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One of Tech’s Few Black CEOs Says Technology Can Help Crack the Code to Racial Equality

The technology industry’s diversity problem is no secret anymore, but one Black CEO who has managed to break into the predominantly white industry says technology actually has the potential to encourage and promote racial equality.

Most of the concerns about the lack of Black people in the tech world deal with biased hiring practices and limited educational resources for Black students interested in tech, but Civic Eagle CEO Damola Ogundipe explained that the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley has even greater implications than one might initially think.

Ogundipe explained that technology, the same industry that has turned its back on Black entrepreneurs for years, could be a great tool to help advance discussions of racial inequality in America.

“What we can see is that technology improves connectivity on all levels,” he told Tech.co. “It allows us to connect across geographical locations and cultures, and it gives us even more opportunities to have honest and open conversations. Mobile technology can literally put the world at our fingertips; social media can make political movements grow like wildfire around the globe.”

That was certainly the case with movements like #BlackLivesMatter and the Atlanta-based #ItsBiggerThanYou rally that brought more than a 1,000 protesters into the streets in support of Michael Brown, the unarmed Ferguson, Missouri, teen who was gunned down by police officer Darren Wilson.

He added that, “Civic technology can provide us with opportunities to make improvements in the civic space and allow people to connect to movers and shakers of social causes, community organizations, legislation, policy-makers and political candidates — faster and more efficient than it ever has been.”

This power that technology potentially has to be a great weapon in the war against racial inequality makes it all the more disappointing that Black voices aren’t present in the industry.

Ogundipe explained that many aspiring Black tech entrepreneurs have ideas that are important for the entire world as well as their own communities, but they are shut out of the market because investors only tend to invest in the type of entrepreneurs that are familiar to them.

“Investors tend to invest based on patterns,” he said. “It helps mitigate risk and is completely logical and pragmatic. However, this presents difficulties for black leaders because the pattern of success has typically been a white male from a certain background with certain skills and experiences.”

Fortunately, there are some tech ideas, like Ogundipe’s own Civic Eagle, that are making it a point to help better facilitate much-needed conversations about racial inequality and the overall landscape of politics.

“The concept for Civil Eagle came from a feeling of frustration with the current civic environment,” he said. “There’s actually one specific moment that kind of pushed me to build Civic Eagle: I was flipping back and forth between news channels, trying to understand the Affordable Care Act, but instead I would get different — and purposefully biased — interpretations of a specific section of the bill.”

Civic Eagle helps strip away the bias so people can really figure out what’s going on inside their government. The app shares new pieces of legislation and allows users to create safe forums to host debates and reach their own decisions about policies.

Being better informed about new legislation can help the Black community really figure out who has been fighting for them politically and who has been hiding behind empty promises to push for the types of policies that could help address racial inequality.

 

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Black Pinterest Employee Recalls Silicon Valley’s Apathetic Response to Ferguson

Tech industry's apathetic response to Ferguson, Missouri

Ferguson? Who is that?

As one of the few Black employees in Silicon Valley and a part of the 1 percent of African-Americans who work at Pinterest, Justin Edmund was bothered by Silicon Valley’s response to what happened in Ferguson.

Ferguson is the name of the city in Missouri where unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer after the teen allegedly had his hands up to surrender.

As far as many of the people in Silicon Valley were concerned, however, Ferguson might as well have been the name of the happy-go-lucky elderly man who walks the streets of Atlanta handing out inspirational quotes to people as they walk by.

Edmund, who is a designer responsible for the look and feel of certain features on Pinterest, asked himself why nobody in the tech industry seemed bothered about the unrest that plagued Ferguson.

Even more troubling, he wondered why most people didn’t even know about it.

When one of Edmund’s co-workers lamented that the tech world didn’t care about Ferguson, another employee responded by saying, “I don’t even know who that is.”

According to an essay published by Edmund on Medium, there was only one reason why Silicon Valley seemed completely unaware of what happened in Ferguson.

“At most major technology companies, an average 2 percent of their workforce is African Americans – we’re talking tens of people at companies employing thousands of people,” he wrote. “At my own company, it’s even worse at only 1 percent. I can count us all on one hand.”

While Pinterest does have fewer Black employees, the company is also much smaller than tech giants like Facebook and Google.

He also pointed out that Pinterest has shown interest in working on increasing diversity, and several of his colleagues have pushed for such a cause.

Even then, however, he doesn’t feel any more comfortable about being a Black man in the tech industry — nonetheless a Black man in America.

“In today’s America, I could walk to the store right now and be shot dead in my tracks because of a misunderstanding, or perhaps for no reason at all,” he continued in the essay titled Growing Up. “There are people in the world that will never see past the color of my skin. Instead, they will shoot me dead for walking home from the corner store with Skittles and Arizona iced tea.”

The quote was a clear reference to the death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old unarmed Black teen in Florida who was fatally shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in 2012.

With so many racial tensions already plaguing the country as a whole, it’s even harder for Black tech employees like Edmund when they don’t see anyone who looks like them in their place of work.

“It’s hard to aspire to be something when you don’t see people in that role who look like you,” Edmund told USA Today.

It’s even harder to aspire to be those things when you don’t even have access to the type of education that would prepare you for that career.

Edmund acknowledged that he was quite privileged and didn’t face the same obstacles that other African-Americans face when it comes to entering the technology field.

“Having grown up in New York, I was fairly privileged, but there are lots and lots of people that, you know, weren’t as lucky as me that are probably extremely smart but didn’t realize that they can download a program and start making code and start building things,” he said.

Edmund also believes there needs to be more efforts to introduce younger students to computer science.

“Inspiring people when they are young and showing them like, ‘Hey, you like Vine? You like Instagram? Cool, you can actually work on those things if you start now and you work on these kinds of problems and you take this kind of path,’” Edmund said. “That kind of awareness will go a long way.”

 

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Could IBM’s Watson Get to the Bottom of the Issues in Ferguson?

IBM’s “cognitive supercomputer” is starting to get involved in law enforcement, and now there is speculation that the data-crunching device could get to the bottom of issues with law enforcements in Ferguson, Missouri, and other Black communities across the nation.

IBM’s supercomputer, better known as Watson, garnered a lot of attention after it soared to victory on the Jeopardy game show more than three years ago.

Since then, the computer has been used in matters pertaining to food science, customer service and helping veterans prepare for life after the military.

Now, authorities are hoping Watson can get more involved with police investigations like the shooting of Michael Brown, the unarmed teen who was fatally shot Aug. 9 by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

Police investigations very quickly lead to thousands upon thousands of pages of reports, statements and lab results that investigators have to sort through.

While this can be a lengthy process for a human and leave tons of room for someone to miss a connection, Watson has the potential to complete years of work in a matter of seconds.

“There may be something in lead No. 25 that doesn’t make sense until you get to lead No. 2,050,” Tucson, Arizona, chief of police Roberto Villasenor told Mashable.com “How is a human going to tie those things together? Cognitive computing can.”

While authorities hope to get Watson involved in their investigations, Villasenor made it clear that humans will still need to be very involved in checking out leads and checking Watson’s results.

“It cannot be a computer or a human analysis,” he said. “It has to be an ‘and.’ We say, ‘Watson said this – let’s go check it out.’ ”

The analytical power behind the supercomputer could allow it to get a deeper understanding of issues with police that are currently being debated in situations like Ferguson.

Many influential figures are launching national discussions to try to figure out how to solve law enforcement issues in urban communities that are leading to Black men being killed and aggressive police tactics being used.

This is where Villasenor believes Watson could help sort through the chaos in Ferguson.

“There are a lot of theories being thrown out in the news media,” he said. “Being able to trudge through all the information and data, and put out accurate information, as opposed to speculation or analysis based on speculation and supposed truth that’s being put out through third-party hearsay … You need to filter through that.”

As Mashable writer Pete Pachal pointed out, it isn’t fair to say that all the comments regarding Ferguson have been “third-party hearsay.”

“Most of the commentators on Ferguson cite some statistics or studies to support their point of view,” Pachal wrote.

The difference, however, is that Watson would be able to digest more relevant data, link relevant information and sort through more files than humans can alone.

With the issue of police militarization being prominent in the media, Watson can sort through all the records that reveal what type of equipment was sold to which police agencies and departments and how this equipment has been used so far.

By analyzing this information, Watson can clearly identify if different, more aggressive tactics are being used more often in Black, urban communities.

“There are mounds of information out there that we’re going to need help sorting through to help us not necessarily answer the question, but at least define the problem,” Villasenor added. “We need to get the data-driven information, and not go with anecdotal information because there’s a lot of emotion behind it. We need to try and get past the emotion and find the truth. It may be bad, but we need to find out what it is so we can adjust.”