The Coinbase story this morning has me incensed enough to re-emerge with a proposal: it shouldn’t be on Black employees to speak out against the discrimination & abuse they suffer within their companies.

The responsibility rests on everyone else to call out terrible behavior.

Things I have seen and spoken out about in my 20+ years in tech:

1. A CEO who hired a Black executive to run a new diversity program who was then prevented from working on diversity for 9 months.

2. A VP so obsessed with “leveling up” the leadership team they put a wholly qualified and respected Black leader in a two-in-the-box with an older white male new hire, and then said one of them would get the job in six months despite everyone knowing how it’d end.

3. Cultural contributions to ERGs by Black employees getting ignored during performance reviews, and the emotional labor of not looking like anybody else on the team resulting in John Henryism being completely undervalued.

The list goes on and on and on and it’s time to say that we don’t have a diversity problem. We have a deep-seated inability to listen to, recognize, and address Black voices in the workplace.