Google, VMware, Strava, Vimeo, AMC Networks, Chan Zuckerberg foundation among others have used Awaken workshops and training
America’s culture wars are already dominating the US election campaign.
Now Silicon Valley’s battle against entrenched racism in its workforce is fueling a lucrative niche business opportunity. A small army of anti-racism consultants are being hired to tackle entrenched bias at some of the world’s wealthiest companies.
"How has white supremacy culture shown up in yourself?" is among the uncomfortable questions being asked of staff at companies like Google and at the Zuckerberg Chan Initiative, the Facebook founder’s charitable organisation, which have brought in experts to address concerns about ingrained prejudice in the workplace.
Companies are increasingly appointing "diversity and inclusion" consultants who can advise executives, question whether they may have unwittingly participated in racist workplace habits and to act as a soundboard to discuss uncomfortable topics before they have to make public appearances before staff or in the media.
Such services, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, range from helping formulate a broad corporate strategy on institutional discrimination to leading workshops and teaching employees how to diplomatically correct a colleague when they say something offensive.
Michelle Kim is the founder of Awaken, which has worked with Google, VMware, Strava, Vimeo, AMC Networks, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and others. She says the firm has seen a 1,000pc increase in inquiries from potential customers this year, propelled by the surge of protests led by Black Lives Matter (BLM).
Of course, businesses in Silicon Valley and far beyond have for years invested in diversity and inclusion programmes to avoid costly lawsuits, employee disputes and improve hiring practices. But the recent focus on BLM is fueling a boom for a growing industry of experts who aim to point out racial bias and discrimination in even the most progressive workplaces populated by Millennials and Generation Zers.
Kim says fees for consultancy range from five figures to several hundred for a basic “lunch and learn” session. Her company focuses on tackling white prejudice head on. Other specialists like Paradigm offer workshops for the likes of Airbnb, Slack and Pinterest.
Star Wars actor John Boyega speaks to the crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest in London, as similar scenes could be seen across the US following the death of George Floyd
In a typical workshop, workers will be asked to share if they feel uncomfortable talking about white privilege and racial bias. Homework sheets tell workers to “reflect on your own anti-black racism and take accountability… educate yourself to avoid burdening your black colleagues and friends… [and] make recurring financial donations to local black nonprofit organisations”.
Kim says the dominance of white culture has become an “insidious” force within technology companies thanks to a dangerous cocktail of arrogant engineers, a presumption that Silicon Valley operates as a meritocracy, and the appetite of shareholders for growth above everything else.
This, she claims, has harmed marginalised groups directly: through hiring, pay and opportunities for promotion, but also indirectly by exacerbating existing societal gaps with the products they develop.
“There is this air of arrogance of thinking they have all the answers and that they will think they can figure it out without realising they might be harming communities that are already marginalised,” she says.
The widespread presumption that technology workers are largely liberal is another problem, she says.
“There is an unspoken assumption that everybody is progressive and there is a sense of workers being all knowing and that ‘we don’t have to go deep because we are not racist’ whereas insidious bias can actually be more harmful”.
Despite significant investments to improve diversity and culture, both Facebook and Google recently said they would impose stricter moderation on its internal messaging systems. Google workers say they have seen an increase in racist or abusive posts, often referencing Black Lives Matter, China and Covid-19 and the Hong Kong protests.
But there is already dispute among the consultants themselves about how best to approach workplace racism and sexism.
Matthew Yazzie, a consultant who helped set up Google’s Ethics and Compliance unit and ambassador to the United Nations’ Women’s Economic Empowerment Forum, says he disagrees with workshops that call out ‘white supremacy’.
"I get why people call it that but I think it is better suited for when we are talking about Swastikas and neo-Nazis in the workplace, not just someone complaining that their boss said something a little off colour. Was their head shaved? Were they holding a swastika? I tend to shy away from the polarising elements and while I understand there are notions of white supremacist behaviour that comes from a colonist mindset, you need context. You cannot just tell people to call their manager a Nazi in a group setting. That is never going to go well".
Tech companies that have backed Black Lives Matter
Kim appreciates that not everyone uses her method. She has walked away from clients who she believes were insincere, or who were using workshops with employees and diversity schemes for PR purposes.
“I think even saying the word white supremacy makes people feel incredibly uncomfortable and uneasy and the industry has not allowed for that level of honesty and candor until now,” she says.
“We have to use the words white supremacy so we can see white people grappling with the notion that they are complicit in creating these harmful systems”.
She frequently comes up against technology clients who believe singling out people for promotion or supporting workers based on their skin or gender is reverse discrimination and has faced employees who do not believe in the initiative. “We had one man sit down and say “well this is going to be a f******* waste of time” before we even began,” she said.
Michelle Kim founded diversity consultancy Awaken after working in the technology industry in Silicon Valley
Credit: Nelson Lau
Reverse discrimination became a hot topic when Google fired James Damore after he sent a memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” to colleagues in 2017. He used the ten page manifesto to argue that the differences in traits between men and women may explain why there isn’t equal representation within technology and leadership and therefore initiatives to promote women for being women were discriminatory, “unfair, divisive, and bad for business”.
“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes,” he wrote.
“When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”
Ironically, it was a diversity and inclusion effort internally that sparked the memo itself.
It is more challenging for corporations than it is for nimbler start-ups to foster an inclusive environment, with executives struggling to set the tone across the board when they have hundreds of thousands of employees on the books.
Some clients may be hiring hundreds of people in a single week. “I often get asked how it’s possible to shape culture if the company is doubling every second quarter,” Kim says.
To be silent is to be complicit.
Black lives matter.
We have a platform, and we have a duty to our Black members, employees, creators and talent to speak up.
— Netflix (@netflix) May 30, 2020
For example, Google hired 20,000 employees in 2019 and had been expecting to do the same in 2020 had it not been for the pandemic. Google’s workforce is 51.7pc white and 3.7pc black, according to its 2020 diversity report. Similarly, Amazon hired 96,700 people in just three months in 2019.
“That is the real challenge for technology companies; they have to prioritise speed, growth and expansion at all costs,” Kim says.
“I think a lot of people inside and outside of Google would agree they are not leading in diversity and inclusion." Google did not comment.
Often, technology companies will look for an outside consultant if they are dealing with a person who might have been attending marches or political events that make other employees feel uncomfortable. Yazzie will work with lawyers or human resources to come up with a legal way to "offboard", which is jargon for fire, an individual in a way that is less inflammatory.
"If you are a black person working with someone who has been seen on the front page of a newspaper protesting neo-Nazi points of views then you aren’t going to want to work there," he says.
Other clients might bring Yazzie in to help with exit interviews if they keep losing black employees and don’t have enough feedback to understand why.
Yazzie says employees with fringe, and often offensive political ideologies, find each other in Reddit threads and are pretty good at covering their tracks internally. One company, the name of which he declines to disclose, had its own Slack channel dedicated to involuntary celibates or incels, who tend to share misogynistic views.
"If people like James Damore were writing memos at Google, rest assured people are self organising at these companies and finding their communities."
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