Podcast Description
“I’m also making myself center stage and I don’t wanna do that either. I just have a really loud articulate voice that people listen to. And so, I need to learn how to use that without erasing the voices of the black women that I’m trying to lift up."Cher is a self-taught principal software engineer at Apple and has been in tech for 15 years. She is a high school and college dropout, a mom, and passionate about mental healthcare, equitable justice and opportunity, music, and science.
Additional Resources
Fighting Sex Trafficking:https://ourrescue.org https://eji.orghttps://preventchildabuse.orghttps://voa.org/homeless-peopleTeaching Incarcerated Folks to Codehttps://thelastmile.org
Transcription

00:30Kim Crayton: Hello, everyone. And welcome to today's episode of the #CauseAScene podcast. Today's guest is Cher; their pronouns are she/her, and Cher, if you introduce yourself to the audience, please.Cher: Sure. Hi, I'm Cher. I am an ICT-4, which is like a staff principle-level software engineer at Apple. And I've been—I taught myself how to code more than 20 years ago, and I've been in the industry for 15 years.Kim: OK, so we start this show as we always do with two questions. Why is it important to cause a scene? And how are you causing a scene?01:09Cher: So, to me, it's important to cause a scene because there is so much inequity and inequality, not just in our industry, but in the world, and it's really hard for me to see people not have even enough to, you know, live off of or, you know, opportunities. And it just feels like there's so much, I don't wanna say unfairness, but I mean, it is unfair. There's so much injustice that people, I think purposefully, ignore because they're benefiting from.And so I think it's important for me, who's somebody who does benefit from those things, to try to do the work to first, you know, draw attention to it and then actually work to change it so that everybody has a fair shot to change their life or even if they haven't had anything wrong with their life, to have those same opportunities that other people in the same exact positions as them, to live life in a way that is productive and comfortable.And how am I disrupting the status quo? I think just by talking a lot about my own privilege, and I used to just talk about that, and I found that people thought of me as being inauthentic, and so, you know, in the past couple of years, I've kind of slowly tapered up to opening up about my past and things that I've done, and then talking about the ways that my being white, and attractive, and sounding like I have a college education allowed me to overcome those things that I have done in the past, and to essentially just start a new life when I decided to.03:04Kim: OK, so if you haven't picked up on it, Cher is a white woman. [Laughs] And y'all know that I have very few white people on here who're not talking about specific technology or some theory, or—because I really don't give a shit about the perspectives of white people because that's what I've been bred to know. I know white people better than white people know themselves. And yet there are certain people in our community who I watch, who I—on occasion—set up to engage with individuals. And they fuck up, they see it, they apologize, and they make amends by moving forward. And I can say that Cher is one of those people.Cher came into the community—I believe it was shortly after the GDI (Girl Develop It)  incidents, and she stumbled, she gets back up and she fights the fight again. And I can appreciate that. I can really appreciate a person who is actively doing the work, recognizing that they cause harm, fixing it—or trying to at least fix it—and learning from those mistakes and to apologize to me means not to do that shit again—and moving forward.And also, Cher actually puts her money where her mouth is. So,