Black Lives Matter Special - Cancelling Cultures with Ian Forrester - Show Transcript

This is a special edition of the Tech For Good Live podcast, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In the first of three episodes guest hosted by Ian Forrester (BBC R&D, Cubicgarden), he's joined by:

David Eastman (Software Developer)

Erinma Ochu (Curator, @sheffdocfest)

Ethar Alali (MD, Axelisys),

Naomi Mwasambili (Founder, Chanua)

To find out more about Black Lives Matter, to support the movement or to download helpful resources, visit www.blacklivesmatter.com.

Transcript

Ian: Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Tech for Good Live Podcast, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I'm Ian Forrester and I'll be your host today. So I'll let the people introduce themselves starting with Ethar.

Ethar: Hi, thanks Ian. My name's Ethar, I'm a tech founder and entrepreneur and I've been working in the tech sector for..errr.. too many years. I was planning on joining this subject obviously as a person of colour and kinda see things have or how they haven't changed in my career.

Ian: Erinma?

Erinma: Hi there I'm Erinma Ochu. I'm locked down, if we're still locked down in London, in Hackney. I'm a Senior Research fellow at the University of Reading and, um, my works focused around the digital society and its disruptions, of which, the pandemic, is one! 

Ian: It certainly is! And David Eastman...

David: Hello! Yeah I'm locked down in West London.  Yeah I suppose by now that I'm a veteran coder and developer, usually sort of agile consultant but right now I'm a games developer with a game coming out, probably next month. 

Ian: And Naomi…

Naomi: Hi I'm Naomi Mwasambili and I'm on lockdown in Liverpool. Liverpool might be the only premiership team to manage to win the premiership in lockdown, that might be something they can put down there. Um I am half Tanzanian and half Jamiancan, born in Yorkshire. I run an organisation called Chanua and we work on a range of digital health and mental health projects. I'm also very involved in social entrepreneurship, social enterprise sector, so... I support, mentor, I’m involved as a trustee. I like social business.

Ian: I'm Ian Forrester, I'm the host and I work for BBC R&D. I'm kind of generally a well known person - if you just Google for Cubic Garden you'll probably find me and find all the weird and wonderful writings that I do. I think that's it, but I want to start with the question... 

There's two things - and thanks to Tech for Good [TFGL] for allowing us to have some space to do this, but there's a load of questions and a load of things we wanna kinda cover and I think we want to start with the thing that kinda probably started it for a lot of people - and it's not started it for us that's for sure! - is George Floyd. The murder of George Floyd. Where were you when it happened and what's your reaction to it? I'll start with Naomi.

Naomi: Okay I've been thinking about where I was and to be perfectly honest I was probably in my house, because it was in the middle of lockdown, with a lot of time to think which in life many of us don't have because we're busy and we've been doing a lot of different things. I guess my first response was another black body being killed and that video being shared as if it's entertainment and I wholly avoid... and I think what's catalysed out of it has been good. But actually, my first instinct was like, you know, how can we support young people from being traumatised from this video. As important as it is that we know that this is going on, my initial feelings were, you know, young black boys specifically and young black children should not be seeing these videos in their WhatsApp messages like it’s normal. And so I can't specifically remember where I was other than in my house surrounded by a lot of plants, but I remember the feeling that I got and what that catalysed which was connecting with black men in network and black women, and setting up groups to think about how we could look at life beyond the trauma of these videos and the experiences we were experiencing as black people in the USA, but also in the UK and globally as well.

Ian: I think David you said that when you saw it, you know, kind of… once again.

David: Yeah for it was just oh God not again. There were a couple of things which made it distinctive. First of all the amount of time he died over. I mean how long was it? 8 minutes? 9 minutes? There's that American comedian who did a sketch on that specifically and he titled it with the exact time. 

Ian: Oh David Chapelle?

David: David Chapelle thank you, that was quite interesting. But the point is that made it a bit distinctive and the reaction afterwards of course was unexpected by everybody because far from people saying "oh not again", the actual reaction was very specific. Partly we think because it was during lockdown so people had a little more time to think about it, maybe too much time, but the result was that we did all look in ourselves and say "yeah how often are we going to be here maybe now is enough and enough is enough" I think was the underlying factor that spread it throughout the world. It wasn't just another one, there has to be an underlining here and that was that. For me, so I'm mixed race, so for me the killing in London in 2007 of Jean De Menezes on the underground, purely for being brown and having a bag on, I've been brown and on the underground with a bag, so I've always felt measures but a little bit worried about that. From that time onwards all of these sorts of things have had a personal effect, but this one perhaps as I say because of the length of time it took, it wasn't an accidental shot "these things happen" it wasn't that at all. It was somebody sitting on somebody for nine minutes. That made the difference.

Ian: Erinma?

Erinma: For me I think it's really important to take the emphasis off the victim, and you know my heart goes out to the families that have been affected by state and police brutality and it's not the first time. For me I have to look at how systematically this happens and to look critically at the structures that create this and those conversations happened and were happening under lockdown before George Floyd was killed and so for me being an academic and thinking in this space, but also you know seeing in everyday life the hidden violence that happens to people that we don't hear about - domestic violence, in particular violence against women, violence in relation to black trans lives as well, across the spectrum of black life and that lockdown would be a particular challenge for black people but also present a kind of opportunity to rethink about those spaces in which can we can feel safe and that we can be ourselves and that we can be alive. So for me, you know, horrible to look at that, what was happening… absolute abject horror at the possibility of the response that could turn to, you know I was frightened, I did think "what if this turns to riots". Amazed that it didn't, but it didn't you know, I think because the judges decided to not let these policemen off. That decision and that response I think turned it into peaceful protests. Of course there was some rioting, but you know for me I think it’s really important to look at the ways in which black people over decades, over centuries have responded under these circumstances and continue to, like Naomi says, and especially black women carrying the burden when black men die. And we have to think about those traumas that sit through our communities but also to think how do we live through it? 

Ian: Ethar, do you have anything you want to add?

Ethar: Yeah and I just have to echo everyone sentiments so far. I found myself in lockdown at the time as everyone else was. I had some of the initial thoughts which have been mentioned so far specifically around "not again" and having seen, I suppose catalogue of these over the past 18 months and longer, it kept solidifying the idea that this has been happening forever and the only difference now is that we have cameras to film it. So, it was obviously terrible for the victims, but the catalyst for a lot of this change was obviously that event - whether we want to see it or not. There's questions around whether or not it would have happened and also given the melting pot of, I suppose the context around the American administration, what the specific state had in their responses to that, was quite interesting to also watch. As Erinma said the fact that there was a quick charging of the officers I think did dampen the potential risks around that, but that in itself only deals with the immediacy of George Floyd's death it doesn't deal with the wider issues of course of systemic racism, which exist by temporally and spatially within that environment. You get systemic racism from before people were born, legislation is in some cases built on the idea of fundamental racism. If you look at the UK statute we have aspects of the commonwealth immigration act, which back in the 1970s effectively baked in racism into UK statute, at the end of the day, through two or three different laws and that's obviously led to Windrush and the quite, I suppose, abhorrent position that's people that have a full right to citizenship are suddenly being made stateless almost on a whim. And that's actually another massive issue. So I think there are parallels, quite significant ones, even though the concrete mechanisms are slightly different. For me that's someone who's been trying to be an activist in this space for a quite a while, whilst it was immediately no surprise, the length I think was quite significant and there was a lot rightly made of the length of time it took for George Floyd to die. But, also I think the dignity and the movement that's spread beyond the American shores was also I think key in this and while we say there were riots, yes that's true, but a lot of members of that were also not necessarily sympathetic to the cause. There's a lot of things and it's a hodgepodge of stuff and there's a lot of focus because people have time to think, but also because let's say of the geopolitical forces at play in the USA as well. There's quite a lot for me to think about and I'm not quite, and I don't know about anybody else, but I've not quite come to a cohesive position on it and where do we go from here. 

Ian: I think that's fine. I think a lot of people, erm you know, I was listening to one just recently talking about that it's okay to say "I don't know" and "where do we go from here?". There's so much. I really want to pull up on a point actually about what Naomi covered which is seeing this in your feed, sharing it, it's everywhere that kind of retriggering of people. I remember... I've only seen it once and I don't want to see it again, basically. There's a piece, a short piece, which just goes through the time of what he says at certain points and even that is enough. So I think it's interesting people kind of sharing this round and this probably comes into some of the stuff with Twitter and what's happening with Trump and, you know silencing and stuff like that, and it probably goes into the open letter, Eastmad [David Eastman], if you want to pick up on that because obviously we don't really have, well I don't think we have freedom of speech here - am I correct in that? Somebody? [Laughs] 

Ethar: So we have freedom of expression. The idea of freedom of expression is that as long as it doesn't violate another human right that expression is valid. So the idea of assessing someone's freedom of speech is actually vetted by whether... or not rather... it itself is a violation of someone's else's right. And that is specifically the European Commission of Human Rights Article 17 I believe, which does make very clear that…

Ian: How do you remember that? (laughs)

Ethar: I did a lot of support, and CAB work and part of that was trying to understand the laws that underpin fundamental society basically. So in essence that was also part of the International Bill of Rights, but also as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed in obviously sort of 1948. But in essence the European Convention, and the UK human rights by proxy, do specify the human rights contained and enshrined in anybody in those laws can not themselves be used in defense to violate someone else's human rights. So the idea of freedom of expression is itself, naturally feted in the event that you then use that expression to violate someone else's human rights. So this argument around whether Twitter and Facebook are responsible or not in allowing it to happen, in terms of clarity, obviously everyone knows what's been said by certain heads of government around the world, not naming any names, but in essence that freedom of expression itself has to be put in the context of the whole set of rights as one block, if that makes sense, you can’t treat them just in isolation, so freedom of speech is itself...I’ll call it non-existent in the UK without the concept of expression and as a result the feted nature of that. 

David: If I can just slide in there because it’s part of the open letter, and also we have academics here so they can finish us off. In fact it didn't start now it started with Sam Gyiamh from the Conservatives wondering whether the problems with the quote "cancel culture" i.e. people saying to not platforming, whether he could while he was an Education Minister try to change that, or alter that, or affect it and this has led partly to a lot of insecurity from people about what the rules actually are. I'm sort of glad you asked that Ian. The open letter today while in a way it is pathetic, it also underlines the fact that people aren't sure. So the open letter basically is a lot of, including J K Rowling which is its own problem but ignoring that, is a lot of people basically saying "you used to listen to us but now sometimes people can no platform us or cancel us and so forth". And basically they're writers and academics and different sets of people, and Malcolm Gladwell signed it as well…

Ian: Did he? 

David: Oh yeah! I won't go through every… we could spend too long talking about who did and who didn't sign it… because people are already rescinding. But the basic upshot, and I would like to pass off to Erinma here because I'm not an academic and she is, the thing is that it's the actual platforming and no platforming and the actual fact of cancelling what people are allowed to say, the response being of course that people in power gave always had the ability to control what's been spoken - I don't believe that's ever changed - and all that's happening now is that there's a little bit of punching up rather than punching down. And that's really what the open letter was talking about. 

Erinma: I mean, for me, just to respond on that, the thing that made me get really worried was to see that moment when there was a journalist filming what was happening in America and the police were stopping the press from filming. That's when things get dangerous and that's when I'm like, really concerned. There's one thing about how like a person wants to change the world and picks up a camera and in that moment what happens what do you film, what do you focus on, and we've seen that you know, importantly the extension from the black civil rights movement, Black Panthers to now, we saw Black leaders in the 60s being murdered. Black men being murdered and the shift for Black Lives Matter is that we have a whole host of people now as a collective, obviously it was a collective back then but you're not completely sure exactly who are the leaders because there's the possibility that everyone could be an activist even though Black Lives Matter was set up by three women in response to a previous murder and you know it spread around the world. So because there's different types of leaders and different types of leadership, it creates the possibility of creating news and sharing news, in ways we perhaps hadn't imagined before which then can't be controlled. On the one hand that has it’s positives, that your newsfeed isn't being controlled by the state and you're getting news, the way the news is produced...Stuart Hall has taught us this, many years ago... that the people producing the content, that might not resonate with other people. So you know for me, there's a moment of possibility between journalism, as we know it, in its traditional forms, and journalism where you have your citizens picking up and sharing stories from the ground. How we live with those stories and what we do and our response to them, is the bit that I'm always keen to get to. For me, it's not about the technology it's about the people and our response to seeing these messages. What do they trigger us to do, to move towards a different future.

Ian: That kind of goes back to what Naomi was talking about...

Naomi:  Ok, yeah, I just wanted to, I guess, even the concept of cancel culture is quite interesting for me and how we talk about it in the context of Twitter, but actually for me the biggest example of cancel culture is colonialism because it's implicitly cancelled cultures. You know we can look at things with a very micro lens, and we can look at the result of those things, but actually when we look back at examples of where whole cultures have been cancelled and demonised and the impact of that for Black lives, African lives, you know Black lives in the UK and the US has meant that the values, the norms and the behaviours you know that we now feel are normalised, that are taught to us, are expected of us, don't align with how we can live life effectively. So for me we can talk about the cancel culture and the fact that when someone says something some people don't like it and everyone jumps on them online and they take their Twitter feed off because it's becoming offensive. Or we can really look at the systemic examples of cancelling of culture and the impact that that has had across all our areas of society and continues to have an impact across all of our lives as well and the negative and detrimental impact for us. So for me when talking about cancel culture in this context, we've really got to look to the systems also being at play that we also collude with, and we're part of as well, that cancel culture. 

Ian: I hadn't really thought about it in that way, but that just chimes so much... it really does. I think that's the thing, most of us already knew this, but for a lot of my friends and people that I work with, they've realised there is this systematic racism and it isn't a "thing", I’m doing little quote marks, it's a "real thing" and it affects everything and if affects so much and you're right… let's just cancel this whole culture. Let's just do this, let's just wade in and do whatever we want and the technology is the enabler, but it's not really, it's about the people and what they have in their heads about what they want to achieve and what they want to do. 

Erinma: For me what was under lockdown was to reach out, and I can't remember who called who, but it was to reach out to Naomi and say, you know, we were talking about things… we were worried about mental health, we were talking things through and we were thinking about how we both grow our own food, but under lockdown we were having these conversations and it's kind of who do you reach out to in that moment to have a conversation which is going to be a positive,  life affirming one, which takes you back from the edge. And so my response was also who do I want to talk to? I remember thinking there's so many people at work that I don't necessarily want to talk to, necessarily [laughs] I need to be surrounded by positivity, and it's not to say that those people at work aren't nice people, it's just that they don't know how to talk about race and racism and they don't completely understand what it is to be anti-racist because most of the people that I work with are white. However, there are some amazing students who are thinking about decolonising the curriculum and sharing literature and readings beyond what they've been given in their curriculum. So that's the kind of thing which gives me hope, is to see who's looking to what else is out there and going beyond that kind of mainstream. For me, what sits beyond the mainstream is always interesting and so in reaching out to Naomi and the work on her platform, which of course she can talk about, because she's working with young people who don't have everything that everyone has in society, might not have access to digital necessarily, and she's getting behind those young people and that's something I want to get behind. I've always been taught by people, when I was at university and I was volunteering in a Black community centre, the West Indian Community Centre on Carmoor Road in Longsight, one of the things I was taught was to always look beyond myself. If I'm safe and I'm okay, I've got food in my fridge and a roof over my head, I can sit down eat my dinner, I've got clothes on my back - I'm fine. Who do I need to reach out to who isn't fine? My response always turns to that and I'm reminded of that - if I start moaning about things - people in the community up in Manchester would say to me "Erinma, we're going to go down I'm going to take you to this church, to this centre you're going to meet some people" and then I'd meet some people and I'd shut the hell up and start listening. It starts with listening really. 

Ian: It's amazing isn't it, when you look at the bigger picture, it suddenly all starts to make a lot more sense. That's what happening people are starting to go "we're in a bit of a bubble (actually, we’re in a big bubble) and actually there's so much more we could be doing to basically bring change and bring people together”. Naomi we were just talking about what you do - do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Naomi: Yeah so I guess, it's probably apt to talk about what we've been doing in lockdown and throughout this period this period and that's definitely brought myself and Erinma together to be doing some more work. So, at the beginning of lockdown I'd actually just got back from Tanzania. I landed back in the UK in March and they were screening and taking it more seriously than we were actually [laughs] - so I got back and I was very aware things were probably going to change quite rapidly. So we work with a range of people, but on a specific project we've been running for the past few years called Neuro Champions, we teach young people about the brain, mental health and neuroscience through playing games. A lot of the work we do is with young people who have care experience, so maybe means that they might have grown up in care, they may live in foster care or they may have left care and be living on their own in supported accomodation. So for us, teaching young people about themselves and the brain is really really important, that they know about their own development and often when we think about mental health and wellbeing, we think about it at the point where it's got to illness and it's quite isolating, and we wanted to bring joy to that. But we were aware that with lockdown looming, a lot of young people would be isolated and excluded and often there would be going people who weren't getting support. And so we came together with one local authority we're working with and after that we managed to get some tech force funding from PUBLIC and NHS X to develop a platform that we called NeuroLove because we wanted to have an online space that was providing love for young people. It wasn't about how to survive mental health in COVID or how to manage your anxiety in COVID, which a lot of information seems to be about out there, we wanted it to be a space where young people could talk to someone, where they could get resources to create and keep active, so their emotional and physical well-being was being nurtured and they felt that they were loved. So we rapidly built this platform, we had the idea in March and it was implemented in April and we had young people using it, which shows you can do things quite quickly under pressure in a very distributed way, and over time we've had more collaborations. So we're able to work with Erinma and Sheffield Doc Fest to give young people with care experience the opportunity to create mirco-commissions, documentaries about their experiences, but alongside that they can receive therapy as well, we've been able to have a lot of things on there exercise, world dance on the platform as well. So yeah ‘Tech for Good’ for us is how you can create a loving space online as well for young people in a world which isn't always as loving as it should be. So that’s just a brief example [laughs]

Ian: Cool. We said we would definitely cover something very techy, so is there anything in particular that has made you put your arm in the air and just go "I can get through this" [laughs]. For me one of the things I was going to throw onto the plate was the Black Tech Pipeline. I know that David and Ethar were talking about there's a big problem with this in banking. I didn't even think about banking, I don't know anyone of colour, I know lots of people... I know nobody of colour who is in banking so yeah what's happening there? 

David: Without being too specific I worked in Canary Wharf for quite a few months among a particular set of banks. It is a very specifically white area which is certainly a bit worrying and there is a slightly, slightly enhanced visibility of Asian men, but zero Afro- Caribbean. I'm perfectly used to being, even though I'm only mixed race, perfectly used to being the only Black person within a team. I think in those cases I might have been on the floor, it was particularly bad. 

Ian: How big's the floor?

David: [Laughs] Well think of.. okay… imagine a block in Canary Wharf, one of those famous tower blocks and think that entire floor [laughs]. That far as you can see. The only reason that's broken up recently is because, there's a lot of outsourcing in Bangalore so as I've said there is a higher Asian presence. The thing is, the reason that can't be disconnected is because of course capitalism and the banking world and the results that often Black people find themselves quite low in certain, in fact a lot of social positions and social economic positions, cannot possibly be thought of as an accident, when you realise there is far too much difference in the representation, in areas that you would have hoped would be far more equal. I mean in a capitalist country, like the UK, it's great that the government makes a visible effort to get representation in different areas…

Ian: A visible effort?

David: ...there’s bugger all interest [laughs]...the underlying nature, like banking, which lets face it, London and quite frankly the whole of England is sort of running on, isn't in any way and no-one even mentions it. And I find that pretty worrying. I don't know what Ethar's experiences are or if they are similar to what I've seen?

Ethar: Pretty much yeah. I did my time in the City and I call it time for a reason. The problem with the City is that it's probably the most explicitly racist place I have ever experienced in the UK, certainly in tech. Mainly because, let's just say the racism even bleeds into the recruitment process. So you'll often get a recruitment agency who says "we want this set of skills" and you think "I have that set of skills, I'll apply". Often what comes back is either nothing or in one particular, I'll call it "fortunate case", I put that in quotes, I received someone telling me "well, it's a very insidious environment, you probably wouldn't fit in there. "What do you mean I wouldn't fit in?" knowing exactly what he meant "well let's just say your profile doesn't fit"... Okaaay… I have banking, it's retail banking I appreciate but you do get that? “Yes", but you don't even require banking on the role "that's okay...but your profile? You do understand what I mean don't you?". What a weird conversation that was. But that's not the first time that's ever happened so for me certainly, the experiences probably echo David's. I've got my own anecdotal stories but certainly tying to, I'll call it the demographic split, a lot of the higher Indian presences you get there are typically in the technology side and not typically "front ofs" and certainly a lot less in tier one banking space,  investment banking space, compared to tiers two and three so that's what I've tended to find. So yes when you talk about systemic racism it's quite explicit in the banking system in a lot of ways unless you're doing, relatively speaking, quite menial jobs so bank tellers, assistants, those sort of people you'll see people of colour there. But that's not the investment banking world, that's retail banking. Certainly from my experience and from the other experience of people I've known there does seem to be a very explicit step there. So while it is systemic still, there is quite an overt gate. Now fortunately like I said I've come to experience recruitment agencies as they are and I don't know if anyone else kind of, certainly for me, felt like a very very [inaudible]... introducing that process so.

Ian: How is it in academia?

Erinma: So I think for me it's important to get in control of the recruitment process so I'm always looking to be the one who writes the criteria, who writes the job descriptions, who does the questions for the panel, who gets the word out. I need to be in control of the process to make sure, of course there's not enough of us who do that, or who know how to do it so let's pass on that knowledge. I'm all for open knowledge and sharing knowledge. I think the challenge is… money is a technology and it's been set up in the same way that the sugar plantations were and that's not put in our favour, let's put it that way. We didn't build the system, so we need to think outside of the box and think what kind of systems and technologies could work. So here's a crazy thought I'll throw out there that I've been thinking about at the moment - this is my ice-cream moment in the rain…

Ian: We like crazy thoughts…

Erinma: [Laughs] Yeah, but basically I'm growing sweetcorn in my back yard and not everyone has a space to grow food, but actually, thinking about food as a possibility to rethink money is a really interesting question. Because what happens when you have the possibility that you can supply your food to some extent yourself and you also understand how to nurture the soil and keep a whole process going that's not short-lived, but long-term, and for me there's something really interesting about how do we get to be thinking more long-term. So, going back to thinking about what Angela Davis would say about this moment being a moment of possibility that's connected and extends from the 60s to now. You know it's amazing to be alive in the same time as Angela Davis who escaped the death penalty - saved by a Black sister - I'm not going to spoil that story, look it up, look who got her out of jail, it's incredible. So we need to back one another and think differently. 

Ian: Nice yeah, that's a great story and it's like - it's not a story it's true!

Naomi: Just on the back of the end of that story about people working together, we promote individualism with our lists and our individualistic way of being and founders of organisations and that's not what changes systems. That's not what creates new systems, it's not individual people. So you know the importance of us knowing how to work together which requires us to trust each other and to be able to come together and collaborate. Seeing good examples of collaboration is really important because when we talk about the tech pipeline, everyone likes a new idea, so actually people are funding new ideas and everyone likes a brown face to go talk about their idea. But when you actually get to a point about making any systematic change or developing something at scale that's where there is a stop. We've really got to look at how we nurture the new systems because I believe that we need to create alternatives, it's not necessarily about looking at systems - again I'll go back to colonialism - which have been created to maintain the status quo and maintain power because that's what they are there to do. You know when you talk about the City that is where the core of the wealth of the majority of the world is and so why would you have Brown faces there? Why would you have Brown faces that want to advocate for their communities, and their families, their villages? You would have people who want to maintain the status quo. We need to look at how we can create alternatives and we need to be able to work together to be able to do that and so we need to learn to trust each other. Learn that actually, you know, individual benefit alone is not beneficial without other people coming along with you on that journey. And then just share. Share what that looks like because I think you know I've worked in many different systems and I guess as a Black female I've been raised to have a low confidence in myself and lack of belief so I always feel that I've got to prove myself which burns the majority of us out. And actually we are good enough and we can do things, it's just actually we've got to create different environments to be able to create the systems that are going to help us flourish more. So I just say we need to look at alternatives and we need to work together. 

Ian: David did you have anything or?

David: I do. I sort of don't in a way because that's a nice positive ending. Mine isn't quite so positive. I share with you Ian, that we both have British sounding names and I have a feeling that I've got into, and you've probably had the same thing, a few interviews that I may not have got into if our names hadn't suggested that as, if I said we had a "different profile". I have been in the room with about five seconds, 10 seconds, it can be a little longer "Ahh where do we start with this interview?" and I'm just waiting for them like "yeah, the ball is in your court, I'm here” [laughs]. And of course to be positive it's an opportunity to prove yourself, but I think we all have that feeling "why are we still proving ourselves?" this far down. It's a little bit of a pity but yeah it's still a thing and perhaps, to be more positive, we still need to do… we want to look forward to - a time when we don't need to still continue to prove, just ‘be’ maybe. 

Ian: I'm nodding my head quite a lot. I will end with a positive quote which kind of goes with what Naomi was saying and that is Buckminster Fuller one of my favourite quotes - "You'll never change things by fighting the existing reality, to change something, build a new model which makes the existing model obsolete." And I think that's what we're trying to do because the existing model is broken and we all know that.

So on that note, thank you very much…

Erinma: Ian, can we do one shout out and it's to Kym and Jay from Triple Cripples who are doing their thing and if anyone feels like they should throw some pennies their way go check out Triple Cripples. We have to think about disability during these times and the ways in which incredible possibility springs from those who live with difference.

[music]

Outro:

Ian: That’s all we have time for today! Thanks for listening.                

If you have anything to say about what we talked about, let us know on twitter @techforgoodlive or email hello@techforgood.live, we’d love for you to join in the discussion.And sure, we will definitely be interested in the feedback. 

To find out more about Black Lives Matter, to support the movement or to download helpful resources, visit www.blacklivesmatter.com. And I would say, just talk about it with everybody...one of the things that really changes things is people talking about it with people that normally wouldn’t want to engage with this conversation, so that’s really good.

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If you enjoy listening to the Tech for Good Live podcast, please consider giving us a friendly review on iTunes, and I’ll just let everyone quickly say goodbye, goodbye everyone...

All: Bye!