 everyone. I'm Marco Rogers. I'm a software engineer and I've had a pretty successful career in tech for over 10 years. Kind of an anomaly in comparison to the kind of experiences that Shola was talking about earlier. And that's kind of why I'm here. I want to talk to you today about what it took for me to succeed as a black person in tech. And I'm going to speak on my personal experiences. This talk is going to be pretty personal. I'm hoping that people will recognize some of the experiences that I had that it might resonate with them. But I'm also hoping that all of us will find something a little bit more important and larger in my story. So we'll see how it goes. The title of the talk says conforming to succeed, but it could have easily been called how to become one of the good ones. You know, that was an alternate title suggested by my wife. Before I get into that, a quick note on what it means to be successful, what I mean by I'm successful. I'm definitely not rich by any means, but I get paid pretty well. I got a nice engineering salary. I've had no major breaks in my employment for this whole 10 years. No problems getting jobs. That's been awesome. And I just bought a house in one of the most expensive places on the earth right across the bay over there. I also kind of reached this rarefied air where like I don't get money back from my tax returns anymore. Like that's over, right? In fact, the IRS they come and like dip into my pocket some more every April, which is like just rude. But I'm very, very fortunate to be where I am and I don't take it for granted for a second. The issue with this is that it's a very different place from where I came from. I changed a lot on my journey to get here. This audience probably knows that there aren't a lot of people who look like me who've made it to to where I am. I've met a lot of other black people in tech over my career, but I also have watched them get crushed, you know, give up, get pushed out, just disappear from this industry. And at some point I needed to reconcile what made me different from those people. I had to figure out what it was, why I was still here, and why I also didn't feel like it was that hard in certain ways. Otherwise it was actually really, really hard. But I had to figure this out. I'm going to go back. Let me start when I was young. Before high school, the schools that I went to were predominantly black. I saw people like me everywhere and that was a very kind of comfortable situation. But at the same time I was also like awkward and like an introverted kid. So I spent a lot of time like by myself and feeling like I was really different. And that's kind of a common story for a lot of people who might end up gravitating, gravitating towards a computer. But I got good grades. And eventually I got identified as gifted. Whatever that means, you know, schools are kind of always looking for kids with potential and then like elevating them above the rest of the class. So I got put in these special classes. I even got bused to special schools to do this gifted thing. And suddenly there were only a handful of black kids like me who were among this group of gifted people and way more people who didn't look like me. I was too young to think about it too much at that time. But what I did learn is that some of us are chosen to be different when we're pretty young. And what that means among other things is that being chosen involves being separated from other people that are like you. And that defined my early school years feeling separated, like I was being moved. So, you know, after my first year of high school, my family moved and I went to a new school. It had a good mix of ethnicity, but it was mostly white. And there I made a big choice. I was one of the new kids. So I had to like pick my faction, you know. And my first friend in that school, the first friend I made and who was my best friend throughout and still is. She was a white girl. Of course, it was heard and decided that we were going to be friends because I was quiet and awkward and terrible at talking to people. And I was mostly fine with that. But, you know, as this friendship progressed, I was kind of quickly presented with that dilemma called the lunchroom, you know, in high school. And so you walk in and there's kind of a cliche, but it was totally true. There's like these there's like two tables over here, like all the black people, right? Whatever faction they were in, they were all sitting together. And then over here is my friend waving at me, telling me to come over and sit with her, her white friends. And it was weird. But I chose to sit with her. I chose to sit with my new friend. And I made that choice with most of high school. Now, I don't mean to sound dramatic, right? But it's high school. So it's always kind of dramatic. But I made a choice that day. And I didn't choose blackness. I wouldn't say that I rejected my blackness. That's too strong. But I didn't choose it. I kind of put it on the back burner. And even then I understood that that was a significant thing. It had a profound effect on my whole high school experience. But I was young and stubborn. And I told myself it didn't matter that much. I was already weird and different by myself anyway. So it's cool. But choosing to move away from that blackness had a cost that I wouldn't really understand for like a long time. So graduation rolled around. And I had decided to go to college and work with computers. How did that happen, right? Like I actually didn't didn't do anything with computers previously. Well, remember that I'm on this like magical gifted track where you have to be invited first. But then once you do, they give you all kinds of like help and extra attention and stuff. Right. So my senior year in high school, they had a budget to get laptops for one class of students. And that was my class. We even got to take them home for personal use, like explore them and learn and I just kind of became fascinated, right? But I didn't realize at that time was I was one of the only people of color in that whole school who got the opportunity to be inspired by computers that day. I still don't know why it was chosen. But I was and I started to understand that being chosen also meant leaving more people that look like me behind, right? If I was going to keep moving forward, they weren't invited. Fast forward, go to college. I went to Georgia Tech in downtown Atlanta. It's important to know that Atlanta is full of black people. Like you see them everywhere, four or five people you run into. It's amazing place. But when I stepped on to the Georgia Tech campus, they seemed to disappear. I knew that a significant number of them went to Georgia Tech, went to my school, but I could not find them. You see, I had I had not chosen them, right? So I was now on the outside. And I didn't get whatever like trail of breadcrumbs you were supposed to get to find out like where they meet and like what they like to do and like, you know, how they dealt with the trials and tribulations of college life. I was basically on my own. They definitely weren't hanging around the College of Computing where I spent 18 hours trying to learn how to code. So I look back on college as like, just like a gauntlet of learning how to conform, learning how to like what people expected me to be. And experiencing culture shock in college is a common thing. But that doesn't mean it's not painful. And in my case, it wasn't just like jarring experiences. I was like changing into a different person. I became one of those computer people at the risk of calling up some, some stereotypes, like I sat in dark rooms in front of bright screens, like hours and hours a day, couldn't be bothered with the way that I dressed just wasn't really important. And I learned to like pick up and I started picking up all the like technical jargon, you know, and this is a thing, right? Like I started speaking differently, not just using the words, but speaking differently. I'm from the deep south, right? I'm from from Georgia, grew up outside of Atlanta, and the backwoods. So my accent was like for real, right? But what I found is like, there's a look that people give you, you know, when they when they're presented with a young black man with a southern accent that's trying to talk to them about like compilers and data structures, they get this look, where it's like deep confusion and dissonance, when they're trying to figure out how to judge you and they can't. And eventually you just learn to like, you know, save them trouble, just talk however they expect to hear it, right? So my accent and a lot of other stuff about me just started to kind of fall away. I remember one year I came home, and I went to apply for a summer job. I was in the waiting room with this older guy, we were chatting about the job. And one point he just stopped, he looked at me, he's like, you don't sound like you from around here. And I was like stunned, you know, I was like hurt and I was angry, even though he had said something like fairly innocent, it like cut me to the quick, because I knew that he was right. I didn't sound like I was from around here. But I was. My mom lived 20 minutes away, right? But he looked at me and, you know, when he heard me talk, he couldn't tell anymore. And that hurt. It stayed with me for like a long time. And I've dealt with some burden to that experience pretty much ever since. So I don't want to, I don't want to sit here and pretend that all this stuff just like happened to me, right? And I had no agency in the change that that I went through. This pressure to conform is very real. And we're shaped by it. But I also had a hand in the shaping, right? Like we choose how do we how we react to some of these things. So far, things I think have been pretty tame. Lots of people from different backgrounds might relate to some of these stories. But I'll tell one more topic story. And this one still stands as like, one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. So I was part of this computer programmer culture now. And Georgia Tech had these like online campus forums, you know, just like a bunch of nerds having heated debates about everything from like compilers to philosophy to like, whatever, you know, Star Wars. And just being generally terrible to each other. One of my formative experiences started when I wandered into some channel. And I got into this debate about religion. I wasn't too personally invested in this discussion. I was just, you know, like I was just taking a stance and trying to support it. Because that's what you did. That's what you had to do. You had to get up those logical debate skills, you know what I mean? Like there was those are highly prized among nerds. I didn't want to be left out. So I practiced. But what I wasn't prepared for was like, how debate goes in the world of like anonymous internet forums. See, I made the mistake of thinking that these were like humans that deserve respect. And they were going to show me the same kind of respect. And instead, I was just met with like the worst, the worst people right the worst like insults and like, they were being cruel. And I was like harassed and you know, it's one particular guy. He was relentless. Like he would not leave me alone. And I didn't even understand how we had gotten to this point where he was like, he like hated me so much. But I was getting angry. I was like, you know, like, look, where I come from, you don't talk to people like that unless you want a problem. Okay. Like, you don't talk to people like that unless you want a problem. So I'm saying. So you know, y'all can see me, y'all can, you know, you can hear my tone, you can watch my body language. So you know what that means, right? So I asked him if he wanted me to come and solve his problem in person. So you know, you can you can kind of see where this is going, but all he had to go on was like text on a screen. So he gave me his name in dorm room and he told me to come over. My self, walking across campus at 11 o'clock at night, I had my leather jacket on, face clenched, a crew of friends behind me because I went and told everybody I was like, I'm about to beat this dude, because he got too much mouth. It's about to go down. Um, I showed him this guy's room and I was heated. Um, I told him, you know, step from behind that keyboard and like say the same things you were saying before, right? Told him to stand up. Y'all, when I tell you that this kid was terrified. Like, he did not know that this was what was going to happen to him. Like, there was an angry black man pointed in his direction. He did not know how he got there. He had no idea. Um, it was, it was pretty, you know, it was pretty ridiculous. Um, there was some confusion while he kind of figured out who I was. But once he, once he figured out who I was, and you know, he, I was the person he had just been talking to. Um, that's when I learned that it was actually me who had the wrong idea, right? So like, you know, none of the stuff that you say online is supposed to be serious, right? Like, it's just what people do when they debate online. But if we met in person, we're supposed to like sit quietly and like have a poke and like talk like civilized people. Everybody knew that. Except me, apparently. Um, I debated throwing this story in but I definitely wanted to throw it in. But it's kind of disappointing. There was no fight. Um, see, I was embarrassed, right? I realized that part of the reason this scene was so entertaining to all the people around me was because of my ignorance. I didn't know what was expected and I had like blown things out of proportion. So so I went home. I went home feeling like who I was and where I came from was an embarrassment. I went home feeling like if I wanted to hang around these people, if I wanted to be successful, I couldn't be this person anymore. I had to be somebody else. And so I decided that from that point on, I couldn't be easily offended. I was gonna be like a rock and like whatever people said was not gonna bother me. Um, I mean, this is yet another decision that has big consequences for black people. Um, by the time I graduated college, I wasn't at all prepared to work as a computer programmer. But I was very prepared to act like I belonged, right? I had been conditioned to go into this like alien culture and like assimilate to prove that I deserved to be there. And I did have to prove it. At this point, I want to pause because some people might be a little confused. I thought about whether I should throw this disclaimer in but it seems like I'm using the term like conform to succeed and like conforming to like whiteness interchangeably. I know that that lacks nuance and I apologize for that but it's on purpose. Um, we know that this this tech culture is full of like mostly white men and as such, they define a lot of the culture. But what we don't think about that often is the further you are from from whiteness, the further out of your comfort zone you have to go in order to to succeed in order to conform in order to do what is expected. Uh and sometimes the the racial component of that comes into like sharp relief. Um because like when you're like a like a lone black person hanging out um with a lot of non-black people, there's this game that gets played. Um and maybe it's maybe it's not malicious. Maybe they're actually friends but it can get very serious and sometimes very cruel. Um either way, the purpose of this game is uh for people to decide if you're cool to have around. Right? Um the game basically consists of white people testing the boundaries of how much insensitive and racist stuff they can say to you before you that you call them out. Uh and if you get offended, you lose. Um it might be you know something simple like that that old gym like oh you're not like most black people. You're one of the good ones. Right? Um I heard that and I was like oh thanks sounds nice. Um and they genuinely like think that's a compliment. Um maybe you know the test aren't always meant to be hurtful but sometimes they get very real and that's how I find myself this last story. I find myself like hanging around a group of friends while they like tried to remember every racist joke they had ever heard to see if I would get angry because you remember I had told them that I couldn't be offended. I had learned that lesson right so I was like nah I'm good. Um you know I was supposed to like stay stoic and let it roll off my back and if I was really cool I was supposed to like laugh and like make them feel like really comfortable and telling that it was cool. Um that that I made it through that but it it didn't go well. Um and I I lost some friends behind that but in general this game right this game that gets played um I'm sad to say that I got real good at it in general. I progressed to like the highest levels of of letting people treat me a certain way and act them like it was cool. Uh see for me and I'm I'm betting for like a lot of black people being good at this game it feels like it's required for success. Um and I just bought a house in one of the most expensive places on earth so I guess I'm winning I guess. Um but this is more than a game right there's a threat behind it. The unspoken part of this game says if you weren't one of the good ones you might not be here and they get to define what good one means uh and I have certain point I realized that I have been chosen to be one of the good ones way back way back in elementary school they just called it like gifted right um I want to wrap up. This story was like very personal um but I want people to hear and think about it as we kind of continue to talk about diversity and uh bringing more people of color into tech. We need to be careful to remember that this is not just a numbers game. You know I'm here because I'm a good engineer but a lot of black people can do the technical things that I do. There could be a lot more of them here doing what I do but maybe they're not willing to conform the way that I did. Maybe they're not willing to feel distance from their culture and their people in order to make it here. Maybe to some of us success is not worth being forced to make excuses for like racism and terrible behavior we're subjected to all the time. The way that things are a lot of us pay a price to be here. It's a steep price and sometimes it means like cutting into your very identity in order to conform to what this industry expects you to be. So when we talk about being more inclusive I also think it needs to be about finding a way to lessen that burden of conformity. We need to allow people to arrive at feeling successful and still be able to recognize themselves and where they came from. Because just because you like leave the door open for somebody doesn't mean that they feel welcome and it doesn't mean that they can walk through and be unchanged. That's it. Thank you. I appreciate your time.