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You’ve heard of white flight. The phenomenon where white people pack up and move from their homes in an area that is becoming less white and more racially diverse. This has occurred several times throughout history. For instance, during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, whites moved out of cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Oakland in response to Black people from the rural southern United States moving into urban cities of the northern and western U.S.
Although the term “white flight” is visceral and captures the strong motivation that whites had to flee these areas, historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when Black people moved into the neighborhood, when in fact, many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation or legal tactics. Professor of Economics at Princeton, Leah Boustan attributes white flight both to racism and economic reasons.
As a psychologist, it is racism and economic reasons once again that explains what I am witnessing in the geographical movement patterns of the Black tech clients I serve. In a historical clap-back, I am centering this phenomenon as “Black Flight” from the bay area.
Black Flight — The phenomena where Black people pack up and move from their homes in an area that continues to lack the types of community and belonging required for thriving.
The Allure of the Bay
Much like people can build a reputation that precedes them, so can physical locations. The Bay Area has built — and I must say, earned — a reputation as the hub for technology, start-ups, innovation, the entrepreneurial spirit and cutting edge academia. This is in part because the span from San Francisco to San Jose is the home to numerous tech headquarters: Facebook, Google, Apple Amazon, to name a few. This is all with a steady pipeline of fresh, young and eager talent from Stanford University, a stone’s throw away.
Make no mistake, headquarters location and placement is a science unto itself. Richard Florida, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, describes that deciding where to locate a corporate facility “is among the most consequential and expensive decisions a company can make.” He explains how essential and costly the location is to a company’s ability to attract, recruit and retain talent, and gain access to vital business networks and markets. As New York attracts the aspiring artist with the mantra “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” psychologically, the Bay is the Big Apple (literally) for aspiring tech professionals.
With all this grandeur and excellence, high achievers of all stripes are drawn to the Bay. So why are the Black people leaving? I believe that if you dig into a distress deep enough, you will run into a system of oppression.
Black Flight
Black employees came to the Bay for not a piece, but for their fair share of the pie. They arrived and became victors of all the spoils promised them. The salary, the on-campus food, the prestige, the clout — all the benefits and perks pertaining. But are they getting it? The percentages of Black tech professionals are staggeringly disproportionate. I believe that disproportionate findings are the signature of larger systems.
Authors Sam Dean and Johana Bhuiyan report that Google was only 1.9% Black in 2014, 2.9% at Salesforce, 3.8% at Facebook, 4.4% at Slack, 4.5% at Microsoft and 6% at Twitter. Lyft and Uber’s workforces are 9% and 9.3% Black, respectively, but that skews heavily toward their lower-paid operations teams. Apple’s workforce is 9% Black, but that includes retail employees. Amazon, which employs nearly 800,000 people around the world, mostly in its low-wage warehouse and logistics jobs, has a workforce that’s 26.5% Black as a whole, but only 8.3% Black among managers.
Then COVID hit, and reopening for most of these tech companies’ offices is on hold until mid-2021. I am witnessing that once these perks and benefits were inaccessible, many Black tech professionals looked around and started asking,“why am I here?” The forced pause of COVID-19 yielded deeper reflection that, for many of my clients, resulted in a realignment with the value, requirement and necessity of Black community and village. This includes romantic prospects, work and non-work peers, and, of course, family.
Many of my Black clients are moving to Black cultural hubs or personal home bases. With the advent of completely remote work from home, the flexibility was finally possible to work at a dream job away from home and still be home.
Black Tech Talent is Housed in a Black Body
I am not sure if this mini Black exodus from the Bay is being detected by HR at these companies. Even more importantly than noticing is understanding what it could be signaling about the lived experience of Black techies.
Let me begin by saying that Black techies are not an anomaly. When CEOs comment that lack of representation in tech is due to not having enough Black talent to hire, know that this is false and is missing systemic inequities at play. Secondly, I would say to every recruitment and hiring team, Black talent is housed in Black bodies that are having a human experience at your companies and need more than the finest amenities. Black people need community, which often means other Black people.
Let me put it this way: How do you get Black people to stay?
You have to hire and retain more Black people. I do not mean three or four more, I mean 3,000 and 4,000 more! It is within the power of these companies to actually hire enough Black staff that my clients would feel less like a token, less like a diversity hire and more like a standard employee. If these companies and organizations truly feel that diversity is important, they need to put the conditions in place to create a diverse workforce. People stay where they thrive.
