This past summer, right around the time there were protests in the streets after George Floyd's death, and the country was talking fervently about race.

Natasha Tiku was calling up computer science professors at historically black colleges and universities.

You know, Howard, Morehouse, Spellman, the schools that everybody knows were getting a lot

of attention from tech companies.

Natasha is a reporter at The Washington Post, and she covers big tech.

She's the kind of deeply sourced journalist who can tell you about the culture inside a

company.

One company, she's covered a lot, is Google.

And for years, Google has been saying it's working on increasing its diversity.

And that's meant a bunch of outreach programs to those historically black colleges and

universities.

Yeah, it was really intriguing.

I mean, a lot of the professors did give Google credit for being early in their engagement efforts compared to other institutions.

But they also told her something else about their students and their experiences at tech companies, despite all that outreach.

Very often they were already finding themselves still maybe the only black person on their

team, maybe facing a hiring committee where there were no other black people.

When they went to Silicon Valley for internships or job interviews, things were tough.

I heard about one female student who raised issues about bias from one of the people she was

working with during her internship, and she was told to work from home rather than deal

with the student who was perpetuating the bias. And I imagine that's incredibly unsettling.

Like here you are reading the headlines about how tech wants to be more welcoming to black

engineers and, you know, you have the guts to raise a concern in your internship and you're

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