Believing Underrepresented People

Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented In Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented In Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall. [inaudible 00:00:15].

Michelle Frechette:
Hi Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Hi Michelle.

Michelle Frechette:
I’d ask how you are, but I can hear you have a little cold.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, I got a little cold. That’s okay. I’ll sip on my tea and I’ll be all right.

Michelle Frechette:
Well, I hope it’s a little one.

Allie Nimmons:
It’s not too bad. It’s not COVID. I took a test, which that’s just going to be the normal thing now. It’s like, oh, I’m sick. I should take a COVID test, huh?

Michelle Frechette:
After Word Camp Rochester. I was very wheezy the next day, and so I thought, oh no, this is how it starts. So I waited a day, gave myself an opportunity to see what was going to happen, and I woke up the next day and it was still that way. So I took a COVID test, it’s negative. It turns out I’m allergic to pecans. And so I was eating butter tarts that somebody actually brought me from Canada and I ate them one a day and was still wheezing. And then when I stopped eating those, it got better. And I knew I was allergic to walnuts, but now I know I can’t eat pecans either. [inaudible 00:01:22].

Allie Nimmons:
Interesting. I didn’t know you were allergic to walnuts.

Michelle Frechette:
If it looks like a brain, I can’t eat it apparently.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s so interesting. I wonder, I know that some allergies present themselves at various points in your life, right? You’re not born with it, which just terrifies me because like, okay, cool. One day I’m just going to be allergic to something and not know.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I’m breathing much better, which is good news.

Allie Nimmons:
Good.

Michelle Frechette:
Anyway, it’s good to see you.

Allie Nimmons:
You too. I’ll try not to cough too. I’ll try and mute myself when I have to cough.

Michelle Frechette:
Okay, no worries.

Allie Nimmons:
So you don’t have to hear me. But yeah, today I wanted to, so I’ve been doing a lot more formal reading and self-education about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. And I’ve been reading this book called, So You Want to Talk About Race? And it’s written by a black woman, and it is mostly for non people of color to read to understand better how to have conversations around race as allies. And it’s a really interesting book to read from that perspective because this just teaches me how to be a better ally to other people. And how to explain these concepts to other people in ways that make a lot of sense. And most of everything she says in this book I really agree with. It’s an incredible book. But she said one thing that I’ve been thinking about nonstop since I’ve read that chapter, and I think that this can apply to lots of other underrepresented communities and not just black people.
But in the book she talks about how sometimes when we are having a hard conversation, you might hear someone say, “Well, this isn’t about race. Why do you have to bring race into it?” Or “Why do you have to bring gender into it? Why do you have to bring being disabled into it? It’s not about that.” And what she says is if the person in the room who is underrepresented says this is about race or this is about gender, then it is because their experience is coloring that situation in a way that the other person might not understand. And the example that she uses is how once she was followed around a store by an employee, which happens to black people because people assume that we are going to steal more than other types of people. And so employees might keep an extra eye on the black person who just walked into the store to make sure they’re not going to steal anything.
So she was followed around the store by an employee and it made her really uncomfortable and it made her really upset. And she says that maybe that employee, it was their first day and they were just really eager and they really wanted to make sure that they kept an eye on everything. Or maybe that store had had a huge rash of shoplifting recently and so they’re extra vigilant about everyone who comes in. But the fact of the matter is that black people are more highly scrutinized for things like that, and it’s more highly assumed that they’re going to commit a crime than white people. So either that store clerk was aware of that fact and followed her around anyway and was dismissive of the fact that it would be a more pleasant experience for her than it might be for someone else.
Or they were so privileged that they didn’t think about that and just did it anyway or weren’t aware of that as a social norm because of their privilege. In both cases, there is a racial issue here that we have to discuss either that this person is being really insensitive or that this person is so privileged that they’re not aware of their racial insensitivity. And I think that concept is really interesting because while I agree with her, and I was telling you this Michelle, before the podcast, recently, there was an instance where a black singer marched into a target with a bunch of her backup dancers and they were trying to shoot a music video in the middle of the Target.

Michelle Frechette:
There were like 12 people. We’re not talking one or two people. It was a big entourage.

Allie Nimmons:
A lot of people doing choreographed dances in the middle of an aisle, a main aisle in a Target. And a white male employee was like, “Y’all got to get the heck up out of here. You can’t be doing this.” And she cried racism all day long, like, “Oh, that guy was being so racist” and blah, blah, blah. I think that race had nothing to do with that. Not even a little bit. Maybe that guy was racist, I don’t know, but you can’t do stuff like that. And if somebody in private property asks you to leave and you don’t, I’m pretty sure you’re breaking the law. So you can’t break the law. Yeah. You can’t break the law and then be like, well, I got in trouble because they were racist. That doesn’t jive.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. Have you seen huge groups of white girls dancing and being allowed to finish and then you got kicked out?

Allie Nimmons:
Right.

Michelle Frechette:
Right, exactly. And you know what? Every time when you were talking before, and now, both times we talked about this in the last 15 minutes, the word “race card” comes to me. You hear people say, “Oh, they’re playing the race card.” I think there’s a huge difference between standing up for yourself and your rights and playing the race card. So in the situation where it’s clearly obvious that somebody is targeting you, you’re being followed, you’re being accused, whatever. That is standing up for yourself and your rights. Doing something illegal and then crying, “It’s because I’m black.” That I would say is when somebody can actually accuse you of playing the race card because you’re now trying to turn the wrongness, I can’t think of the right word to say. You’re trying to make it be the other person’s fault for doing something that you shouldn’t have been doing.

Allie Nimmons:
Right. And it’s interesting in both of those situations, the being followed around the store, I don’t want to be followed around the store. I want to be treated the same way as everyone else…

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
Who were not being followed around the store. The girl dancing in the target, like you said, pretty sure there was nobody else dancing in the target, so she didn’t want to be treated the same as everyone else. She wanted to be allowed to do something that she wasn’t supposed to be doing. And when that was taken away, she brought in the race card and I feel like you can draw the woman card and say, “Well, I want special preferential treatment because I’m a woman.” And that’s very different than saying, “Please don’t talk over me in a meeting.”

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
And somebody saying, “Well, you’re playing the woman card.” It’s like, no, I want to be treated the same as you would treat any other person who is not black, who is not a woman, who is blah, blah, blah.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s like when I get those DMs we’ve talked about, I get them all the time, and they’re like, “You’re so beautiful.” And I’m like, oh, would you say that to a man that you were messaging on Twitter? No, you would not. So why would you say that to me? It has nothing to do with gender or sex at all. It’s just treat people the same in situations like that. Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette:
There was a… I’m sorry, go ahead.

Allie Nimmons:
No, you go because I need to cough anyway.

Michelle Frechette:
Okay. I saw a TikTok recently, which when you talked about following around the store, I have two stories with that. The first one is my daughter has been followed in stores before and she was the only person being followed in a store where there was more than one person in the store. So they weren’t following everybody, they were following her and that made her feel icky. And part of her wanted to go up there and pay for five pairs of shoes to show them. But the other part was like, why would I give this place money if they’re treating me like this? So what do you do in that situation? But she also didn’t want to cause a big issue and get trespassed from the store either. And she was much younger then, so she’s an older… She’s not older, she’s your age. But she was in her early twenties when that happened and she didn’t know how to handle that other than to just forget it, I’m out of here, kind of thing.
But recently, and I saw it on TikTok and I just looked it up so that we could include it in the show notes, is there was a story of a black man and his family at the museum and his children were behaved. It wasn’t like they were running amuck and people thought that they were going to knock things over, whatever. And a museum employee started following them from room to room and he turned on his phone and he turned to the employee and he’s like, “Are you going to follow me everywhere?” And the guy just wouldn’t even hardly respond to him or anything like that. So you could look at the story later, but it was exactly what you’re talking about. They weren’t following other families, they weren’t following other people. They were following the black man with his kids. And so yeah, what do you do in that situation?

Allie Nimmons:
I really don’t know. And it’s so dangerous now, it’s hard to stand up for yourself sometimes because you don’t know if somebody is going to respond in a way that is violent. In this particular story, I don’t have kids, but I would imagine if I was somewhere with my kids, I would be even more scared of how I’m going to react because I don’t want my kids to get hurt. I don’t want to put my kids through that type of intense situation where they feel like somebody is attacking them. I don’t want them to see you get upset and heated.

Michelle Frechette:
You don’t want to put your children in a case where somebody’s going to get harmed because we all know that just being black means that you are a target of physical confrontation more than somebody who is white every day of the year. And so you also have to worry about your physical safety and that of your children as well.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, that’s so scary. That’s so terrifying.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
It brings me back to when people decide to say, “Well, it’s not about race. I wasn’t trying to make it about race. I’m not being racist. It’s policy”, or whatever. And I would just really, if there’s anyone who is listening who has said that before, who has been accused of doing or saying something racist or sexist or ableist, and you’ve said, “That wasn’t my intention and so you’re wrong”, think back on that situation and realize that your intention is not the same as an effect. If there is an effect, it still hurts that other person. Another really great thing that this woman talks about in this book, she’s talking about microaggressions and this comes into intent. She’s talking about microaggressions and she’s like, if you’re walking down the sidewalk and every couple of minutes when somebody passes you by, they punch you in the arm.
And it’s not every person, and it’s not every time, but just every once in a while you get punched in the arm and you don’t know when it’s going to come. You don’t know why it’s happening. You can’t stop it. You can only keep walking forward and keep getting punched in the arm. And then one person comes by and maybe they’re talking on the phone and they’re using their arms and gesticulating wildly and they hit you by accident, and that’s the last straw. And you blow up at them and you scream and you yell at them and they go, “Well, that wasn’t my intention. It was an accident.” It doesn’t matter. You still got hit. You still got hurt. It’s a hurt that’s been building for all of this time.
And even if that person says, it’s my God-given right to walk down the street and wave my arms around, it doesn’t remove the fact that they hurt you. And it also doesn’t remove the fact that if they decide to do that again, any other time in the future that that happens, they can’t say it was an accident. And that made me think a lot about intention and how we really like to say, “Well, that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t mean to”, and somehow that removes not even necessarily blame, but that removes responsibility or that removes involvement and it’s just not true.

Michelle Frechette:
The phrase…

Allie Nimmons:
We should care about the fact that we hurt somebody, whether or not we meant to.

Michelle Frechette:
It makes me think of a couple different phrases too, like the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s all those little things that add up. If you start to put one piece of hay on a camel’s back, they don’t even notice 10, 15, 20, but you put a bale of hay and they’re like, “Whoa, that’s a lot.” And you just keep adding it at some point. That last little tiny, tiny weight is what just causes them to crush. And the whole phrase like death by a thousand paper cuts, one paper cut, two paper cuts at some point you’re bleeding so much that that last one is what did it in. So it doesn’t matter that you weren’t the person that caused all 1500 other paper cuts. You added one that caused the end or that caused the person to break or whatever the right phrase is. But it was the point of we can’t take it anymore kind of thing. You’re muted.

Allie Nimmons:
My bad. Everyone deserves to be believed. If I tell you, “Hey, what you just did was the last straw, what you just did was the last paper cut”, you don’t get to tell me no, you don’t get to tell me that it’s not so bad or whatever because you don’t have the experience that I have. And I think it scares people to think that their experience as a person is not complete. The things that we know to be true are always going to be incomplete because there’s always going to be people who have different experiences than us.
And I think that’s a huge thing for allies, that’s like a third eye-opening moment of as an ally of my experience is never going to be complete. There’s always more that I can learn. And if I hurt someone the best and really only thing I can do in that situation is to apologize and figure out how I can make it better. Do I need to get you a bandaid? Do I need to just remove my spell from your space? What do I need to do to make it better? Because can you imagine a child comes up to you and says, “I fell and scraped my knee”, and you tell them, “No, you didn’t.” That’s not going to make their knee hurt any less.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. There are a lot of ways to react. And so if somebody says to you, “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back”, or they don’t have to say that, but it just is and they respond to you in a way that makes you like, what did I do? There are ways that you can respond. The one is to say, “No, you didn’t. No, I didn’t.” And just be obstinate. Another one is to say, “I’m sorry, but…” and then make an excuse. Another one is to say, “I’m sorry”, and explain, which is not the same as making an excuse, right? Or “I’m sorry”, explain. And how can I make it better? And the last one is the one that we should be seeking to do when we harm somebody intentionally or otherwise.

Allie Nimmons:
And what I’d even add to that is, I’m sorry, explain. Can I make it better by offering solutions? That’s something that I’ve learned from you. I think when I came to stay with you at a certain point, maybe it was even before that, but I remember what you were telling me, it’s less helpful when people say, “What can I do for you? What can I do to help? What can I do to help?” But it’s more helpful when they say, “Can I do this?” And you have every right or every ability to say, “No, I’d rather do that, or I can do that on my own. But this is something that you can do.”

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
And I think it extends to if you accidentally, unintentionally hurt someone, it’s so much more proactive to say, “I’m sorry, it wasn’t my intention. This is why it happened. Can we have a conversation about it? Would you like me to just leave you alone? Can we talk about it later?” Show that you actually give a crap and that you know there are solutions to be found because then we start talking about, we’ve talked about this before, putting the impetus on the hurt person, the marginalized person to solve the problem. Asking “What can I do to help?” is definitely a good start. I’m not saying don’t ever do that.

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
But it is doubly helpful to try to think of what can you do and offer that as a solution.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
Give that person the ability to accept or deny the help.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep.

Allie Nimmons:
Give them the power.

Michelle Frechette:
Really good point. Absolutely. Absolutely. I am, and this is actually good advice, regardless of how you’re hurting somebody, whether they’re a marginalized person or not. So if you’re the person that just puts somebody over the edge, no matter what it is, that’s always good, right? So what you just said. So for example, my dad passed away last year and people who said, “Let me know if you need anything.” It didn’t matter that I was disabled or not, or a woman or not or any of that. That’s nice. But the people that said, “I’m coming over Friday night, I’m bringing dinner and wine, and I want to hear you talk about your dad”, that’s different. That was way different. And I could say, “Oh, Friday won’t work for me”, or “I’m not ready right now.” That kind of thing but it was action as opposed to “Let me know if you need anything.” I’m never going to call you. Right?

Allie Nimmons:
Yes.

Michelle Frechette:
I’m never calling you. Exactly. You also made me think about the conversation about taking credit for somebody else’s work, whether it really was or wasn’t or that kind of thing. And we should make this a sticker. Okay, so I’ll send you what I’m about to say. I wrote it down. If you want to get something done, make a white man think it was his idea.

Allie Nimmons:
Damn.

Michelle Frechette:
Because I have worked places before, specifically when I was running a massage school, that I had ideas for ways that we could market, ways that we could improve, and none of them were ever good enough. But weeks down the road, man, that owner would re-come up with that idea, slightly change a little bit. He had the best ideas a week or two after I gave him the ideas.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
And I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen something along those lines, right? So yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
That sucks. And that’s another instance where if you point out that as a pattern, somebody could say, “Well, you’re bringing gender into it. Gender has nothing to do with it”, but women, that constantly happens to us. We’re constantly…

Michelle Frechette:
All the time.

Allie Nimmons:
Talked over. We’re constantly ignored. Our ideas are constantly… Our credit is taken. And so the person who says, “It’s not about gender” either knows that it’s about gender and is dismissing your feelings or is so wrapped up in their own sense of privilege that they can’t see that it is about gender. So it is about gender.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep. Absolutely. I just texted that to you, so we’d have that for later.

Allie Nimmons:
Nice.

Michelle Frechette:
For sure. Switching gears a little bit, but this episode will come out in the next couple of days, but by the time we record our next episode, our first webinar will have launched because that’s next Wednesday. So let’s talk a little bit about that webinar series. You got the schedule up in front of you, maybe? I know The first one is Black Men in Tech, and I was incredibly privileged to speak with three men who I think are just rock stars in the tech community and listened to and asked questions about what their experiences are as black men in the tech community. And I’m just so excited for their voices to be heard starting next Wednesday. Do you have the rest of the schedule in front of you? We can talk a little bit about those different episodes.

Allie Nimmons:
Yes, I do. Well, they’re going up on a weekly basis.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. So they’re going up every Wednesday on our YouTube channel. The first one is focusing on black men, like you said. And you know what? I’m going to put a little clip of that show in right now.

Michelle Frechette:
So the first question I have is, what do you wish people knew or understood about what it is like to be a black man in tech?

Speaker 3:
So often I am the only black person in the room, and sometimes, like you alluded to, Michelle, I’m the only black man in the room, so I often feel the pressure that I’m representing more than just me. And I don’t like feeling that pressure. It’s not a pressure that I welcome. Sometimes I get asked to represent other black people. So I was at one job and they wanted me to review some wording on a website or something like that, and they asked me to review it to make sure they weren’t tripping over any words that would maybe offend people, that it was attractive to black people. And I had to tell my manager, “I don’t do that.”
I don’t know what they want to see. And I told her, “I’m not captain of the blacks. I don’t know.” There are people who have the ears to the ground. They’re trained, they know, they know what you should say, and they could give help. They cost a lot of money. You can go hire that person. I do not know what other black people want, and you shouldn’t judge other black people based on me. I have this sinking feeling that if a black man before me did something or did something wrong, it seems to have an impression on me. And I have the fear that if I do something wrong, if I flub in some way, it’s going to play in their minds to the next black person coming along.

Allie Nimmons:
That was the clip. And so then the next one, the 18th of October, Naesha Green is speaking to three people who have disabilities that work in tech. The 25th of October, I spoke with three non-coder, non-developer, non-software engineers who work in tech. November 1st, Naesha spoke with three people who work in tech. November 8th, Michelle spoke with three non-native English speakers. That’s probably my favorite, if I’m honest. That was one of my favorite ones.

Michelle Frechette:
That was a good conversation.

Allie Nimmons:
That was one I was really, really curious about, and I really wanted us to do that topic. And then November 15th is going to be three people under the age of 25 years old, and that one had the added… “Benefit”, is that the right word? The added… So all three people that I spoke to are WordPress Nepo babies, who their parents got them started in WordPress. So we had a conversation about that as well, of being someone who has had the privilege of being injected into a community and having opportunities that are a little bit more readily accessible to them, but then also the need to break out of that mold or out of that expectation.
So, “well, I’m not just XYZ’s kid. I can stand on my own two feet as a professional” and blah, blah, blah. That went into a direction I didn’t know it was going to go in. But yeah, if you go to underrepresentedintech.com/webinars, we have information about the sponsors, the episodes, the panelists, all kinds of good stuff. And yeah, I’ll make sure to put links to all of that in the description show notes.

Michelle Frechette:
Fantastic. I am just super excited about this. I love this idea. I don’t remember which one of us came up with the idea if we just rolled it into conversation.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s mostly your idea.

Michelle Frechette:
I honestly didn’t remember, but I love how we worked through it together, how we brought Naesha in to help us with it and how the community supported it with the sponsorships that we got. So yeah, I’m just super excited about all of it.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, me too. I’m stoked. The first one, even though I sounded super surprised, I don’t want to make you panic, that first episode, it’s edited, it’s done. It’s actually uploaded as a draft into YouTube right now. It’s all ready.

Michelle Frechette:
Yay.

Allie Nimmons:
And I’ve been slowly working on editing all the other ones and making them look and sound really great. And yeah, I put a lot, I’ve been working really hard on editing these episodes. I’m really proud of myself.

Michelle Frechette:
I appreciate that. I’m proud of you too.

Allie Nimmons:
Thank you.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
All right. Well, we’ll leave you all with that. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
Go to our sticker shop because we got some good stickers in there too. So if you’re interested, underrepresentedintech.com/shop.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s right.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep. You can see all the fun things that we’ve been doing. Allie’s been doing some really hard work, and I appreciate all that you do for us, Allie. Thank you.

Allie Nimmons:
Wonderful.

Michelle Frechette:
Anyway, we’ll see everybody sometime next week, on our next episode.

Allie Nimmons:
Bye.

Michelle Frechette:
Bye.

Allie Nimmons:
This episode was sponsored by the following companies, the Blog Smith. The Blog Smith is a holistic content marketing agency for B2B technology brands that creates data-driven content with a great reader experience. Visit theblogsmith.com to learn more. Thank you so much to our sponsors for this episode. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode using our database, or just want to say hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.