On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor was asleep in her bed when three Louisville violence workers busted into her house and

To look at me, I am white. I have certainly benefited from my skin color throughout my life, but that whiteness was a suit I had to learn to wear. When my family moved to Philadelphia in 1970, they were moving into one of the most racist cities in America at the time, presided over by racist mayor Frank Rizzo. We moved into a small Portuguese community in a majority-Black neighborhood. We moved into homes and businesses recently vacated by white flight. We came in as Portuguese, and we needed America to make us white, because that is how America defines success, and we were here for success. (The irony of having to find our place in a caste system we helped to create is a cursed monkey’s paw implementation of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance, but I’ll save that argument for someone who didn’t go to a state school.) We hung the Rizzo re-election signs in our storefronts, later we would hang the Reagan signs too. We crossed the street when Black people came our way. We hired our own. And we adopted all the slurs. Our goal was to achieve whiteness, which meant hating blackness and hating immigrants. Every immigrant group that comes into America wants to be the last group through the door. Trust me, immigrants would rip the plaque off the Statue of Liberty faster than a Proud Boy at a tiki torch Black Friday sale. And every immigrant group knows the secret to achieving whiteness — patiently wait in the wings until the current whites believe Black people are catching up, at which point, the books are open, and the Irish are let in, or the Ukrainians, or the Czech, or the Cubans. In America, whiteness is a reward for stepping on others’ necks.

So, no, seeing that Trump had gotten more immigrant votes in 2020 than 2016 didn’t surprise me. After all, when I attempted to talk to my own family about his xenophobia my mother’s reply was “Oh, he doesn’t mean us!” There’s always an immigrant group on deck for achieving whiteness. They’re voting for their turn at bat. And my family did indeed vote for him. But when you say that immigrants don’t vote in their own self interest that’s not true. We are voting in our own self-interest. We understand how this country was designed to work. We’re playing by the rules you set. We did, indeed, learn it from you, Dad.

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ssarily complex (aka over-engineering). Implementing certain design patterns for the heck of it is something that most developers have done. Just because you see an opportunity to implement a design pattern doesn’t mean you should. All this accomplishes is adding more technical debt to the code base.

Once I left the immigrant bubble to go to college I got to put on my white suit. Again, my mother sagely warned me that, “immigrants don’t waste money on stupid things like art school.” On a college campus, I was now surrounded by people who I could choose, or not choose, to reveal my immigrant-ness to. I’d achieved the dream, climbed the caste system and claimed my whiteness. Huzzah. And then, proved it wholeheartedly by painting anything I achieved as a product of hustle, hard work, and intellect. Double huzzah. It felt great for a while, until it didn’t.

As an immigrant, you get to be excited about America’s future while taking a mulligan on its past. As a Portuguese immigrant, well… my people were in shipping. We are the foundation of America’s past.

In twenty years of running our own studio we have hired exactly one Black person. Sentence about the pipeline yadda yadda yadda. Sentence about how you can only hire who applies yadda yadda yadda. Once all the excuses that you attempt to use to cover your shame are exhausted you’re left with the truth: we have hired exactly one Black person in twenty years. That’s a fact. And it’s a fact that makes me very uncomfortable, because uncomfortable is where we need to be. It’s also a fact that most of the companies in our industry are no better. You have not hired enough Black people. And if reading this is making you uncomfortable, great.

We don’t erect monuments to shame. In fact, our slaver past can best be summed up by this quote from Renato Epifânio, president of the International Lusophone Movement: “Anyone who knows anything about Europe has to agree that Portugal is probably the least racist country in Europe. This can, and should, be one of our greatest causes of pride.” It can’t, and it shouldn’t be. The smallest asshole at the asshole party is still an asshole.

This was right around the time that I found out that although, yes indeed, I was an immigrant, the history of my own people was a little extra than most. It wasn’t talked about at home, or in the community where I grew up. It was during a conversation with a Black classmate in college. We were talking about where we’d come from. I mentioned I was an immigrant. “No shit? Where from”? “Portugal.” His face changed. His body language changed. I asked him what was up. “Oh, you don’t know?” I didn’t. He told me. We both avoided each other after that, unsure of how to handle it. I’m sure I didn’t handle it well. That was shame.

There is a line in Ijeoma Oluo’s excellent book So You Want to Talk About Race that I’ve used in essays and talks before, and it bears repeating here: “If you are white in a racist society, you’re a racist. If you are a man in a sexist society, you are sexist.” By which she means, if I may mansplain, that people who look like me get these privileges regardless of whether we want or not. I’m quoting this line again because the first time I read it my reaction was that obviously this didn’t apply to me. How could it? I’m so woke! I put up a slide saying I’m an immigrant at the end of all my talks! I am pulling out this quote one more time because of how deeply uncomfortable it made me when I first read it. It covered me in shame. Of course the line applied to me. The first time I read that line I spent the next twenty pages of the book attempting to read what she’d written, but it wasn’t sinking in because I kept going back to that line. I couldn’t hear what she had to say because all my energy was going towards keeping that shame her words had awoken in me from hitting home. I’m also ashamed to say how long it took, but once I accepted them I could actually hear what she had to say. I had to acknowledge and own my discomfort and shame. And that’s when the work begins. Now is the time for people that look like me to be uncomfortable.

I was recently having a conversation with a friend about how people we know, and believe to be good people, continue to work at places like Facebook, despite the overwhelming evidence that places like Facebook are, you know… bad places. We discussed the obvious suspects: a good salary, overwhelming student loan debt, fancy job perks, and all those things are true to some extent. But I believe the biggest reason is shame. Once you admit your involvement in something terrible you have to deal with your shame. I’m not even talking about admitting your involvement to others, I’m talking about admitting it to yourself. To admit you’ve spent years working on tools to dismantle democracy is a shameful thing. Especially if you’ve continued working on them long after the point where it was obvious what you were working on was complicit in dismantling democracy. The easiest way to keep that shame at bay is to not admit those things are bad. Which is one of the reasons companies distract you with things like good salaries and fancy job perks. They’re shinier than the shame.

Just six kilometers to the east of that monument — and I encourage you to walk it because it’s a nice walk — you’ll walk into Pelourinho Velho (Old Pillory). It’s a public square. It once served as Portugal’s premier slave auction. Walk a kilometer to the northwest of that and you’ll end up at Rua do Poço dos Negros (Street of the Negro Pit), where my ancestors threw the lifeless bodies they’d exhausted. There is no monument in either place. In fact, there is no monument, or museum, in Portugal dedicated to its slaving past.

If you ever find yourself in Lisboa — and I encourage you to go, it is a lovely multicultural city now! — you may find yourself staring at one of its marvels, the magnificent monument to its sea-faring past: Os Descobrimentos. The monument points out over the Rio Tejo like a giant arrow, and it’s adorned along the sides by action-posed statues of the great navigators of Portugal. My forefathers. This monument is a bauble. It is meant to take your mind off other things.

For the first two decades of my life, being an immigrant was my defining chara