 This is usually a 45 minute talk. I will do my best. I wanna make sure that this is worth your time. And so, whoops, I'm gonna go back. Okay, so this is the Expanding Your Empathy talk and I'm Caronda Adair and these are some places you can find me on the internet. And I just wanna thank the organizers for inviting me and all the previous speakers. I don't think I've ever had a better setup for this talk than the speakers that have come before me today. And especially wanna thank Caroline for writing a talk that I think was written personally to me, I'm pretty sure, about burnout and busyness and overwork. So, content warnings for this talk. I'm gonna be talking about a lot of the crap that marginalized people put up with every day. So that includes pretty much any ism, any phobia, any misogyny, and Anita Sarkeesian's Twitter mentions. And police violence against black people and a couple of images but no dead bodies. So basically if you've watched the news recently or God forbid you follow the RNC convention or you're a marginalized person who uses Twitter, you probably won't see anything super new. Although this has been covered throughout the day, I wanna do just a quick talk about terms so derailing, basically not all, like when we're trying to focus on an issue of someone being harmed, derailing by focusing on another issue or basically trying to defend your group because you feel under attack, that's no good. Tone policing, which is basically like, you know, if you just weren't so angry, like you would have more people on your side. It's focusing on the way a message is delivered rather than the content of the message and the issue that we're trying to talk about. And also there's my obligatory cat slide, those are my voice. And mansplaining, which I think is pretty much summed up here, but you can go and see more examples at mansplain.tumblr.com. And this conference is called open source and feelings, not open source and facts. So that will be, that will be reflected in the focus of my talk. I'm not going to be citing any scientific studies or talking a lot about facts. Okay, oh and the last thing I want to talk about is Kevin. Kevin is basically an amalgam, a shorthand for talking about sort of the default most privileged members of society. And Kevin is not any of the folks who have been involved in this, is not any of the following. He's not gay, poor, an immigrant, black, Asian, disabled, unhealthy. He doesn't have to struggle with being different and he just fits in by virtue of his birth. So when I refer to Kevin, just, that's kind of the overall picture that I want you to have in your head. And this comes from this amazing article which you can find on medium seven leadership lessons for minorities and everyone else and I highly encourage you to read it. I'm pretty sure you can find it on my Twitter feed from the last hour. Okay, so what are we talking about when we talk about empathy? It's the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And somebody asked me or one of the other ways I describe it is just like giving a shit about somebody besides yourself. And I think every time we try to make progress in society there's always a lot of pushback and I think that one of the reasons that I'm just gonna call him Voldemort is so dangerous. I think you know who I mean. Is that he basically preaches the opposite of empathy, preaches apathy. And not only that, but they're proud of it. It gives other people permission to not give a shit about anybody else and to shout to the world about it. And so someone asked me if I was excited about giving this talk today and that's not one of the feeling words I would have chosen, especially if you've been asked me a week ago. But one of the things that happened recently is that I had a chance to go to talk by this woman, Isabel Wilkerson. Does anybody know of her or read this book? Okay, I have not heard of her or this book either before, well, a few weeks ago. So I went to this talk two nights ago and she is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and she wrote this book, The Warmth of Other Sons. And the book is about the Great Migration which is a period of time, a decades long period of time when almost half the black population of the United States left the south and migrated elsewhere, migrated north and to the west coast and to the northwest. And it's one of the most under-reported, underwritten about like a major events of our history. And so she wrote this book and she spent some time on Wednesday speaking about this book. And it was really great timing for me because I was kind of dreading, like I wasn't super excited. And I'll just say, I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I'm gonna tell you guys some things that I don't usually say to a large room full of white people. So can I just tell you some stuff up front? So the last two years have been really, really hard for being a black person in this country. And the last time I gave this talk was about two years ago. And so Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had recently been murdered. And I wore, I actually wore a hoodie on stage while I was giving the talk. And I talked about just sort of waking up every day with the knowledge that I could just be snuffed out for going about my day. And that takes a toll on you. So these are some of the feeling words that I would probably use about just having lived through the last little while. And maybe things aren't worse, maybe we just know more about what's happening. But on any given day when I wake up and I look at social media, there's a better than even chance that I'm gonna see a hashtag. And that's gonna be the name of someone who was killed because they looked like me. And that's a lot to go through every day. So I wasn't really feeling that great. And I've been really feeling like I really don't wanna be in spaces where I don't know if it's safe. So if I get invited to, Nicole talked about being invited to the party. So if I decide I wanna go to a meetup or a conference or some sort of mainstream majority space, I really have to think hard about am I, do I wanna deal with white people today? I mean, I have to deal with white people every day cause I married a white person, but. But do I wanna go to a space where I don't know who's gonna be there and if it's gonna be safe and do I wanna deal with that because there's a better than even chance that somebody's gonna, that I'm gonna experience some kind of microaggression or worse. And so I remember I had had a period of time where I had been home alone with the cats for a while and I decided to go to the WordPress meetup. And so this dialogue is going on in my head as I'm making my way down to this WordPress meetup. And the one part of me saying like, oh, stop being so pessimistic. Like, people are basically good, be open. And so I went to the meetup and then afterwards we were talking as you do and a guy said, oh, where are you from? And I said, I'm from Portland. And he said, oh, but where are you really from? And so, you know, I did all this work convincing myself to go to the party and then I was bummed that I went. So that is the state in which I went to this talk to hear Isabel basically just kind of feeling like, eh, rat, people, like whatever. I'm not saying this was an OH that I said but I'm not not saying it. So I went to this talk and it was really impactful for me and I wanna share a few of the things that she talked about in that. And the first one is this. It takes courage and vulnerability to have empathy for other people. Empathy is not pity. It's not feeling bad or feeling sorry for someone. It is actually being willing to try to take on what someone else is going through and figure out, you know, not what you would do in their situation from your place of privilege, from your set of experiences, but how it feels for them to be going through whatever they're going through. And that is hard. It's a lot of work and there's kind of a limit to how much you can do it. And really, we're kind of better at having empathy for animals than we are for people. This was a story about a 10 year old boy who rescued a cat who was being tortured by some other boys and ran over with his bicycle and all this stuff. And so in this story, in the comments, which you should never read, but in the comments, the comments were all about how great the boy was who rescued the kitten and how awful the boys were who tortured the kitten and what was not found in the comments were comments wondering what the cat had done to deserve it, if the cat had asked for it, what the cat was wearing. There weren't comments blaming male hormones on the behavior of the torturers and no one accused the cat of playing the cat card and trying to make everything about cats. So I saw this movie, I feel like I'm probably the only person in this room who's seen this movie. It came out in 1982 when I was 11 and it was called White Dog. And the premise of this movie is that this dog had been literally trained to kill black people and a black dog trainer takes this dog and tries to rehabilitate it. And I think that for some reason, I couldn't tell you a lot of the details of this movie. It always stuck in my head though, probably because I really love dogs and I really love German shepherds and I was 11. But the point that I wanna make is that if you encountered something like this, yes, the dog is dangerous and you're not gonna approach the dog but you're probably gonna understand that this dog has literally been tortured its whole life to make it feel how to make it behave the way that it's behaving and that context is important. And so you need to bring that context to the other humans that you deal with every day. So if you're willing and likely to participate in a little thought exercise with me, I will say that the more axes of marginalization you experience in life, the more permission I give you to opt out of this. But go ahead and close your eyes if you choose and just imagine for a moment that for hundreds of years the people who look like you and the people who feel like you and the people who love like you had been enslaved and murdered and beaten down in every conceivable walk of life. Imagine that you're not allowed to own a home even if you can afford one. Imagine that your culture has all but been wiped out or stolen time and time again for others to profit on. Now I want you to think about someone that you love and think about if that person left the house every day and you didn't know if they were gonna come home. Think about if you had to worry that for no good reason that person might be just killed for going about their day. Think about if you had to worry about your son because he works as a parking enforcement person and you worry that someone's gonna call the cops on him because they think he's stealing the cars. So go ahead and open your eyes. And now with that context in mind sometimes what happens is people come along well-meaning but possibly ignorant and they say things like, I don't see color. Please remember not everyone on this team is male. Bye guys, that's so lame. Well, you're a writer, not technical. I know a lot of women tech writers. So how do you feel about this as a woman? We love your talks, but we don't pay our speakers. Just stand on the stage and look pretty. So sometimes when these things happen although they seem small, you get this. You get this in response because you have ignited a powder keg that you didn't know existed because there's a larger context that you weren't aware of or that you weren't thinking about. And a lot of times the reaction is like, hey, hey, hey, hey. Why are you so angry? Like what is the big deal? Chill out. And if you were nicer, you'd win more people over to your cause. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Like, you're still catching flies. I don't know why. I don't know why people say that. Or if you just cooperate with the police, then you won't get hurt. This is from two days ago. And this man, Charles Kinsey, was trying to protect his patient. He had his hands up. He was on the ground. And when he asked the police officer why he shot him, the police officer said, I don't know. So maybe if you will cooperate, you won't get hurt. Maybe if you're Kevin, that's true for you. Maybe if you're Kevin, the police will make every effort to subdue you, even if you are holding a gun as this man is here. And you'll get the benefit of the doubt at every turn. So having privilege is kind of like, is kind of like having the latest version of Chrome, right? If you're Kevin, you are cruising the internet, you're cruising the high-speed internet on the latest version of Chrome on your brand new 15-inch MacBook Pro. Everything is golden, okay? If you're me, maybe you are on IE7. You can still get the information, but it's kind of a different experience. And if you're someone who's differently abled, trans, person of color, maybe you're cruising on IE6. And a lot of times when you try to talk about your experience, what you get in reply is, okay, it works on my machine. So I want to thank Nicole for inspiring me to go through this slide at the last minute. I don't play Pokemon, but I did get to see it in action today. That was fun. So this isn't helpful or useful. And in fact, it's hurtful because as developers, there's a lot of developers in this room, I'm sure, who probably are experienced enough to have dealt with all of the browsers that I mentioned. And you know, you're working in the latest browser, you're coding up something beautiful, you're using all the latest CSS tricks. But you know that call is coming that says, oh, your client who's in a corporate legacy stuck on their old browser is gonna be like, oh, it doesn't look great. And you don't say to them, well, it works on my machine because you understand that's a real thing. They're having a different experience. And so you go and you try to fix it. So context. So some of the other things that Isabel talked about was about the importance of knowing your history. History provides context. Now, writing this book, she spent 15 years writing this book. She interviewed 1,200 people. And she chose three people to really focus on and be sort of her protagonist, her main characters that she follows through this entire journey. And she talked about the fact that she did that on purpose. She wanted to pick sort of like every day people who are just kind of striving and trying to live the best life that they can. Because a lot of times when we talk about black people in society, we're talking about problems. We're talking about poverty or unemployment or black on black crime or, you know. And she kind of compared it to the student who just comes in and does their work and has really good attendance and pass the test. And that student gets ignored because they're not a problem. So they don't get attention. So she wanted to focus the attention on these three people and she wanted her readers to experience what it was like for them to go on this journey. And I think that's really important because the bottom line about empathy is that you can't have empathy unless you actually know and care about people on a personal level. Empathy is not in your head. You have to be, you have to get involved. And so without knowing the history, you get stuck in this cycle. And, you know, we all see this in tech, you know, discrimination and resistance and abuse and around and around and around again. And part of the challenge of preparing this talk is going back to two-year-old slides and realizing like, oh, I can just fill in, you know, this thing with the current instance of whatever terrible thing is happening. So one of the things I did when I first wrote this talk was I, Anita Sarkeesian is a videographer and she writes videos, she releases videos about women in video games and how women are portrayed in video games. And so I went into her Twitter mentions, and this is where we get into the content warning. I went into her Twitter mentions and I just screen capped some stuff that, you know, this was just like probably in a day's worth of Twitter mentions. These are some of the things that, you know, she was putting up with. And this is in response to video game critique. And so as I was working on this, you know, kind of trying to see like, what's the lay of the land? I went back to her mentions and this was from yesterday. And this one in particular is, you know, wines since women who invent negative experiences. And one of the other problems about, you know, trying to speak up about abuse is just not being believed. And if you go to the Geek Feminism Wiki, they have a timeline of incidents that starts in 1973. And I'm pretty sure if you peruse that, you would find a lot of repetition of the same kinds of incidents happening over and over again. And, you know, the one positive thing about having that is that, you know, at least having that sort of record means like you don't have to start the conversation at like negative 10. You don't have to start the conversation at, does this really happen? Which was a thing for a long time. For a long time it was like, oh, that's not really happening. That's not really a problem. So at least we have the record of like, yes, this is really happening. But it all kinds of seems kind of inevitable. And so, bringing this back to the tech world, you know, we've been talking about, I think tech companies, big tech companies, kind of started to release their numbers a couple years ago and have been talking this big talk about diversity. And yet a lot of teams still look like this. And I'm really heartened to say that this is my original slide from probably two or more years ago and that I'm hopeful that this team looks different based on some things that I've heard in the last eight hours. But, you know, that kind of team is not sustainable. And, you know, GitHub knows that. GitHub's obviously working really, really hard to change that kind of scenario. But the reality in the US is that 75% of white Americans have no friends, not even acquaintances, who are people of color, zero. So if you can only have empathy if you know and have affinity for someone, and 75% of white people know zero people of color, what are the implications for, you know, the future of us getting along as a society? And one of the things that happens when you start talking about these things is that companies will say, Facebook, is a pipeline problem. There's just not enough people, really. There's a lot of organizations who have been working really hard to try to give opportunity to underrepresented people in tech in spaces where they can actually do their best work. So the pipeline is not the problem. You know, people of color, underrepresented people are graduating from these schools and programs and getting computer science degrees and fully half of them are not getting hired. So it's not the pipeline problem. And another thing that people like to say is, well, if you don't like it, why don't you go build your own? It's like, oh, you know, I know that we basically built this country, like off the backs of your labor, and we stole your land, and you've been marginalized and denied the opportunity to build wealth, but why don't you just go build your own thing? And amazingly, sometimes we do. Anyway, even though it's really, really hard to get resources, you know, I saw a little bit of how hard it was just to get this live captioning, you know, and I've had my own struggle with trying to raise funds for things, and I watch people in our communities try to get access to resources to try to make things things better, and it is, it's a struggle. But sometimes we just, you know, get fed up and we go off and we make our own thing. And that's kind of cool, but you know what bugs me about that? It kind of seems like we did that already. You know, in some ways, it kind of was better in certain aspects when schools were segregated. I mean, you had, if you had all black students and all black teachers, then those teachers at least believed in those students and encouraged those students as opposed to having, you know, I don't remember how Nicole talked about it, but like having the difference where you're just the one and people are already sort of putting their low expectations on you and shoving you in a corner and putting you know, putting you onto the slow track. But the problem with that is that, you know, having access, everybody should have access to all the opportunities that they want. So I have some good news. The good news is that we've made it through all the super bummer parts of this talk. And I want to talk to you about what do we do? How do we start to fix this? How do we make it a little bit better? And the first thing is just to understand that we are all living in our own personal bubble and it's a bubble made up of our particular experiences and our particular identities and intersections and we live and interact with people who are also in their own bubbles. But you have to understand that that's happening so that you can at least realize like, okay, I'm coming at this from my particular perspective, let me try to listen and understand someone else's perspective. And the second thing is that we need to understand that we're gonna screw up as we start to widen our circle and interact with people who are different than ourselves and people who have experiences that we know nothing about, we're gonna screw up. And we might get called out on that and that's okay. You will actually survive someone telling you that you screwed up and did something hurtful. And I think we don't see enough examples of that happening where it happens and then we apologize and we move on for it. And I'll tell you a story when I was in college the first time, which was many, many years ago, it was at the University of Oregon and I did, at that time there were I think 18,000 students and there were 50 black students on campus. And so they did a video series like sort of talking about diversity and interviewing a lot of the students of color. So I was being interviewed by a Native American woman on camera, on video, and she asked me some question and I said something, something low on the totem pole. And we had a pretty friendly relationship so in response to that she just kicked me under the table. I was like, yeah, that was not good. And it was recorded and maybe they'll edit it out if they're feeling kind. But you know, I said it, she kicked me. I was like, yeah, that was not good. And then I apologized and we moved on. And you need to be able to accept those criticisms because what's actually happening when someone tells you like, hey, you screwed up and you said this thing or you did this thing that's really hurtful is that that person is saying to you, I think you're better than this. And they're giving you a chance to be better, to live up to their expectations. And no matter how safe a person seems, it's always incredibly, it's incredible emotional risk. And it takes a ton of energy to even say anything in the first place. Even if you are 99.9% certain that the reaction is gonna be something that you want, that the person's gonna apologize. It still takes a ton of energy to actually do that. So when you respond with defensiveness and retreat into trying to defend yourself and trying to prove that you're a good person, we all wanna be good people and we have this idea of ourselves as nice people. Then you're actually furthering the injury by basically derailing and denying what happened. And I wanna just say a little bit about being nice because nice people are kinda dangerous. I really don't, I'm really kinda mistrustful of nice people and there's a study talking about how nice people can be so conflict-averse that in this experiment, they were given orders to, they weren't really shocking these people, but they didn't know that. And so they would just continue to take orders to do harm to someone because they didn't want to have conflict. So I don't really trust or like niceness and I would suggest and encourage you to be kind instead of or at least in addition to being nice. So I wanna just talk about what do you do? Does anybody remember, does anybody do this like in school where they tell you what to do if there's a fire? What do you do if there's a fire? Stop, drop, and roll. Good job. So, in order to kind of counteract this sort of visceral emotional response of like wanting to defend yourself and having flight or fight, you need an alternative plan, right? So if someone calls you out on something that you said or done, here is your three-step plan. The first thing is to stop. Like don't like take a minute, take a breath before you respond, just stop and take in whatever feedback that you have been given. And the second step is to listen. Like to really try to turn off whatever's going on in your head and listen to what the person is telling you. Listen to their point of view. And then the third step is just to apologize. And there's a link to a really great article about a teacher and how she teaches her students to really apologize and they role play it and it's awesome and I'll post it up later. But if you do these things, the great thing is by and large, most of the time you can probably go on with your day. Like when people dig in and they double down and they get defenses, then it becomes this huge thing and it's back and forth and like you can't even, whatever it is you were trying to accomplish with that person gets completely derailed. Whereas if you can just sort of take in the feedback and apologize, then you can move on. And we don't, you know, we don't see enough of that. We don't see that demonstrated and Paul, you know, did a great thing here where he just kind of was like, oh, oops. Thanks for letting me know that. And then the other thing that you need to do is, you know, we talked about, I talked about how insular people can be with their circles, you know, we get into a zone where we're just interacting with people like us, other developers, other designers, you know, you need to like get out of your comfort zone. Branch out a little bit. Start to learn and give a shit about people who are not like you. And, you know, if you live in a place that's super homogenous, guess what? I'm gonna assume because you're all here, you all have access to the internet, which means you literally have access to most of the world and a lot of the world's information and a lot of perspectives from people who are freely putting out information about what it's like to be them. So, you know, there are a ton of resources. Like don't go out and try to make friends with people so you can like check off your diversity box, okay? But, you know, start to follow some different people on Twitter. And pro tip, marginalized people on Twitter don't only talk about being marginalized, we talk about a ton of stuff. So, you know, when you're following somebody, you're gonna most likely find some other thing that you're like, oh, hey, I like to nerd out about Pokemon or, you know, whatever it is. And talk to them about that. Like talk to people as people, but get to know some different kinds of people and find out, you know, what's important to them and what kinds of day to day things go on in their lives. Read a book. I highly recommend getting warmth of other suns, full disclosure, I bought it on Wednesday and I'm 22 pages in. But she actually said in the talk that she felt like if you read that book that that was probably the closest as a white person you would get to understanding like what it's like to be black and to go through that journey. So, like we have all this information, you just have to do a little bit of work and a little bit of searching and, you know, expend some effort to go and find this information and go and connect with other people. Spend 30 minutes a day just like replacing your Twitter with a list that is like not all your normal people. And I made this list, this list is like three years old it's still up. So if you don't, if you're like, oh, I don't know anybody like go, go to this list and just follow it. What would our spaces look like? I love that Nicole talked about this. Like if we could have empathy as a core value in our work spaces, people could do amazing work. People would be freed up to do amazing work. And, you know, if you talk to, you know I love that she would go and interview like give me your black engineers and talk to them because there's always there's always the mental overhead of doing that second job of doing your job and then doing your job of being the blank, the gay, you know, the gay pplup or the black developer, you know that's like a whole other job. So, you know, what if we created these spaces where people could do their best work? And sometimes that looks like really just like small things like your language, which isn't really a small thing but it's an easy thing comparably it's a really easy thing to change. And make people an esteemed part of your projects and your communities and your workplaces. So, I wanna encourage you not to be an ally but to be an accomplice and to really listen to other people's stories. One of the most powerful things you can do on whatever axes of privilege that you have is to listen to other people's stories and to witness those, bear witness to those and to share those stories, share what you learn because one of the things that happened is that, you know, when you're talking about being harmed as a marginalized person, often we're just not believed. So, when people, you know, with higher ranks of privilege talk about it, like suddenly, suddenly it's a thing. So, if you have the power to do that if you have the privilege to do that it's a really powerful thing for you to do. And then speak up for others. As you are able. And just know that as you do this work you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna screw up. But that is the job. This is my pinned tweet, by the way, so if you wanna, and what are we up to? 1,200 retweet, I don't know, people love this tweet but that's the job, like do the best you can. Apologize if you screw up. Learn from your mistakes. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you.