It wasn’t supposed to be this way…

This framework was started by a diverse group of people who assembled in 1999 to collaborate on how to end racism. The group was called the 2020 project, and our commitment to each other was to be accountable to one another for the end of racism in the United States by the year 2020.

Its 2020 now, and I can safely say that racism/white supremacy is still alive and impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans and billions around the world. The 2020 project failed.

Back in the late nineties, the 2020 project got together several times a month, to collaborate and hold each other accountable to dismantle the American system of racism/whiteness. In 2001, one of the founders of the group, Pat passed away very suddenly at a young age of complications from sickle-cell anemia. Her husband, Ron, excused himself from the group. 

The 2020 project, having lost its two most active and visible African American leaders subsequently fell apart, and the work we had begun together ground to a standstill for some time.  

After several, less successful attempts to restart the 2020 project, I decided to attempt to complete the thinking and document the framework we began together.  What you are reading now is the result of that effort.

It’s is quite different than what we started with back then.  

That is how this framework, (which was envisioned to be a collective, intersectional, communitarian framework for ending racism), came to be authored by myself (a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, middle-class, male technologist).   It’s also how a project that was envisioned to end racism by the year 2020, has largely remained dormant for the past 20 years.

Who am I?

I’m a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, upper middle-class, college-educated man, I don’t have any special claim to speak about racism or being oppressed. I don’t have any special academic credentials. I have no lived experience of being mistreated by Racism.  I’m not the first, or only, or most accomplished white person to want to do something to end Racism; far from it.

Insofar as I have something new to bring to the conversation, it largely springs from my perspective as an urban technologist, and from my experience as a white person who went to work for leaders of color implementing technologies that supporting both racist and anti-racist policies.

What else do you need to know about me?

My name is Jamey Harvey.  I studied Political Theory at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) where I was lucky enough to be exposed to the writings of a wide range of thinkers of color, radical, queer, and feminist political theorists, as well as a wide range of smart, mostly dead, white guys.

The opportunity was largely wasted on me.

Despite the well-meaning efforts of my professors, advisors, teachers, and classmates somehow I (and most of my white, liberal, progressive friends) came out of school content to be enveloped in a protective and comfortable cottonwool of whiteness (and maleness, and straightness, and cis’ness, and middle class’ness, for that matter).

When I graduated from Santa Cruz I went to work in Silicon Valley where I became fascinated with the way technologists, technologies, and the ways that dedicated groups of nerds shape lives both intentionally and accidentally.  

I started my first company in Silicon Valley at 23, and have gone on to found at least six different technology companies: some more successful than others, but most of which were cutting edge innovators. I have a legitimate claim to have produced breakthroughs in the fields of entertainment, social networking, systems interoperability, peer-to-peer networking, location based services and government transparency.

The 2020 project was both life-changing and heartbreaking for me.  It was terrifying and exhilarating, and in the end, the group was too fragile to survive Pat’s death.  Failure brought me face-to-face with my numerous limitations as an antiracist.  The start-up tech ecosystem I inhabited was extraordinarily  homogenous: white, middle class, suburban and insular.   My life, my thoughts, my language, my habits and my culture, were shaped by Racism, without interruption or insight.  I was fragile and dangerous and stuck. I needed to make a change.

In 2003, I accepted a job running E-government (and later almost all software development) in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) for the government of the District of Columbia.  DC had recently come out of financial receivership.  The mayor, Anthony Williams, was a well known technocrat, determined to use technology, data, best practices and especially the Internet to improve the lives of the residents of the District of Columbia.  

Sunsetting systems and antiracism

Even though the technology agency I worked in was probably 60-70% white, many or most of the people I worked with in the city government, were black, latinX, or immigrants.  It was, by far, the most diverse environment I’d ever been a part of.  Importantly, the nature of my role brought me into regular contact and relationship with people of color and with black people in particular. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by black friends, rivals, allies, adversaries, superiors, and subordinates.

I learned that everything, (and I mean everything), that I had learned and been taught about black people by society, media, life, lore, common wisdom, and life up to that point was complete and utter bullshit.  

Racism (including my own carefully colorblind Racism and complicity in keeping white supremacy hidden from view) stopped being a theoretical problem for me once I joined the community of technologists working to transform the DC government.     

I am regularly confronted, still, by how my own behaviors, beliefs, actions, and alliances support the system of Racism; hurt people of color; and produce inequitable results.  I’ve struggled to escape that undertow, with mixed results. 

My job in the DC Government (and my continued work as a consultant today) was to facilitate wrapping our collective brains around big entrenched, legacy technology systems that persisted and replicated themselves, seemingly, perpetually.  Many of these old technologies were a barrier to implementing new antiracist policies and programs.  Most systems we were replacing served no group of stakeholders well, and many measurably hurt the constituents they were supposed to serve.  Somehow the old technologies were inevitably, vigorously defended nonetheless, often by the people whose lives they appeared to be negatively impacting.  Stakeholders feared changing to a new system, even when their current systems were literally killing people.  

Maybe especially when their current systems were killing people.

Moreover, there was a very common “anti-pattern” that I began to suspect was relevant to antiracism work.  Very often, hidden in the shadows, behind the angry, distressed, and fearful users of the system, were hidden stakeholders: politicians, consultants, companies, (and the technologists that worked at them) who were doing everything in their considerable power to make sure that old systems couldn’t be replaced.   They refused to share documentation about how their technologies worked.  They refused to maintain interfaces that allowed their systems to interoperate with successor systems.  Many of them even hired lobbyists to go over the heads of the program managers, or agency directors, or even the mayors of the city themselves to maintain their revenue streams with the city.

Without exception, these “anti-pattern” technologists tried to remain invisible with great success.  The most successful vendors never appeared in any contract with the city.  They were hidden under layers of other companies who profited by helping hide whose hands were on the rudder.

This is where the idea originated that Racism is a dominant, legacy technology that must be sunsetted. 

Like Racism, technologies seem to fight back to resist being turned off.  Otherwise rational people, even ones who profess to despise the systems we are removing, become almost possessed to fight change when you touch the systems they have lived in for most of their lives.  Their behavior is eerily familiar to the behavior of white people when you ask them to examine or touch the system of Racism.

Could what I learned sunsetting entrenched technologies in the District of Columbia be instructive (or even vitally important) to ending racism?

This framework is my attempt to explore that question.

Technologists engage and extend larger, much broader conversations, crafted by leaders who came before.  What you’re reading today is what many technologists would start with to take on a large intractable, entrenched and seemingly impossible problem:  a framework to understand, decompose and elaborate the design of Racism in order to formulate a strategy to sunset it. 

If Racism is a technology, it is critical to understand the system, in order to end it.

Thank you for considering these hypotheses about the the nature of the system of Racism.  I hope you find them valuable, and you pass them on to others who would be interested in participating in this project.

Your participation is essential.