In mid-2020, the city of Seattle that has been my home for 5.75 years was one of the epicentres of the Black Lives Matter movement re-erupting after filmed deaths of black Americans at the hands of police in the USA went viral.
People at work burst out in virtue signalling and self-congratulatory back patting as they banned the words “black” and “white” and replaced them with less meaningful replacements. They weren’t being jerks. They were just clueless about how to make change to fix the huge societal problem that is institutionalised racism in the US.
It all frustrated me and I didn’t want to listen to another person tell me that my brown skinned existence would be fixed if I read a book about how not to be an anti-racist and thanked them for doing the same.
There was an uncited line I heard that went something like this… Reading a book about anti-racism doesn’t make you an anti-racist in the same way reading a book about mountain climbing doesn’t make you a mountain climber. You have to hike and walk up inclines and eventually climb a mountain before you can say that.
It made me wonder how I could take that idea and learn to climb mountains and at the same time help others to do that too.
That was when I discovered this TED Talk by South African writer Sisonke Msimang. It talked about taking action at the end of a book to help the author or the cause. She mentions tech people adding a button people could click to do that at the end of a book or on buying it.
This blew my mind because I worked in the one place where I could make this possible – Amazon Books. And I knew I could build anything.
I shared the talk with my leadership and it went viral through the organisation and all the way up to people who could make it real.
As I leave Amazon and the Books organisation for my next adventure, this stands as one of a dozen world changing sparks that I had the ability to make that could actually aid the #BLM cause and others. All because I am a geek who builds systems that millions of people use.
Take the 13 minutes it takes to listen to her speak in 2016 about something that will be so powerful in this new decade.
Damana Madden 