From Gimla, this is Reply All. I'm your Mangaljochi.

Around 10pm on Tuesday, February 16th, I got a voice memo from a friend.

It was pretty short and pretty direct.

None of this is your problem to fix, my friend said.

Stay the fuck out of it.

For those of you who don't know, the event my friend was telling me to stay the fuck out of

was a full-blown reckoning of a race and work culture that took place on Twitter,

involving this show and a series we made called The Test Kitchen, which was about the systemic racism

at a food magazine called Bonapetit. Not long after we published for second episode of that series,

former colleagues of ours at Gimla spoke publicly about their honestly really horrible experiences

working as young black people at our company, which is overwhelmingly white.

Some of these allegations actually centered on this show and how some members of our team,

including PJ vote and Shufi Pitimanani, who were the editor and reporter on this series,

opposed the Gimla Union, which was formed two years ago in large part by people of color.

In the aftermath of that online reckoning, PJ Shufi left the show.

I've been thinking about the message my friend sent me a lot lately because what I'm doing,

literally right now, on the air, on video calls every day, is the exact opposite of staying out of it.

Which is to say, after all of the tweet friends, after the New York Times articles, after the

Notes Ap apologies, after everything that's happened and all the people this show has let down,

a very familiar course of events has transpired. The white leader guy is at the stage,

and a black guy is talking to you about it. Backback doesn't feel good to anyone,

but it is what's happening. But truth is, despite my friends warnings, I have definitely not stayed

...