Pinterest's seventh employee on being black in Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO — In the tense days after an unarmed black teen was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., Justin Edmund wondered why no one else in Silicon Valley was talking about it.

"Why would they bother?" he wrote in an essay on Medium.

"At most major technology companies, an average 2% of their workforce is African Americans — we're talking tens of people at companies employing thousands of people. At my own company, it's even worse at only 1%. I can count us all on one hand."

The seventh employee at Pinterest, Edmund, 24, is a designer responsible for the look and feel of key features on the site, which acts as a digital clipboard for users to share photos of hobbies and interests, say wedding cakes or vintage hats.

Yet, as a young African-American man, he feels isolated, one of the few people who looks like him in the company where he works and in the Mission District neighborhood of San Francisco where he lives.

Gripped by the violent unrest and confrontations with police in Ferguson, Mo. in August, Edmund says he was shaken, afraid to even venture to the corner store for a can of soda.

He tweeted about his fear. His followers thought he was joking.

Tracy Chou, a colleague at Pinterest who has championed bringing more diversity to high tech, was also frustrated.

When she lamented that the tech world didn't care about Ferguson, someone told her: "I don't even know who that is."

Late one night, Edmund sat down at his computer and let his feelings rush onto the page.

The result was "Growing up," the essay he published on Medium. It was the first time he had ever written about race, an uncomfortable subject for many in Silicon Valley.

"In today's America, I could walk to the store right now and be shot dead in my tracks because of a misunderstanding, or perhaps for no reason at all," he wrote. "There are people in the world that will never see past the color of my skin. Instead, they will shoot me dead for walking home from the corner store with Skittles and an Arizona iced tea. For many of you fortunate enough to read this blog post, you will never know how frightening that is."

The essay was read nearly 15,000 times and shared on social media by Silicon Valley executives and investors.

"It was pretty crazy how fast it got picked up," Edmund said. "This issue is becoming more front and center in people's minds, which is good."

Silicon Valley sees itself as a progressive place where anyone with smarts and drive can make it.

But a series of sobering reports revealing just how few African Americans and Hispanics work inside major technology companies has shaken that belief.

It's called the 2% problem. That's the percentage of African Americans in Silicon Valley.

At Pinterest, the stats are even worse than at other tech companies: 92% of the staff is either white or Asian. Just 2% is Hispanic and just 1% is black.

But Edmund says his company, which at about 400 employees is much smaller than tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple, is making diversity a priority. One Pinterest staffer is focused exclusively on diversity and inclusion.

"It's hard to aspire to be something when you don't see people in that role who look like you," Edmund said.

Edmund started modeling and acting when he was 9 months old.

At the age of 4, he tried out for The Preacher's Wife and landed a major role in the 1996 film starring Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. Edmund played Jeremiah, the son of the pastor of a struggling Baptist church in New York City.

His brush with fame didn't change how Edmund was perceived. He remembers being followed around a drug store in the New York suburb where he grew up. He was shopping for mechanical pencils.

A self-described nerd, Edmund dreamed of becoming an inventor.

"I didn't want to become like the people that I saw on the news every night. They usually were black, like me, but they were being arrested for various crimes and generally made out as bad people. What seven, eight, nine year old wants to be a bad person?" he wrote in his essay. "My somewhat shameful solution was to reject everything about black culture in a naïve effort to distance myself from what I was told to be 'bad' by society."

He played Dance Dance Revolution instead of basketball. He listened to Japanese-American singer Utada Hikaru instead of rap music.

He quit acting. He didn't want to be just another black celebrity hounded by the media. He wanted to build things.

In high school, he taught himself to code.

At Carnegie Mellon, he discovered his passion for design. He was the first in his family to graduate from college.

While interning at Facebook, he met Pinterest founder Evan Sharp. From there he landed a job at one of Silicon Valley's hottest young startups.

"I wanted to make something positive. That's what attracted me to Silicon Valley," he said. "Those kinds of things are possible here."

What's also possible in Silicon Valley: Swinging open the doors of opportunity to underrepresented minorities, Edmund says.

Companies should go into middle schools and high schools and offer basic programming classes to get kids excited about technology, he says.

Reaching kids when they are young and when their interests are still forming is not just the right thing to do, it's in the self interest of Silicon Valley, Edmund says.

If companies here become more diverse, they will be able to reach more consumers around the country and the globe, he said.

"Inspiring people when they are young and showing them like, 'Hey, you like Vine? You like Instagram? Cool, you can actually work on those things if you start now and you work on these kinds of problems and you take this kind of path.' That kind of awareness will go a long way," Edmund said.

"Having grown up in New York, I was fairly privileged, but there are lots and lots of people that, you know, weren't as lucky as me that are probably extremely smart but don't realize that they can download a program and start making code and start building things."

Edmund says he's optimistic that the technology industry famous for its mantra of changing the world can itself change for the better.

"If the people who have the power and the money funnel them the right way and to the right places, we can solve these problems," Edmund said. "But people have to see what the issues are instead of just standing by and being silent, or tweeting 140 characters about it and then forgetting it's happening."