Flippant remarks about “Career crossroads, culture and community” @webinista
I like the way Tiffany B. Brown coins and uses the word funemployment in “Career crossroads, culture and community.” On the heels of the mega-debacles around what happened to Adria Richards lately, Tiffany Brown (to me) approaches the same issue in a graceful, thoughtful, but-still-strongly-critical manner (as she always is online):
Developers are awfully fond of the word “community.” The word comes up again and again when discussing programming languages. We speak of a JavaScript community, a PHP community, or just generally, a developer community. But communities have norms and boundaries, usually unspoken. It’s those unspoken boundaries that I want to talk about.
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When I walk into a tech event, an interview, or any room full of strangers, I scan it for potential friends. People who match that pattern are the ones I feel most comfortable approaching. I even look and listen for signs: rainbow stickers on the laptop, Nike or Adidas high tops, or jokes that reference the music I listen to. When I don’t see people who match my pattern, I feel extremely out of place.
I think the same is true for most of us. And therein lies the problem, or my problem, anyway. Web developer communities often feel desperately homogeneous in terms of their culture.** Peppering a talk with Star Wars or punk music references is cool. But I’d feel more at home if there were more devs who could make Jay-Z jokes or catch my Drake references. I’m honestly not sure what to do about that. But I know it’s part of what keeps me from participating in these communities.
What I’m seeing here is Tiffany engaging in the 21st-century version of what bell hooks calls yearning. Tiffany is very likely to be the first developer of color to actually admit that she misses ‘her people’ (of all skin colors) because she has been locked up in these W2 labor camps mistakenly called “civilization.” It might actually help Tiffany to listen to bell hooks speak about community in “Connecting Self and Community” here in the kinté space.
There are several degrees of cultural isolation that I feel in the work place. Firstly, I approach this world as an artist trying to masquerade as a philistine “engineer”—I’m oversimplifying this because the separation of artist and scientist is another bunch of bullshit I’m not going to flip into right now. Secondly, I approach this workaday world from the point of view of an armchair architect: the so-called “design” of the entire city I supposedly “live” in sucks—so the very act of commuting to work is soul draining. After working IT for four months in the gardens of the Amgen, I now know from experience how uncomfortable it is to work in a typical office building—before it was just a general yearning…
From the sexist point of view (and I do have a sexist point of view), Tiffany is not “tough enough” to handle the isolation. Tiffany is actually openly, publically yearning to be a human being—which is why I feel she will be happily married for a long, long time. Most people (myself included) get into IT because of our anti-social skills—and I know what I am writing here makes me look retarded—but get some mufukkin education and see what it would have been like to grow up in South Central L.A. in my neighborhood as crack cocaine hit the streets in the 1980s. I took my Blackness straight out the ’hood and got a degree in physics with it—my Blackness does not come out of being “the only Black guy” in the all-white neighborhood. So being anti-social in a deathly sick society is actually a life-saver—and this is why I have been able to survive for so long in complete isolation pulling down paycheck after paycheck.
There are many implied “insults” in the previous paragraph. Let’s find some:
- Too many women depend on passive social relationships rather than their internal-life-force-being. No human being should learn to “live” with isolation. We need activists who are deliberately involved in building community. Remember there were women in the Black Panthers serving breakfast for children on their way to school. After murdering some of these women, the government copied this idea and started serving breakfast/lunch to children. Too many descendants of these women are leaving much to be desired. Real talk—not pimp talk, ladies…
- The culture of the workplace that I have experienced for the last two decades and counting is no replacement for or progressive improvement over what I grew up with as a child in South Central Los Angeles. Crack cocaine came in later to destroy this. I had real fun as a kid—some jokes and play from a 30-something, workplace “white-guy” (of any skin color) is talentless nothingness by comparison. To get a non-Black idea of what this feels like watch episodes of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and pretend that what they make fun of was actually meant to be taken seriously. You want a Tofutti Break with Grass Valley Greg?
- Were it not for me inheriting my mother’s strength—her ability to constructively isolate herself (along with my father’s tech skills)—I would be dead by now. Period. Notice how I have no white people to thank here… okay, okay—‘Thanks Police Chief Daryl Gates for not murdering me in cold blood although a few of your officers tried indirectly a couple of times, due to your Wagnerian policies.’
- Too many self-described “Black people” in technology aggressively avoid finding their Blackness in a technical context. Just like any devout racist, these tech folk assume that Blackness is about instinct, emotionalism and animal-like non-consciousness—decorative uselessness—while the rewards of Europeanized patriarchal intellect are both “realistic” and limitless. This is a recipe for Buster Brown mediocrity masquerading as “community of color”—one Star Trek Voyager episode after another…
- At bottom there is the anthropomorphic love for the technical field itself. Being with Thought in the field of study is like having a relationship in thought with another person—thousands of other persons. You can hear their voices when you study any technical subject close enough… You start to imagine what they were thinking—and the purity of the thought itself can be quite beautiful and enriching—far healthier than being in physical contact with the toxic “real” person. There are plenty of Jewish music lovers who can find something to love about the work of Wagner—while they would never want to meet Wagner in person. Black intellectuals can be just like that too…
I’m glad for Tiffany that she would actually expect to find happiness in a public workplace community of her peers. For her it seems just out of reach. For me, most of my peers were killed—as in killed dead. Many of them killed by the prison industrial complex… That sounds like a irresponsible joke to dumb-asses of all skin colors who are not students of American history—let alone Black history. On the contrary, bitch: Not all of the gangsta rap you heard was based on bullshit. Too few understand what Bob Marley meant when he sang “kill them before they grow…”
You see kids, what we have been thinking of as “technology” and “geek culture” is (to me) just like American music was before Black people started picking up military marching band instruments and turned them into “jazz”—which, by the way, is a word brothers like Miles Davis never used seriously. There is a Whole Other Level of soulful intellect waiting out there—waiting within… We should be yearning for that…