Dear White People and the Issue of Sexuality
Last night I went to see Dear White People with my friend @liveinsidelikeits1999. The movie was electric. I quipped later that I could write an article every month for a year and wouldn’t feel as though I exhausted things to say about it. One of the central characters, Lionel Higgins (played…
Desperately hoping this movie comes to Durham soon (and dreaming of it playing the Northgate instead of the Carolina).
Work is work. Had a good chat with a potential project sponsor, got the first (of what will be many) warning that next year could be tricky, funding-wise. One good thing about our program is that we’re a hybrid recruiting / tech incubator program, and those demand curves don’t always mirror each other, which gives us a little bit of insulation.
Between calls, I played through this great little record three or four times:
GYPSY PERVERT by MANNEQUIN PUSSY
After work, ran over to the Pinhook & checked out the setup for our WXDU simulcast of Sunday’s Know Your Poll show/party. 2 – 7 p.m. – we’d rather have you there in person, but if you can’t make it: 88.7 FM in Durham, or wxdu.org everywhere.
Day two of the All Things Open conference. One of the opening keynotes (here in the modern era, every non-breakout talk is a keynote, I guess) was by the Chief People Officer at Red Hat. She spent the whole time speaking in kind of vague terms about the need for diversity in tech, citing the current heavily skewed numbers, and talking pipeline.
Which is certainly important – we could still do a million times better at eliminating all the cultural biases that work against girls who like math, science & computers.
However, among people who actually regularly think and talk and write about this topic, the consensus is that it’s utterly pointless to work on pipeline issues until we’ve done something substantial about the actual culture within the industry first.
And that’s one subject that the CPO of Red Hat was pretty much silent about.
After the morning’s breakouts, the CPO was back to moderate a panel discussion about women in tech (the panel consisting of about half of the women who were speaking at the conference). I’m going to see if I can embed all of my tweets from the panel here:
Women in tech panel starting out with the panelists talking about their varied & non-traditional routes into tech. No “right” way. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Going from being geekiest person in entire high school … so weird when ppl assume yr not technical as a woman. #ATO2014 #womenintech
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Men in Estelle Weyl’s cohort still in enterprise; women are contracting/solo, because enterprise wanted to channel them into mgmt. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
The RedHat VP from this morning is trying to direct the discussion back to pipeline. & now trolling us w/ “is diversity important?” #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Now Megan Squire is laying into media/pundits who like to pick up on superficial correlations/guesses and won’t do the research. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Estelle Weyl speaking up for ALL the ppl who are underrepresented in tech: different races, genders, orientations, religions, ages. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Megan Squire gets a round of applause when she says we can’t just focus on pipeline & then drop those folks off at the same industry door.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Finally a (vaguely stated) question from the moderator about ways to maybe improve the culture. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Megan Squire: when she teaches, she makes a point of varying the coding exercises, not just the standard dry number sequences. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Lots of applause when panelists start talking about being interrupted, talked over. Amplify & acknowledge women’s voices & ideas. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Estelle Weyl: In tech there is a Dave:women ratio: average team has as many guys named Dave as it has women. #ATO2014 #changeTHATratio
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
. @ericastanley talking about the low ratio being self-perpetuating. Hard problem. Mentoring is crucial. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Make job descriptions more approachable – women & men (at present anyway) read “nice to have” skills lists differently. #ATO2014
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
Simple thing you can do: read #ATO2014, follow & RT women in tech. @anildash RT’d only women for a year, so you can at least *try*.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady)
(note that in that last tweet above, I was suggesting that conference attendees should find women tweeting in the conference hashtag & follow them – more generally, if you’re on twitter & are interested in women in tech, there are hundreds – try this list.)
It was awesome to see the panelists sort of take matters into their own hands, and [repeatedly] bring up culture & institutional sexism, even in some cases by ignoring the questions the moderator was asking.
I saw some great talks, some merely good talks, learned a few things. Oh, and thanks to the conference organizers not ordering enough box lunches to go around, I got to walk up the street to Capital Club 16 and have a beer & a schnitzel sandwich for lunch.
Came home, ate some fish collars (!) from Saltbox. Ricky described them as like eating chicken thighs, and that was actually oddly apt.
Watched the last episode of Lonesome Dove. Tommy Lee Jones finally got to do some actual acting – and he was great. On the gore front, got to watch one character try, and fail, to shove an arrow the rest of the way through Robert Duvall’s knee. Also got to see Ricky Schroeder with a terrible mustache.
Via Erik Sugg, yr daily dose of clueless entitlement run amok. Sigh.
i’ve been working hard for the last little bit to help put together this killer NARAL pro-choice NC benefit. so stoked to help bring body/head to NC for their first ever show here. if you’re local, c’mon out – it’s a saturday, it is guaranteed to rule *and* it supports a great and local cause. killer poster by julianna thomas.
tickets / details here – http://kingsbarcade.com/2014/11/15/bodyhead-with-solar-halos-jenks-miller-rose-cross-nc-presented-by-naral-pro-choice-nc-three-lobed-recordings/
Got up early to drive to Raleigh for day 1 of 2 of the All Things Open conference, an enterprise-oriented open-source conference. The group that runs it is based in Atlanta (where they run a similar conference in the spring), but between Red Hat, RTP and the startup scene here, there’s probably far more reason to have one here than in ATL.
I never go to conferences, so I have no real points of comparison, but: the speakers are knowledgeable and approachable, and present at varying levels of polish, from Very to Not At All. The organization is sufficient, if not especially mind-blowing (although this year’s is way better than last year’s). There are some women speakers, but not enough to make me happy.
(Two of the six talks I saw today were by women, and both rooms were packed to overflowing, so hopefully that’ll lead to even better balance next year.)
Everything I saw was pretty wonky, far too much so for a general-purpose blog, so I’ll spare you the details. Although I will say that I continue to be amazed at watching people walk in 2 minutes before their designated start time & then struggle mightily with laptop/projector issues.
Also this can serve as a reminder that Mac people still need to travel with their own fucking VGA adapters.
Anyway. Low-key nerdy fun; a nice paid vacation that includes the chance to get at least the names & urls of projects that I could probably make use of.
Made the final decision & arrangements to simulcast the Know Your Polls party on WXDU – it’s a get out the vote rally & concert at the Pinhook on Sunday afternoon from 2 to 7 pm. Lots of good bands: SOON, Daniel Bachman, Some Army, Shirlette Ammons, Hammer No More the Fingers, Midnight Plus One, and PIPE. Show up at the Pinhook if at all possible, but if you just can’t get away, tune it in at 88.7 or wxdu.org
Western sky sunrise (at Mangum 506 Condominiums)
Some fun conversations on Twitter after some folks read my Sunday diary entry.
@rossgrady you’d be surprised at amount of black folks who won’t do certain things or go places cause they think that it’s “not for them.”
— Eric Tullis (@erictullis) October 21, 2014
This is such an interesting observation. I’m sure Durham has its share of racist white people, but I can only assume that there are also a ton of white people who are, to greater or lesser degrees, feeling partially paralyzed by guilt, self-consciousness, reflexive discomfort, whatever. So much easier to just cling to 9th St. and the “DIY District.”
Dear White People [god I can’t wait until that movie opens around here – I hope it plays the Northgate & not the Carolina]: there are black folk who feel the same way. Let’s all try harder to just say hi to each other on the street & whatnot. The little things add up, y’all.
[Side note: Seeing Django Unchained at the Northgate with a predominantly black audience totally fucking ruled.]
Circumstances conspired to keep us from going to a screening of Kiss Me Deadly at Duke tonight. I met Mickey Spillane once, in high school, during the summer when I was at the SC Governor’s School for the Arts. (for all you fact-checkers: It’s a residential program now, but was a summer program at Furman University when I was a kid)
Spillane lived in Murrell’s Inlet, SC, and had for years & years – which is, I assume, the only reason they invited him to the GSA to talk to students. Noir was making a comeback – Black Lizard had just debuted the year before – but it was all Thompson & Goodis, and critical reevaluations of Raymond Chandler. Serious attention hadn’t trickled down to Spillane. Has it ever?
Anyway. Like any good thrift-store haunting freak weirdo high school student in the mid-late 80s, I had a fedora, so of course I took it with me to class & had Mickey Spillane sign it. “Some Mike Hammer,” he wrote. Later in life I guess my value system got skewed way out of whack, because I no longer have the damn hat.
Monday is never as action-packed as Sunday, so this is going to be pretty short. Work was work. Ran into a former intern who has been pretty bummed lately about ratio of work:recognition in his organization. He told me that he’d gotten fed up, went to his manager & demanded a promotion – and got one. A well-deserved one, too.
Note to people following the Satya Nadella controversy: This is how it should work for women, too. In some organizations I’m fairly certain that’s not currently the case. In our industry at least, though, demand is high enough that one can make ultimatums about walking and actually follow through on them if necessary, without crashing & burning.
After work, continued watching Lonesome Dove. Tonight’s episode included murders from ambush, the execution of a wounded comrade, the murder, hanging & burning of two random farmers, the execution by hanging of their murderers, including one longtime friend of the main characters, and a brief shot of the aftermath of the murder by Indians of three secondary characters, including one scalping.
Oh yeah, and some moderately direct references to prostitution, and a horsewhipping.
Robert Duvall got to do some good work, and Anjelica Huston finally made her appearance. I’m starting to see some glimmers of actual work going on underneath Tommy Lee Jones’s hat & beard.
In comparison to Deadwood, it’s basically a children’s show, but it’s still remarkably gory for 80s broadcast television. Now that I think about it, it’s actually gorier than Deadwood – but without any cussing, of course. What an odd pair of “historical” documents they are, together.
