# My views on Race

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2020-06-08
- **Format:** Video · 1757 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Community, Career
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/my-views-on-race
- **Watch:** https://youtu.be/TwioLPWTJyI

I share my personal views and experiences around race and being a black individual, both in my company and the wider Tableau community. I structure my thoughts around three areas: opportunity, context, and education towards collective empathy, drawing on my own story from migrating to the UK to going freelance and joining the Information Lab.

## Key takeaways

- The fairest path is opportunity judged purely on merit and skill, not ethnicity, and creating advantages based on skin colour is just the flip side of the same problem
- Racism and racial bias are distinct: bias can be subtle and subconscious (surprise at how well someone speaks English), while overt racism is something different that also needs naming
- Context matters enormously, racism in the UK cannot be directly compared to the US, and businesses operating in a pandemic have limited bandwidth, so patience and helping leaders understand are part of the work
- Collective empathy only forms when people bring what they have learned back into their teams, families and communities and discuss uncomfortable subjects rather than staying silent
- Silence is what perpetuates racism behind closed doors, so both those affected and those with privilege must be willing to have difficult, constructive conversations

## Chapters

- 0:00 Setting context and ground rules
- 2:15 Opportunity and my migrant story
- 9:16 Finding identity at university
- 12:26 Going freelance and joining the Information Lab
- 19:03 Context and relativity of race
- 23:42 Education towards collective empathy

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/my-views-on-race

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena