happening where I can influence there. My goal this year has been to gain power and influence, so I can actually make meaningful, impactful change in tech. And it's happening. I have more white dudes in tech who are like, "Oh shit!" I didn't notice because again, everybody realized it was racism at 2016. Everybody's eyes woke up. We've been talking about this forever, but we post racial. And so, if you go on Twitter at any given day, there's somebody who is in the community talking about and breaking down what they did as a mistake, how I corrected it as an educator and what they're going to do next. This is how we do this. So I do it, I do it on the micro level, but the macro level is where it happens. All these folks, Uncle Bob, you could say whatever the hell you want to do. All you know how to do is code. That's it. CORALINE: He maybe isn't the greatest coder either. KIM: I didn't say great. I said all he knew how to do is code. I didn't say anything about how proficiency he was, because if he has the ideas that he has currently, he's not. He's causing active harm. And we're shifting. We're at the tipping point. And people like him and some other folks, they're not availing themselves, a black women like you and I to learn. And there is quickly coming a point where they will be obsolete and the fact that --because when I talk about this in organizational level, this is what my doctoral study is about. It is about learning organizations. We no longer live in an industrial age. We are not making widgets. This is an information age and you compete to have competitive advantage, you differentiate and you are innovative. If you can get that lived experience, information needs to go inside a person, they need to work with and have a lived experience and that becomes knowledge. If you cannot capture that knowledge, which is called tacit knowledge to scale within the organization, you have missed the boat. And this is why these individuals don't even realize they're obsolete and I just sit back and laugh. You can kick and scream all you want to. But when I'm talking to business leaders to get them to understand that people like us are helping your bottom line and people like them, are risk management issue, it's not even equal equation. So that's how I do it. So I just let them, because again, when they rant and rave on Twitter, what I do is screenshot. And so everybody gets to see, because like you said before, they don't believe our lived experience. So I want you to see them treat me like shit. You need to see that because for some reason whiteness needs to see my ass get beat up before they're like, "Oh, this shit is really happening." And this is another thing. So I have over 8,000 followers. I have as of yesterday, 22 monthly sponsors. I have two community sponsorships because I know my work cannot be sponsored by corporate America. I already know that because I ain't gonna shut my mouth. So I have community sponsors. They sponsor $100 a month so I can do this work. Out at 8,000 people, 22 people are monthly sponsors. Now, I know. I give you 50% who can't afford it because I don't want money from folks who can't afford it. That's why I have merchandise and all that other stuff. So they want to support. So that leaves 4,000 people. I know 4,000 people in this community. You know what? I'm going to say 2000. I know that there are 2000 people. You know what? I'm going to give you 100. I know that there are 100 people in the #causeascene community who learned something from me every fucking day who are not giving shit in return and they are parasites and voyeurs, and I have no use for you. CHANTE: Well damn! I heard it straight from her mouth. KIM: And it's not the first time. CHANTE: That could be another hashtag. [Laughs] KIM: I can say it all the time. If I could get 50 people to give me $100 a month, that's $5,000. I could pay my taxes, I could live and I can do this work. CHANTE: So here, let me ask you a question. When you said voyeurs and parasites, that's one of the things I struggle with. I kind of go back and forth like, "Do I really want to get on here on the stage?" This is what black folks have been doing for years is entertaining white folks. Why do I want to get on another stage, on Twitter, on whoever, and be the one doing the tricks? And then everyone's like, "Ooh, ah yeah, great." Then stealing behind my back and not giving me credit for it. And so, I struggle with that personally, especially in this technology space where I'm supposed to be creating content and all this stuff, which is great and everything for certain people who really do appreciate and will pay for it, but the vast majority will not. And I'm like, "Well, that's how I'm going to maybe get the voice out there, tell the message and kind of encapsulate the story." What am I supposed to do when it comes to telling the story, telling this narrative in this space and not becoming a token? KIM: One of the guiding principles at #causeascene is intention without strategy is chaos. You cannot do this work without a strategy. I know very clearly why the hell I'm on Twitter. I get business from being on Twitter. My fees right now for our consultation is $500 and they're going up in 2020. I couldn't make that kind of money as a teacher. So I recognize that, people are gonna steal and I get that, but you know what? I created a lane for myself. Well, I can call that shit out. And the one reason that I do it is because I recognize that I've set my life up so that I can say things that other people can't. So I don't speak for black women, but I speak on behalf of black women. So I need people to know how long it take us to write a goddamn email to your sensitive ass so that you don't get your feelings hurt and you still get your feelings hurt. So my thing is I'm damned if I do, damn if I don't. So I'm going to say what the hell I want to say. And everybody can't do that. I get it. And so I put myself, I make myself the target of a lot of shit, but I do that so that I can be free. I do that so I can be free. And so when I started this, when I started #causeascene in 2018, it was because I was pissed at that point. I was like, "You know, I just wouldn't want to just go fuck some shit up because I'm so sick of these lazy -- like you said, bringing me to conferences, want to do, want to have. We are not having coffee because you're trying to get free consulting. Not going to happen. No booboo. Somebody on LinkedIn the other day sent me a message talking about he has a co-worker who he asked who do they want to meet? Some white chick who is doing D&I who shouldn't be doing itwho she wants to meet. And she mentioned me. It's a strange question, "But would you be interested if I connected you and pay for lunch?" I said, "Oh thank you for reaching out. And yeah, I'd be interested once you pay my $500 an hour consultant fee." I don't do fucking lunch. I could pay my own lunch. REIN: Did you hear back from them? KIM: Hell, no. REIN: Did they pay you $500? [Laughter] KIM: I knew they weren't, but real clients do. I just booked a client for next week who gave me five after, because I vet the hell out of people. You're not wasting my time. So I vet the hell out of people and that's something you're going to have to do because people want to waste your time. And until somebody tells me, "Bitch, are you crazy," my prices keep going up. There was so much price asymmetry, we don't even know how much we're worth. CHANTE: Thank you. That's a whole nother conversation. KIM: Yes. People already told me my prices need to be double because I need to see myself as a -- you need to see yourself as how much was they pay for legal fee or legal advice? How much would they pay for tax advice? REIN: How much do CEOs make an hour? KIM: Exactly. CHANTE: Yeah, that's true. KIM: That's where my fees are about to align right up there with it. Again, like I said, I kept bringing that $8,000 to a hundred, I don't need a whole bunch of them. Just a few. REIN: If a CEO is making $10,000 an hour, you can make 600. Why not? KIM: Thank you. CORALINE: So Kim, I'm really curious about the work that you do with these organizations. You've talked a lot about how you start that relationship, how you vet them, how you lay out the issues in plain language that cannot be contradicted. How do you know when you're done? KIM: When they finish my six-step process. [Giggles] So, I created a six-step process of, and this is what Ti.to and all of my clients have gone through. When I'm doing a consultation, so the consultation that I have coming up, they're concerned because they're not getting diverse clients. Of course, you're not getting diverse clients. White folks think folks know you. We don't sit around trying to figure out who the hell you are. We don't know you. We've got to do some work. CORALINE: Can I clarify one thing, Kim? I don't mean your work is done. I don't mean the work is done. I mean, your work is done because that work is ongoing, right? KIM: Are you talking about globally? CORALINE: The work that the companies who hire you, they have more work to do once you're done with your part. I would just wanted to clarify that. I'm not saying you solve the problem of diversity and inclusivity. These companies, you've hopefully put them on a track where they know the hard work that they have to do ahead of them. KIM: The six-step process is first you imagine I have my clients and customers imagine what the ideal customer or client experience was. If there were no limitations, what would the ideal client experience is? And so from there we go to define. So now we need to define our core values. And then we need to apply, because what we do is take those core values which are very subjective and turn them into something that's measurable, which is very objective. And then we test those because now we have some measurement and then we evaluate the results of that. And then we standardize it. It's an iterative process, but none of them have any of this in place. So once I get all that, then it's time to move on. REIN: Kim, do you use Russell Ackoff's Idealized Design work in your work? KIM: Never heard of it. REIN: Cool. The 'imagine a world with no constraints, what would you do' sort of a thing is the start of his process as well. KIM: It's the start of a lot of -- so my doctoral study is rooted in a theory called learning organizations, which is much different from organizational learning. Learning organization is and this is why inclusion and diversity has to be the bedrock of your organization. Because this is an information knowledge economy. Everybody in that space must be learning. And this is why the Uncle Bobs are obsolete. This is why they don't, because it's not about sitting at a computer and coding. It is about having a relationship with every department so that you know that what you're coding aligns with what marketing is doing, aligns with what HR, who we need to bring in, all of those things. And this is why it's much simpler for me to talk about racism and white supremacy as a system because my research is rooted in systems thinking. It's not about these silos. I tell people all the time, they'll say, "Oh, my team is great, but yeah, my job sucks." Let your manager leave, your ass is gonna be in pain too. It's not about your team. We'd have to stop thinking in silos because as you said earlier with the fascia, we're systems. If you do something on one team, it impacts something on another team. Whether they communicate that or not, whether it happens instantaneously or not. And that was what my keynote at Node Interactive 2017 was about. It was about we need to stop thinking in silos and start thinking -- my thing is building learning organizations in an information economy. REIN: The other thing I think we need to stop doing is we need to stop assuming that things have simple causes. KIM: Oh, Lord have mercy. We need to stop looking for simple solutions to complex problems. Yes. REIN: Newton got us all fucked up on this one because in these systems we're working in, things happen and there's not an obvious equal and opposite reaction thing going on. Things happen in complex system as a result of all sorts of stuff going on all the time. KIM: But no, Newton didn't fuck us up. What we chose was to ignore quantum physics that came afterwards. This is why this shit gets where it is. People want to be stagnant in their learning in some things and then want to grab onto the newest thing. This is why we have this. I won't have an argument about the damn dictionary definition of racism. Social scientists have now defined racism beyond what Webster's has. So yes, Newton was right, whatever way he was was right, but quantum physics says there's multiple potentialities until you just focus on one thing. We don't want to talk about that. So to me, it's not throwing the baby out with the bath water, which is a Southern term, I'm sure cutting your nose off to spite your face. We got a lot of those. And this is why a learning organization is necessary in 21st century. You always have to be open to new information, evaluate that on what you know and make informed decisions from that. I'm not making widgets where there are a hundred of us on an assembly line and every widget must be the same because there's a million different things it needs to go into. A company, organizational leaders benefit from bringing me in and paying me well and treating me well because if I have the tacit knowledge in my head and I don't feel safe to communicate that to you, you have lost all of that. I am absolutely of no value to you. So I could care less about your coding skills because my lived experience should be informing your code. So it's no longer somebody with some headphones in the corner in the morning. We can't work like that. REIN: A thing happened in tech, and you mentioned this before, that we're not building businesses. We're just wrapping something around some code, and that's what we're trying to do. We think it's a product and we build, we wrap it in this thin skin of being a company. Startups are not businesses. KIM: First of all, the lean model canvas, I don't know why people use it. That is not a business. That is how you iterate a product or service, but we're using that as a business plan for some reason. REIN: The code is just one thing. It's just one artifact of all the stuff that goes on in making decisions about how you're going to evolve your business. And so, making the code like primary or central and how you think about this is doing a disservice to everything else that's going on. KIM: And that goes back to the whole what's technical and what's non technical, the Rockstar, the Ninja, the Unicorn, dah dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, ad nauseam. If all you can talk to me about is code, I have absolutely nothing to say to you. You are absolutely boring to me. REIN: Here's the hardest technical skill I've ever learned - facilitating learning retrospectives and one-on-one interviews. I have read so much. I have talked to so many people. I have practiced it so much and I'm still not great at it, but I'm better than people who just don't think that's a skill. KIM: Yup. CORALINE: I think one of the problems that we face as an industry, I don't want to speak to the rest of the world because I don't have that experience, but we want things to be simple. We want a one-line definition of a problem. We want a user story where we don't have to think about who the user really is. We just have to think about this interaction. We don't have to think about a person as a whole person. We want it to be simple. We want it to be boiled down and we don't want to be challenged. KIM: Yeah. You hit on that because we don't want to think about the ramifications of our decisions. Everything is you do it and there's no consequences. And that is as we know in the real world, everything has a consequence, good, bad or indifferent. I'm trying to bring up this document because it speaks to what you just said about learning this to do those reflections. I did a talk at Fluent and I challenged them. It was some things you need to be doing, like if you're a developer, you need to go sit with support so you can see the problems that your staff is making. It's about developing those -- first of all, let me read this. Skills for the 21st century are a complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence, judgment and decision making, service orientation, negotiation and cognitive flexibility. Nothing about coding. REIN: Where does this come from? KIM: It was Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum, and I can share that with you. REIN: It seems like a somewhat authoritative source. KIM: Yup. When you talk big goal of what I really want to do, what my bucket list is, it is to speak about economics at the World Economic Forum. That is my goal. Let's go to Davos, Switzerland and talk about this stuff. CHANTE: Let's make it happen. KIM: Yep. That's what I'm saying. [Chuckles] CHANTE: Yeah. I would love to see you on that stage and hear you on that stage. I need you on that stage. Absolutely. KIM: First of all, you have a whole bunch of rich people who come and talk about rich people issues. It's like, "Yeah. Okay." And I also don't like the term soft skills. I don't have soft skills. My skills are pretty hard. When you're having to deal with people all day, yeah, they're pretty hard. So, I did find it. I say the strategies for developing your other technical skills: seek opportunities to be part of a multi-disciplined team, seek opportunities to mentor and be mentors, seek feedback on skills other than programming, offer to write documentation, spend time working in the support department solving customers' problems, conduct lunch and learns for non-programming staff, participate in job shadowing and job swapping, socialize with non-programming staff in activities that do not involve alcohol, speak at tech conferences about things other than technology, and volunteer to teach programming to a group that is underrepresented and marginalized in tech. REIN: Can I just say that I really like calling these 'other technical skills' because I'm done with calling things soft skills. Soft skills is just a new way to call things unskilled labor. KIM: And so that you not pay me, but I'm doing that work plus more, yeah. REIN: And like we were talking about in an earlier podcast, a lot of the other technical work that people are doing that's not valued is being done by minoritized groups. It's being done by women, it's being done by black people. And it's the stuff that keeps the team together. It's the glue work, but it's not soft work. It's hard technical work. It's just not what you learn in a CS education. KIM: It is not technology. REIN: If you don't think that interviewing people is a technical skill, I dare you to go read Gary Klein's book on cognitive task analysis and then tell me that it's not a technical skill. KIM: Okay, let's be honest. Most of these people aren't interviewing. What they're doing is bringing in their friends and family. REIN: I don't mean interviewing like for a job. I mean an incident happened and you want to learn what happened. So you go talk to the people that were there. How do you do that in a way that you get people to recall as much as possible and explore as much as possible about what happened, that's a technical skill. KIM: And think about how many people though who, again I'm going to challenge, who actually care about that though because they don't care about the other perspectives that may be involved. So I tell people all the time, I tell people facts change, truth remains the same. And we see that with communism, with Germany, with fascism, hell in the South. If you just change the damn textbooks, facts change. That doesn't change the truth of what happened. And so when you have that you, -- so, I give this example of you're in a life drawing class. You have a human figure, a naked somebody in front of you, and they all in a circle. The truth is that you're all drawing a person. If I'm on the back end looking at a buttocks and I'm supposed to draw like an entire person, I can only imagine. I'll make assumptions about the parts that I can't see. Even if I'm just supposed to draw that back parts like you're talking about the muscles. Like the sides, I don't see the sides. What do they look like? There's a lot of assumptions going on. So this is the value and this is what pisses me off when people talk about bringing these people in, "They're under skilled," or whatever. My lived experience is so much more than your coding experience because I could provide a different perspective for you that you have not seen. I can tell you, and this is why one of the guiding principles at #causeascene is prioritize the most vulnerable, the most vulnerable, the canaries you keep throwing down the mine are telling you the problems. REIN: There's a term of art for this in complexity theory called bounded rationality, which says that my perspective, my awareness of a complex system is bounded. It's limited, necessarily. I can't know everything about a complex system. It's basically a law of nature. KIM: So, what you're speaking to again is why we need learning organizations and we need to be thinking at a systems level because then you bring people in who have other bounded things. This is why I never -- I used to use this as an example -- I never like the word competition or even the thought of competition. Let's say we throw out some Skittles, so you have competition. I don't like the red one, so they got to go. I don't like these, so they have to go. So by the time you end up, you end up with absolutely nothing awesome. Colors and flavors that don't nobody want. But that's what's left. Ain't nobody happy. Collaboration on the other hand is when you put all of them damn Skittles together, we can create something together and have some flavors and some experiences that we never could have had by themselves. REIN: Yeah. Let's say I like red Skittles and you like yellow Skittles because you're weird or whatever. KIM: Hey, watch it. [Laughter] REIN: I have a random assortment of Skittles so I don't want those yellow ones, they're gross. But you do because you're weird. But if I can't give them to you because we're competing, then we both lose. KIM: Yes, exactly. But I need you to zip that up because I'm not weird because I like yellow Skittles. [Laughter] REIN: You can agree to disagree. [Laughter] KIM: Yeah, but that's what's required. Again, all of this -- see I can always bring the conversation back. And that's what's required for work in the information age and the knowledge economy. If I feel that every time I open my mouth, I'm competing with someone or I'm going to be discounted, as you said, I got to bring all my credentials, have them on my back for you to even listen to me. But then in the meetings. I'm just going to shut up. I'm not going to say anything. REIN: The one thing I look for when I'm interviewing to hire is, "Can you demonstrate to me that you have an awareness of how systems work?" That's it. That's the whole thing. Because complex systems are recursive. They contain other complex systems. So, the code we're building is deployed into an environment that runs it and infrastructure that is complex. It lives inside a larger structure that includes all of our business goals and all of that stuff, our customers. That system is complex. That system lives inside an economy. The economy is complex and so on. KIM: So now you understand why I want to write my book! [Laughs] In our economy, capitalism was built to justify the enslavement of black Africans and annihilation of indigenous people and we exported that around the world. In Dr. Kendi's book, he talks about anti-racist, anti-capitalism. I want my thesis, or my hypothesis is I want to test, can we have anti-racist capitalism? I have no problem with capitalism. REIN: So this thing, I've been wanting to say something for like 30 minutes, but I haven't had a good opportunity. So you were talking about how socialist analysis privileges class and that is wrong and bad, but it's wrong even under a socialist analysis. Because let's take America, your thesis is that we need to separate capitalism from white supremacy, right? We need to have capitalism without white supremacy. It needs to be possible. KIM: Exactly. Because I was going to say separate it. No, I'm redefining it. REIN: No. Not like put the white supremacy over here. KIM: Yeah. But you need to be specific because you know these people would take that and run. So, I'm saying a new definition of how capitalism should [crosstalk]. REIN: I'm not saying Apartheid 2.0. No. I'm just saying that the reason that privileging class and the socialist analysis is wrong is because the material conditions in America are that [inaudible] there is no capitalism in America without white supremacy. And so there can be no analysis of class in America without an analysis of race, and vice versa. KIM: Yeah. That's the hypothesis I want to test. That's where I want to push myself and seeing what is out there. This is one reason why this president, when he was campaigning the first time, I was like, this is all about white people trying to maintain white supremacy because Cole ain't coming back and this does not make financial sense for Cole to come back. And the great example was the, it wasn't the Harley Davidson, even though they left, it was the Carrier company. He was saying they were going to go to Mexico and he was going to make them stay. And what he only did was delay them leaving because in our current economy of how we define capitalism, if you're a for-profit company, you are by legal as leadership of an organization are beholden to shareholder value. That is the only thing you can care about is increasing shareholder value by law. So if those shareholders figure out or decide that you stay in the US -- and that's another thing I want to digress here. I don't say America because that defaults to the US. We are part of the Americas. We are in the United States of America. There's a North, South and Central America. So to say that a company has to stay in the US when it is financially better for them to go for shareholder value only to go to another country, those shareholders will sue that leadership. So what is now you're seeing in companies, you see it in some B-Corps, you see it in L3Cs and I talk about it a lot. So it's shareholder value versus stakeholder value. I identify as four stakeholders and they go on the order of importance. People work for you. They need to be most important. Then you look at the people who partner with you. Then you look at people who buy from you and the people who invest in you as last. If all stakeholders are aligned with the core values and you see it all the time, you have a company and then you bring in a partner who has different core values and they've messed up your whole reputation because they've done something. This is the things we need to think about. So I think I see it, the beginnings of it there. I want to push that. I want to be explicit about saying an economy that is anti-racist and capitalism that is removed because again, our form of capitalism which we exported was built to justify slavery, free labor, and annihilation of indigenous people. That's how we defined it. Just like we're redefining terms every day. Every year, the dictionary puts new terms in there. And so, I want to be optimistic and say, "I think we can do this." If nothing else, I want to do the theory. And this is why, and I said this on a little break, is this is why I stay optimistic about tech. First of all, there are no real rules. People, you can start a tech business, they're barriers, but they're not barriers to a brick and mortar or starting a bank or the traditional businesses. They're not that kind of barriers. And we touch every industry. And once tech gets this right, every other industry has to follow suit, they're going to have to. So I see what happened to Kamala Harris at the highest levels. This country needed to see what black women had been telling, you just to be professional, just to show up to work. This is what we deal with. This is a text dealing with y'all asses on everyday basis. We need to see, and it's unfortunate, but we need to see how cruel our immigration policy could be. We need to see that. We need to see Facebook continually profiting off data while causing harm. We needed to see [inaudible] business leader who is not only buying places, but somebody on the board approve that. Then we work with rent out or lease the places that he bought. So he would not only get a salary with profit off that. We need to see that. CORALINE: Kim, I am so thankful for the work that you do. I have learned so much from the conversations that we've had, from the talks of yours that I've seen. I just want to thank you for the work that you do. I know that the strongest voices, the loudest voices in the room are the people who hate the work that you do, the people who hate you for who you are, the people who hate you for attacking the status quo. And I have so much admiration, respect for you. I want to thank you so much for the teaching that you brought us today, for your positive attitude and your endless optimism, which I did not understand where it comes from. KIM: I'm a black woman. CORALINE: [Laughs] Yeah. KIM: We are the moral compass of this country. If we don't do it, who will? CORALINE: I totally hear you. So, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been amazing. And I miss you, friend. KIM: Thank you. CHANTE: Well, that was hard to kind of follow up with. But what I'll say is, I just want to say in addition to the things I said earlier, I stand in solidarity with you. I really admire the voice that you're bringing to this, the fire in the belly. And again, everything you've touched on really just resonates inside of me. I'm so proud to see a strong black woman standing up. Sometimes you got to shout, sometimes got to scream, act a fool because that's what we've been left to. But to your point, I think we are the moral compass. And so again, in solidarity, I can't wait to meet you in person. KIM: [Chuckles] Also we're going to be angry black women anyway, so why not just lean into it? CHANTE: Okay. All right. REIN: Okay. One thing I was hoping we would do at the very beginning was what you said originally, which is throw out some definitions. I feel like we've sort of put all the pieces together for a definition of racism here. But one thing that I want to be really clear about is that racism is not when you don't like black people, it's not when you have a personal animus against someone based on their race. It's systematic. And that's where people get confused and why it's not enough to just not be racist. KIM: Okay. Give me just a second because I'm going to review. REIN: That's exactly what I want. What I want is Kim, the teacher, set the class for us here. What's the definition? I think people need to keep hearing this over and over again. KIM: All right, so these are not my definitions. These are just definitions that I took from people who have studied this. And this is another thing, we want to discount -- lay people who are white folks who were triggered by this, want to discount people who spend their lives researching these things. It just amazes me. REIN: I thought about it for 15 minutes and I don't agree. KIM: I'm just going to say how I have it in the slides. Racism equals race prejudice plus social and institutional power. Racism equals a system of advantage based on race. Racism is a system of oppression based on race. Racism equals a white supremacist system. Racism is different from race prejudice, hatred or discrimination. Racism involves one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institutional policies and practices of the society and by shaping the culturabilities and values that support those racist policies and practices. And that came from the website, DismantlingRacism.org/racism-defined. You can find that there. But from the book, so you want to talk about race. She has a very simple, she says simple ways to determine if something is about race. Number one, it is about race if a person of color thinks it's about race. It's about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. It's about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately and differently affect people of color. REIN: So, the first source that I'm aware of for this is Patricia Bidol from 1970 who defined racism as prejudice plus institutional power. And this was in a book called Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. If folks want to look it up, it's published on Verso. You can go buy it and read it. CORALINE: We are at our time. Thank you so much, Kim. I always learn from you and like I said, I really appreciate your spirit. I appreciate the fact that you're fighting it and the fact that you are leaning into being an angry black woman. I think people need to see that and I so appreciate the work that you do. Thank you. KIM: Thank you. CHANTE: Thank you, Kim. REIN: I love that people are challenged by you and that's on them. And that seeing how they work through that tells me a lot about who they are. KIM: Yes. I'll say this in closing, I'm no longer responsible for the feelings of white folks. It's time for you all to get therapy, not my issue. CORALINE: Perfect.