White guys with beards at BrooklynBeta, a composite image taken from the Attendees page at brooklynbeta.org.
I attended Brooklyn Beta yesterday, its fifth and final incarnation, a love-fest shindig with all the Cool Web People you undoubtedly know at least by reputation if you work on the Internet. And everyone is pretty unfailingly nice and pleasant to talk to, and you meet people you wouldn't have met otherwise, and everyone's really keen to share what they've learned. I love that about the web and the people who make it: there's no secret formulas, we all want each other to be able to do better work.
The talks themselves were far more inspirational than technical. Jane ni Dhulchaointigh, endearingly warm, smart and creative, talked about accidentally inventing Sugru, that magic goo that lets you hack and repair anything physical. Rookie publisher/editor/actress Tavi Gevinson, insanely smart and articulate, who just graduated from high school and is now on Broadway, was interviewed by Longform editor Max Linsky. Welsh jeans idea man Dave Hieatt talked about putting a town of 400 people back to work with good design. The Internet Archive's Jason Scott did a barnburning talk on the work they do as guerrilla digital preservationists, saving roughly 3 petabytes of recent Web history in a converted church, rescuing people's memories when digital platforms and services get acquired, merged or shut down. (You can Bittorrent all of GeoCities from The Pirate Bay, thanks to their work.)
And yet something about it all made me feel uneasy.
If you browse the Attendees list, you'll see how overwhelmingly white the audience was (though they titled it 'a melting pot'). All the presenters were white; most of the volunteers were; all of the organizers were. There were a smattering of East and South Asian attendees, some Latin names, but only about 5 black people including Baratunde Thurston (who I personally didn't see at any events).
This, even though Brooklyn itself is something like 33% African-American and/or Afro-Latino depending on which stats you read, and 20% Hispanic. That's weird.
I'm not going to blame the organizers for this - they have no control over who bought tickets. But at $300 a pop that's a lot of money for a self-employed person or someone just starting their career, in any case.
There is an undercurrent of that gentle, white, well-meaning hipster colonialism, underwritten by corporations like Adobe, Github, Shopify, and Squarespace, some of whom have been known to have diversity issues.
There is the issue of middle-class white people borrowing the cachet of a working-class, gritty, multiracial neighborhood as a launching pad for their creative dreams and businesses. Artists as shock troops of gentrification.
It's an undercurrent in popular culture that informs our desires; Jane ni Dhulchaointigh even mentioned being inspired by Demi Moore living in an artist loft in NY in the movie Ghost, when she was an art student with dreams of making it big.
In a related event, Portland architect Jeff Kovel noted (in reference to what made his city a hard-working creative hub) was the trope of "people crafting things with their hands, like their pioneer ancestors," i.e. the white middle class dream of giving up this somehow demeaning life spent shuffling paper and pixels and going back to the land to be Real People Doing Real Things.
This idea of "back to the land" needs further examination. Black people worked the land unwillingly for generations and didn't see a dime; they're still fighting to get to that point that white people complain about, sitting in an office, shuffling paper and pixels, accruing repesctability and power.
Poor folks of all races don't have the luxury of thinking of backbreaking, stultifyingly dull rural life as some sort of Martha Stewart lifestyle choice. Minorities are still working the land, and Americans resent their presence because it reminds them of the class differentials in their society.
But that aesthetic has a strong pull. White hipsters with farmer-plaid shirts, 1930s haircuts, retro glasses and lumberjack beards were present en masse at Brooklyn Beta, verging on the point of self-parody (see pic at top).
Portlandia neatly skewered that aesthetic in 'The Dream of the 1890s' ; white hipster bands taking on homespun 1940s dresses, banjos, ukeleles (always the goddamn ukeleles), fiddles, washtub basses and demure, wispy white-girl folky vocals.
Some white hipster folkies, yesterday.
I've chatted with yorkwhitaker about this; the idea that the white middle class is obsessed with the past, where people of color are moving into the future.
For instance, some white folks I know have a violent allergic reaction to artists of color like Nicki Minaj or M.I.A or even Kanye West, whose performances and art are decidedly futuristic. From the wild colours and textures in their clothes, to machine-generated sounds you haven't heard before, to glitchy music videos; pushing the envelope away from what we know and are comfortable with, and dosed with an unapologetically forward sense of ego and sexuality.
Afrofuturism and sci-fi imagery in a tour poster for Kanye West, the cover of Janelle Monae's The Archandroid album, and in fashion (more here)
"That's not music! How is Nicki Minaj even popular??" To someone raised on traditional rock and roll, it's challenging stuff.
So in my mind, this whole white-hipster concept of "authenticity" feels like a polite way of being reactionary and exclusionary.
It feels like in their retro aesthetic and occasional outbursts of complaint, white people are afraid of the future; particularly, a future where they aren't asked for their opinion, where their aesthetic and discourse and even economic clout are no longer the dominant ones in society. (Surely GamerGate is this sentiment expressed via other avenues.)
I still think BrooklynBeta was a valuable experience. But it's a reminder that it's incumbent upon the tech industry and the design industry and the educational pipeline to open up opportunities for people who are not already white and well-off to get into the business, and to actively invite people of different backgrounds, paths, histories. It means outreach. BushwickGamma and NewOrleansDelta and FergusonEpsilon.
It means bringing the cost of access, in time and money, down.
Getting a degree in design or user experience from a recognized school like Carnegie Mellon (and the connections/internships you get), for instance, literally costs a house. Going back to school to do the MFA in Interaction Design at the School for Visual Arts isn't cheap, if you can even afford to live in NYC to do it. The newly-minted Center Centre (aka the Unicorn Institute) in Chattanooga costs $60K for a 2-year program, though they do throw in a lot of nice stuff.
It's insanely hard even for middle-class white people to get the required (over)education you need to get a foot in the door, so imagine how hard it is when you don't have money, credit, or the free time to pursue it, and when there are other systemic barriers and prejudices working against you. (Or even semi-organized prejudice, in the case of startup advisors who tell white Stanford bros to hire more people like themselves.)
And for what payoff? According to a recent study published in USA Today, Hispanics make $16,353 less than equally skilled white colleagues; Asians make $8,146 less; blacks, $3,656 less.
Hispanic women in tech make the least of all, and women asking for raises are much more likely to be rejected vs. men.
Where do we go from here? As a famous rat once said, "Hopefully, forward."
