Supporting the Next Generation of Brown and Black Girls with Theresa Gonzales
Will Gen Z save us from ourselves? Empowering the next generation to overcome toxic cultural and gender norms
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Picking up where we left off in Part 1, Theresa is lamenting that it’s already hard enough for women to get a successful business off the ground without all the toxicity and bullshit that comes from simply being a woman.
We’re left to wonder: can we trust Gen Z to fix the fucked up attitudes we’ve allowed the internet—and by extension, artificial intelligence—to perpetuate around gender and cultural norms? We’re hopeful!
Also note theme of community we keep returning to.
Paulette: So what's the fix?
Theresa: I always say we need to be more bold and we need to step into those arenas. They may be hard and we might feel like, “oh man, this is really rough.” Or, “how do I navigate the space?”
If you can, find a mentor or sponsor* in the organization. And if you don't, then work there and see what you can take as knowledge, and then like clay you make something else from your experience.
Because I think that's what you and I have done, here today in this space. And I feel hopeful, I really do about the future. You know, you were talking earlier like, will we ever see a woman of color in the White House? Well, there is one, but she's just a VP.**
The next generation, which I'm very supportive [of], I really love the energy! Although, sometimes they don't know a lot of things, but that's what we're here for. And I love them. I learn a lot from them. And hopefully they learn a lot from us.
Paulette: Well, Gen Z is in what I saw described as their loud and wrong phase right now. But they're living it publicly online, so they're being loud and very comfortable in the things that they're saying.
Even if they are wrong, and no one is correcting them yet. And they will learn. Sometimes we all have to go through it. I love Gen Z. My niece and nephews are all Gen Z and I learn a lot from these kids.
I'm always so surprised, pleasantly, by how well they seem to know themselves. It's like they took all this generational bullshit that's been passed down for the last hundred years and they were like,
Enough! I've learned from all of your mistakes. It's all in my DNA. I'm not going to repeat them.
I look at teenagers today and I'm like, I wish that 30 years ago I had your resolve. I had your guts. Even if you're wrong, you're standing up for yourself. And it's amazing! I have hope for the future.
Theresa: As you're saying, I have the same relatives in the space, and I think their resolve comes from a community that they've actually built through technology, right? These social platforms, which is A) good and B) bad at the same time.
Because there's a lot of psychological effects. And even though they say, “oh, I'm not affected by it.” But they're constantly on the platforms.
Yes, they can feel empowered because they know so much about technology. But there's also this construct of constantly validating their existence through something they're holding in their hand.
I think they're coming out of it a little bit more, being more social into a community environment, and I think that's where technology is good, where it can push you into that realm.
But at the same time, it still has that negative effect of people putting false narratives again out there. And how do you decipher that?
Paulette: Especially when you're young and and new in the world, you know, you just don't have the experience to be able to sift through what's bullshit and what's true.
Theresa: I think that's what separates us from them, is our experiences, because technology was not so apparent. We had the radio and television. That's where the evolution of all of this came from.
Seriously, it's not new. It's just reformatted in a way that's consumable to what is today. Which is the phone.
But before it was the radio and television giving you your information, plugging in. From there, it evolved into academia: how do we get more communication out there? And then it became universities were communicating through technology.
If anybody wants to understand where the internet was born, it really came from a lot of the government and sciences in academia. And here we are today.
Talk about creatives and sci-fi back then—I'm just gonna say I love Star Trek now. And when you go to the old school Star Treks, they had the little flip phones and what are we doing now? And they're talking on their watches and now we got the Apple Watch. It's all in your chisme (translation: gossip).
Paulette: Yes. When we were at that club in Vegas, my watch kept reminding me that I was gonna go deaf. I feel like Inspector Gadget with this thing on, but I love it.
Theresa: Yes. It's like, come on, we need some new MacGyvers out there.
Paulette: I have hope that they're coming and that they're little brown girls.
Theresa: Yes, brown and black girl little girls, they're coming. It's already happening. We just don't hear or see their stories. That's that's what this [podcasts like this] is for.
Paulette: Yeah. We need to go find them and we need to make sure that they feel supported.
Theresa: Yeah, the whole community in general. You know, just to circle back to Podcast Movement in Vegas, I'm gonna give a shout out now to Patrick Hill who created Disctopia. That's his streaming platform.
He just a wonderful person and he is going against the grain. He's African American, he lives out in South Carolina, [and] he has built this platform for creatives because he sees community in that way.
I think he has his degree in computer science, but that's how he turned it around. And when you see how many people of color actually are in this space with a technology platform, I think there's only maybe two.
And that's Patrick with Disctopia and SquadCast with Zach Moreno, who has a podcasting recording platform, and that's really amazing. So, brown and black men out there, they're just as supported and they're also building technology.
Black and brown girls are being more brave and we need to see more of what our brothers are doing out there. Because that's the pathway for us: building those platforms [like] they have created.
There are women, I'm not saying there aren't women. There's Tribaja! Shannon Morales has built a platform for hiring. She is Afro-Latina. She's amazing.
So there are people out there building technology platforms. We just don't fucking hear their stories.
But this is why I do what I do called Latinas from the Block to the Boardroom. Because it is centered around those narratives we don't see, we don't hear as much as they should be amplified.
Instead, you see Tech Bros that are creating new water, fucking Liquid Death, because they're in cans and they get like $10 million in funding. And I'm like, “oh, you're saving the planet?”
Okay. I guess we're just like, I don't know what we're doing…
Paulette: Tell me how you really feel, Theresa!
Theresa: I went down a hole. Why? Because I was at South by Southwest and I saw that shit everywhere and I know the story. And here Latinas and Brown and Black folks were the least funded on shit that actually benefits our purpose in life. And I'm like, do we need another can of water called Liquid fucking Death? Oh my God, here's $10 million. Go do it.
Paulette: I'm laughing, not because it's funny. I'm laughing because if I don't, I will cry.
Theresa: It's true. I mean, this is the reality.
Anyway, I was there [at South by Southwest]. It was wonderful. Lots of Latino artists coming out. It's a great conference and it's super overwhelming, but it is amazing and I got a lot out of it.
It really is amazing.
Paulette: I remember when it was just a tiny thing. A local music event. And it's in the last, what, 20 years, 30 years? It's just blown up. It's like a formidable multimedia conference.
As we segue into discussing Theresa’s background, Theresa explains how the tech world’s emphasis on creativity has allowed for shows like SXSW, which began in 1987, to flourish into the multimedia events they are now.
The takeaway here is how important diversity in leadership teams automatically increases creativity and output.
Theresa: In Silicon Valley—I've been here for a long time and I was at Google, I was at Facebook and all the, you know, whatever—the thing they really emphasize is the creative aspect that is threaded into building technology. The creativeness of art or experience. And utility.
So when you go to these campuses, they're beautiful. They really wanna inspire creativity for building.
And our culture's had that before. We do have it today. And yet we're still trying to get to the next platform of how we can incorporate our culture into that. So that's why it benefits that whole environment down there.
And it is a McKinsey report which says if you add diversity to your product teams, to your C-suite, your revenues are going to increase.
I feel that, and this is arrogant, that they're so far ahead in the build that no one can catch up to them that we don't need those people anymore. We just don't need them.
And I feel like right now is an absolute big opportunity for anybody interested in building something in that arena. If you were laid off or whatever it is to just go out there and just at least try. At least try because you have all that with you.
I mean, when I was there I was really tripping out like, “wow, look at this place. I wanna fucking steal all the chairs and put 'em in my house. This chair is like $5,000. I want it!”
I'm sorry, I just went to my block mentality like, I'm gonna take this chair when I leave.
Paulette: That's great that the duality can live in all of us.
To read the rest of this conversation, check out these other posts:
Part 3 coming soon.
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*For more on finding a mentor or (better yet) a sponsor, check out The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are by another podcaster Alicia Menendez (who is also an MSNBC anchor). Chapter 8: Addressing the Emotional Cost outlines how to do this successfully.
**I edited out of this post my potentially controversial 2-minute long rant on our Vice President. But I left it in the episode so if you want to hear it, fast forward to the 17:48 mark on the podcast above or here.