In an inconspicuous brick warehouse on Preston Street in Houston, a crowd gathered full of hopes for the future. The 60-person group included Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations, and Keith Lee, a TikTok food influencer, who stood back in a Yankees college jacket, avoiding any attention he could. “I have to tell him that the food in our town is not like that This wrong,” said a San Francisco-based LinkedIn executive.
Like me, they were in Houston to attend AfroTech, an annual technology conference that is now a popular destination for many black tech professionals. Tonight, as part of the Microsoft Creator Unplugged event – one of many external programs taking place during the four-day conference – Spruell, Lee and others sipped champagne and mingled with the select crowd. The scene was picture perfect. Except that this year’s AfroTech conference gathered in the shadow of Donald Trump’s election victory a week earlier, and there were other things on the participants’ minds – vital, terrifying, perhaps inevitable.
I was less than 30 minutes into the venue, temporarily dubbed the House of Black Techxcellence, when I met a former Twitter employee and the conversation quickly turned to the nightmare of Trump 2.0. It wasn’t just the fact of the Trump campaign’s persistence, the way he won on a platform of grievance and low-cost racism, but also the cohort he aligned himself with – tech kids like Elon Musk – and everything their alliance seemed to stand for ready to unleash.
“Buying Twitter turned out to be a brilliant move” on Musk’s part, said a former employee, convinced that his utilize of the platform to, among other things, influence the election was the kind of high-level villainy seen in the movies.
I agreed, apart from the fact that it was very real.
“You have to respect this vision,” he said. “We need better heroes.”
AfroTech, at least on paper, is in the business of creating heroes. Organized by Blavity, a digital media company for millennials, AfroTech began in 2016 as a 600-person networking event in San Francisco for Black people in tech who faced a persistent lack of representation. Field it was simple-for us, by us— and over time, the gathering has grown into a magnet for all kinds of dreamers, many of whom also realize that there is power in the collective. Today, AfroTech is an all-in-one attraction. It hosts a recruitment fair and about thirty panels over four days, but it’s also, if not more so, a networking challenge. Think of it as coming home – it attracts startup founders, engineers, massive investors and programmers, but also anyone looking for a good atmosphere.
I was particularly curious about this after the US elections in which a Black woman lost to a convicted felon. AfroTech is now a name in the black tech world; this year, approximately 37,500 people participated. But how well does it actually prepare participants for the impact of a Trump administration that doesn’t have Black innovation in mind?
As I participated in various conversations – with titles like “Mastering the Pitch” and “Thriving in the Innovation Economy” – I scrolled through what a former Twitter employee told me. We need better heroes. I started to think of it as a question, a challenge. I began to wonder if AfroTech was doing everything in its power to raise the next generation of leaders.