Content warning: discussions of racism, silencing, and genocide; centering a privileged perspective.
By now, the hot takes on Basecamp's new workplace policies prohibiting the discussion of social and political issues* on work platforms have more or less reached full saturation across the tech-news Internet. It's unquestionably a bad look for Basecamp, but I'm not here to wade into a full recap; I don't really have anything to say that hasn't already been said better by very intelligent people, like this great summary by Edward Ongweso Jr. at Vice, and Jane Yang's deeply personal reaction to the announcement.
*as defined by its white male co-founders
What I'd like to delve into, for a moment, is Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson's response to the significant backlash Basecamp's been receiving since it announced the policy change on Monday afternoon. An article at The Verge by Casey Newton revealed more detail behind the reasons for the change, including the discussion that appears to have been the inciting incident. In brief: company employees had an internal reckoning (in discussion channels on the company's own Basecamp instance) regarding an old running joke that was now rightly understood to be insensitive and racist. As part of the discussion, an employee used the Anti-Defamation League's Pyramid of Hate graphic, designed to shed light on how a society can arrive at active genocide, to illustrate the importance of checking discriminatory behaviors early - before they can create a fertile environment for the more life-threatening behaviors further up the pyramid.
Hansson took exception:
"I was dismayed to see the argument advanced in text and graphics on [Employee 1’s] post that this list should be considered part of a regime that eventually could lead to genocide. That's just not an appropriate or proportionate comparison to draw.
And further more [sic], I think it makes us less able to admit mistakes and accept embarrassment, without being tempted to hide transgressions in the past. If the stakes for any kind of bad judgement in this area is a potential link to a ladder that ends in genocide, we're off on a wrong turn."
After another round of back-and-forth, detailed in Hansson's post, leadership decided to pull the plug on the conversation. Shortly thereafter, the new workplace policies were announced.
I'd encourage you to read through both Newton's and Hansson's accounts, to hear as many people as possible in their own words. For those of us with certain kinds of social privilege - like Hansson, like myself - the thought process will look pretty familiar. It's a textbook example of the fragility we experience when confronted with our role in systemic oppression, and it's why we should take a good hard look at what appears to have happened here and try to learn from it.
Since roughly 2009, Basecamp customer-service reps had been keeping a list of "Best Names Ever," a collection of customer names that struck them as 'weird' or 'funny.' But discomfort with the list was growing, and current widespread focus on social justice prompted employees to start a conversation about accountability. In an attempt, within their own company, to understand and contextualize the harm that the list had caused, one employee posted the Pyramid of Hate graphic to an internal work channel. From the ADL's website:
"The Pyramid shows biased behaviors, growing in complexity from the bottom to the top. [...] If people or institutions treat behaviors on the lower levels as being acceptable or “normal,” it results in the behaviors at the next level becoming more accepted. In response to the questions of the world community about where the hate of genocide comes from, the Pyramid of Hate demonstrates that the hate of genocide is built upon the acceptance of behaviors described in the lower levels of the pyramid." (emphasis mine)
The Pyramid of Hate, then, illustrates how "minor" instances of bias create an environment in which increasingly life-threatening manifestations go unchallenged. This is a crucial piece of context to understand for those of us who are not often on the receiving end of microaggressions, and it's the precise reason that the "just a joke" defense doesn't hold water.
But it's also a bitter pill to swallow for a privileged person, the first time we're introduced to it. We're used to thinking of ourselves as good people, and assuming (usually rightly) that our actions will be judged only by our intent and by their immediate outcomes. I don't know anyone, and I don't imagine Hansson knows anyone, that would intentionally facilitate genocide. So when we're confronted by a concept like the Pyramid of Hate, it feels like an egregious attack, one that threatens our image of ourselves as decent people who do the right thing.
Unintended consequences suck. It doesn't feel good to discover one, nor should it. And systemic bias is a pretty heavy unintended consequence to take on board. (I say "unintended"... we're going with the charitable interpretation for the sake of this discussion, but there's no shortage of people who know exactly what they're doing when they choose to uphold oppressive systems.) So how do we proceed? In that moment, we have two options: internalize the new information, apologize, and do better; or get defensive. And from the details that he himself has shared, it looks a whole lot like Hansson chose to get defensive:
"I don't think we serve the cause of opposing colonial regimes or racist ideology by connecting their abusive acts around names to this incident. And I don't think we serve an evaluation of you and others making fun of names in a Campfire session by drawing that connection either.
...
It's [...] inappropriate for us to be laughing at individually named customers in our company Campfires, but not because there are any racist or colonial overtones to it.
...
It [connecting the list of names to racialized violence] needlessly creates this extremely high-stakes environment where inappropriately making fun of a name [...] can be rendered as part of some larger narrative of colonialism and racism that it just does not merit."
That defensiveness, when it arises, is ours to manage and no one else's. When we turn the conversation to "tone" or "proportionality," or claim that we drive people away from the "cause" by making them feel bad about themselves, we distract from the most important issue: repairing the unintended consequences in whatever way we can, and making sure they never happen again. Hansson and his co-founder Jason Fried claim that they are simply refocusing Basecamp’s culture away from the political, but in reality, no issue is apolitical. There are only the perspectives that uphold the status quo, and the ones that challenge it.
These conversations are complex and painful, and we as privileged people are rarely going to walk away from them feeling good. But we have to recognize that even having the option to walk away is a luxury that nobody else gets. The world makes it all too easy for us to prioritize our own comfort in the name of "productivity" or "civility," and to shut down important conversations that might generate real change. But it's long past time for us to collectively muster some emotional resilience and quit throwing up roadblocks, because there's far more important work to be done.