Conforming to Succeed ...
summary
Claim: getting ahead in tech often requires conform to whiteness—early selection into a gifted track, deliberate code-switching, and stoic tolerance of racist tests. Evidence is personal history: a ten-year uninterrupted engineering career, a house in an expensive city, and the social practices that enabled it (accent suppression, changing dress and speech, learning debate-as-sport). Outcome is mixed: measurable material success but a felt cost—distance from culture, identity erosion, and being “stuck between two worlds.”
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:08What is successful
- 2:11What made me different
- 2:57Early school years
- 5:50Moving away from blackness
- 7:27Going to college
- 8:17Culture shock
- 9:14Conversational dissonance
- 11:25Online campus forums
- 15:38Conforming to succeed
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