Yesterday, the Tech Intersections Conference took place. This is a conference that I co-founded with a Mills College professor here in Oakland. As far as I know it's the first conference of its kind for women of color--specifically, Black and Latinx. Oh... I guess you didn't know that you shouldn't be referring to people from a Latin American cultural or racial identity as Hispanic. Latinx is a gender neutral term used in lieu of Latino or Latina. Hispanic is a colonial term which probably will be tossed out soon enough. Please use Latinx moving forward.
Organizing and putting together a conference is a lot of work. I knew this going into it, but had forgotten how much work. I organized The Amazing Meeting back in 2003. My handle in the skeptical community is well known. It's nice to know that they have given me credit for starting it. That conference has grown a lot over the years. I feel good that I gave birth to something that people enjoy attending.
The idea behind the Tech Intersections Conference was to provide an affordable conference that women of color could attend. We provided childcare which is an important option to have for this particular demographic. We also provided scholarships along with reduced fees for students and unemployed women. This was all to make sure that there were no barriers to entry.
Apparently, the formula and the thinking behind all of these considerations was successful--we were sold out. We even had a waiting list. I recall that I had some of these same considerations for the other conference that I founded. Although, I was more focused on affordability for The Amazing Meeting.
I focus on affordability because a lot of conferences are very expensive. People can go to conferences when their companies sponsor them. However, individuals have to pay for them outright and then get reimbursed. That can take some time depending on the company's payment cycle. This means that you are financing this yourself. I especially wanted to avoid that for this conference.
I was fortunate to have the Mills College professor and a couple of other wonderful individuals help me create the conference. It was a crazy idea and a glint in my eye back in April of 2017 when all of the planning began. I felt that Mills College needed better exposure to tech companies. Generally speaking, a lot of companies don't seem to be aware of the college despite the fact that it has an excellent Computer Science department. Better yet, it is a mostly women's college. Seeing as how the tech sector doesn't have a good representation of women of color in its ranks, I thought that this would be a golden opportunity for the school to get better traction for its students.
More than anything, I felt that the time was right to start something like this for this vastly underserved section of the population in Oakland. We were able to secure a couple of fabulous keynote speakers: Erica Joy Baker, and Leah McGowan-Hare. A little known fact is that most women of color do not get paid to speak at conferences. We were happy to break that unfortunate situation for these keynote speakers. Hopefully, we have started a trend for these amazing women moving forward.
The conference was only a day, but we had many sessions and speakers. There was a gamut of subjects. Some of the attendees lamented the fact that they could not attend all of the sessions. We'll probably have to think about doing something to address that next year. Otherwise, it was an overwhelming success and achieved all of the goals that the committee hoped for.
As I was attending the conference, I started to think about how much women of color endure, especially Black women. There are so many micro-aggressions that take place in the course of a day, let alone a lifetime for them. I know this because as a woman of color, I have experienced and endured it. I don't want to focus on whether or not the people that evoke the micro-aggressions have an awareness of what they are doing. It's a fact and it happens. It will take a lot of foundational changes in society for us to move past those actions.
The end result of those actions is that black women suffer a condition now known as "weathering". Weathering is a term that Arline T. Geronimus coined in her research into what role stress plays in biological aging. The starkest result of this is that black women have significantly higher deaths after giving birth.
It turns out that the constant stress of racism has an effect on health. That seems obvious to me, but it wasn't obvious to other scientists when Ms. Geronimus underwent the research for her thesis and presented it to the scientific community. It was very controversial.
The way to think about weathering is what happens to wood over time when exposed to the elements. It develops a weathered look. This gives you a very stark and direct picture of what stress can do over time. Essentially, stress "weathers" you over time. It ages you prematurely.
Of course, people will say that it's been known that stress is a killer. It's been linked to heart disease and other diseases that point to a deterioration of function. It's been discussed and evaluated by the medical profession. And, it's been appearing as high blood pressure. However, no one, before Ms. Geronimus, ever made the connection to what micro-aggressions and racial prejudice as a form of stress can do to black women. One could make the case that it probably has the same kind of effect on black men. The difference here is that the life of a mother is at stake either during pregnancy or after the birth of the child.
While I was sitting there at the conference, I glanced at all of the younger faces in the audience. I then realized that some of them may die if they chose to become mothers--all because of racism. I didn't want to be so aware of this possibility for their futures.
Racism kills. It kills outrightly. It also kills us silently.
A heart can't survive surrounded by the wires of racism.