A Collaborative Journey

In these pandemic, cultural identity awakening, and racial reckoning times, Code2040, in collaboration with Filament Consulting Group (FCG), is embarking on a conversation journey to explore the Black/African American experience in the tech sector. As the 21st century progresses, Code2040 and FCG are engaging in this process with the intent to offer the collective stream one of many possible narratives about the Black/African American experience in the tech sector.

As the holder of the engagement process, FCG is grounding this conversation journey in what is called transmuting white supremacy and patriarchy™. Tactically, this translates into holding with great intent and perspective the unapologetic respect and admiration for Black talent. This tactic is crucial in a sector that often implicitly ignores the entrenched white supremacy and patriarchy influencing company cultures, systems, and processes. This is a choice that supports and hides anti-blackness present in cultures, systems, and practices to the detriment of many folks' mental health, career promotion, authentic engagement, and future possibilities in the industry. The foundation of this project journey chooses instead to explicitly acknowledge that white supremacy, patriarchy, and anti-blackness exist in the sector AND that it is Black/African American technologists who are the experts to share, shift or enforce the desires, needs, and experiences of Black/African Americans therein.

An Intentional Journey

Code2040 is offering and Filament Consulting Group is holding space to gather, share, and document the varied experiences of Black/African Americans in tech to tell their stories and share their experiences.

We invite you to join us on this conversation journey. Co-imagine, co-create, and co-foster community and share your stories with us and other Black/African American technologists. During this journey, we are committed to holding a space of exploration and innovation that is grounded in a deep respect for the Black/African American experience and the healing spaces we desire and deserve. The stories and knowledge shared will be held with care and directed towards reimagining and transforming the tangible experiences of Black/African American people in the tech sector.

We are embarking on this collaborative journey to:

1) First and foremost create community, foster relationships, and transmute the negative impact of feelings from and tangible experiences of isolation,

2) Hold facilitated and fostered space to have illuminating introspective, transparent & positively vulnerable conversations for those that choose to engage, and

3) To offer the larger community of the tech world a glimpse into the reality, fortitude, commitment, creativity, and innovation of Black/African Americans in the sector.

Journey Perspective

While Code2040 & FCG are in support of outcomes that these gatherings and stories create that explicitly benefit and support Black/African Americans in the workforce, this journey and these stories are not explored and shared to help decision-makers in tech increase productivity, to manipulate BIPOC’s understanding of their agency, to combat BIPOC turnover, to create distracting and derailing DEI tweets, etc. This journey and these stories are not gathered and shared to help white/white-passing people in tech in soothing their complicity, show their allyship, make defensive, or generate uninspired action.

The stories, themes, and ideas that blossom and are cultivated during all of the conversation pods will be gathered and shared in the aggregate, with Code2040, with the intention to create, shift, and transform the tangible experiences of Black/African American people in tech, in which the possibilities are endless. Some of which we hope will open our own eyes:

• to our own brilliance and ability to start and fund companies,

• to own our genius and demand presence in the rooms we want to be,

• to offer tangible support to each other,

• to remember that we are what WE say we are in the tech sector not what white supremacy and the patriarchy-influenced tech sector tries to tell us we are.

If in addition to these gatherings and story sharings having a positive impact on the reality of those who identify as Black/African American, there is also an opening for business models, company cultures, and internal systems to actively explore AND engage behavior and belief shifts led explicitly via Black leadership and tangibly empowered decision-making by Black/African American techies, so be it. This we welcome.

Journey Process

Journey participants choose one or more of the conversation journey options (Red, Black, or Green). Each option is for two conversations with the same participants at each, over the course of two weeks. Participants are engaged in a conversation process during each session that incorporates individual reflection time using the medium of their choice, small group conversations, and whole-group engagement.

Journey Path Options:

A Journey in Red:
Engaging What Has Transpired

Journey conversation prompts are designed to support a conversation about exploring and sharing experiences in the technology workplace in and post 2020.

A Journey in Black:
Expanding What we Understand as our (Individual & Collective) Power & Agency

Journey conversation prompts are designed to support a conversation about exploring and sharing thoughts to understand experiences in the workplace and technology sector within the specific framing of the impact of white supremacy and patriarchy. In the face of real and tangible experiences of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and patriarchy in the tech sector, prompts in this journey will explore what it looks and feels like to individually imagine, create, and foster, as well as collectively support access to, boundaries and protections (tools, processes, ideas, concepts, etc.) available to people who identify as Black/African Americans.

A Journey in Green:
Exploring What is to be Manifested

Journey conversation prompts are designed to support a conversation about exploring and sharing thoughts, ideas, and desires for career growth; the future of the technology sector; and the imaginings of what is possible for individual and collective engagement for Black folks specific to the tech sector.