Black Coders Matter

Arif Gursel talks about his career in computer science, beginning at Microsoft.

https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2016/12/20/black-coders-matter

“It’s one of the instances in my life that’s burned in,” Gursel recalls, more than 15 years later. “I’ll never forget it.” In the dining room Gursel was met by hundreds of pale-skinned, staring faces. He was the lone black person.

“I open the cafeteria door—I’m a young kid with dreadlocks, walking into this homogenous environment of white males, who are responding by looking at me like, ‘Who’s this?’ ” Gursel remembers wandering the cafeteria, weathering awkward eye contact until J Allard, Xbox’s cofounder, finally called him over. “It was like the first day of high school, but there you can find a cultural connection with someone. Here, I was just isolated.”

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The awkward incident in the Xbox cafeteria his first day was just a taste of what was to come. Throughout his time at Microsoft, and later at Zillow and at retail mapping company Point Inside, Gursel claims he witnessed again and again the vagaries of discrimination and racial insensitivity. People sharing an elevator with him might clutch their bags and move to the corner. A “Good morning” was often met with phrases like, “What it do?” (“People are always trying to dap and ‘bro’ you,” Gursel says. “Man, that shit pisses black people off.”) At Zillow, he says his floor of developers blasted rap music laced with the N word. (“It was, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” he remembers. “It would never be ‘kike, kike, kike,’ or ‘fag, fag, fag,’ because some of them are Jewish, and some of them are gay, so that’s important to them.”) At Microsoft, a team leader, drunk at a party, allegedly bemoaned the required interviewing of minority candidates; another said he hoped Gursel appreciated the “Aunt Jemima” motif of a party.

“The pan-African community is damaged by years and years of institutional racism. We’re walking around with PTSD—posttraumatic slavery disorder. Four hundred years of trauma, and it’s never stopped,” Gursel says. “Trump says, ‘Make America great again.’ Name one day that was great for my community. We’ve always lived under the thumb of systematic oppression.”

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