00:54 - Pariss’ Superpower: Being Vocal and Transparent

• #BlackTechTwitter


• The Villian Origin Story
  
  
  
  
  • Deadpool
  
  

08:01 - #BlackTechTwitter & Black Tech Pipeline

• Job Board


• Labor Compensation

15:56 - Being Okay with Losing Opportunities

• Announcing Success


• Criticism & Privilege


• The Great Resignation


• Generational Wealth


• Hustle Culture
  
  
  
  
  • Hustle Culture: Why Is Everyone Working Too Hard?
  
  

28:57 - UX Design vs Software Engineering (What would you do if you weren’t in tech?)

• Thinking About Vulnerable Communities


• Coding For Work


• Foley Artist; Working Behind the Scenes


• Tech Supporting People’s Real Passions

35:11 - Pariss’ Passion for Acting & Being On Set

• Behind-the-Scenes


• Watching Marginalized People Succeed: “BE BOTHERED!”

43:38 - Growing & Evolving Community

• @BotBlackTech


• A Note to #BlackTechTwitter/Black Tech Pipeline Potential Successors

Reflections:

Chanté: Being intentional about community.

John: The impact an individual person can have on culture.

Jamey: Be bothered. Ways that marginalized communities share some things and not other things.

Tim: Having these discussions because people who are not Black do not understand the Black experience; Making sure the Black experience is changed for the better moving forward.

Pariss: Being an ally vs being a coconspirator.

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Transcript:

JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 264. I'm John Sawers. My pronouns are he/him. And I'm here with Chanté Thurmond.

CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. My pronouns are she/her and ella. And I'm here today with Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Thanks, Chanté. My pronouns are they/them. And I'd like to also introduce Tim Banks.

TIM: Hey, everybody. My pronouns are he/him. And I would like to introduce today's guest, Pariss Athena.

PARISS: Hey, everyone. I'm Pariss Athena. My pronouns are she/her.

I'm founder and CEO of Black Tech Pipeline and creator of the hashtag movement and community, #BlackTechTwitter.

JOHN: Welcome to the show!

We're going to start off with the question that we ask every guest that we have. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

PARISS: This is such a downer, because I really don't know. I don't have one. I don't have a superpower, I don't think.

JAMEY: Just because you don't know does not mean that you don't have one.

CHANTÉ: One of them that I think is obvious to me, when I found you on Twitter, was your ability to see the problem, see the opportunity, and obviously, to find the talent. So those are three clear distinct talents you got there.

PARISS: Yeah. Okay, I didn't consider them as superpowers, but we can definitely go with that.

CHANTÉ: Sure!

TIM: I will tell you; it was interesting to me because Pariss and I don't interact very often on Twitter, but I've been a follower and a fan for a while. The one thing that I've noticed about you is that you are always unapologetically yourself and I think that is a huge thing that cannot be underestimated. Because your ability to do these things, and your ability to inspire and empower others is because you first inspire and empower yourself. That's something that myself as a Black man, especially as a Black woman, we don't see that a lot and we don't see that a lot in a way that uplift others as well.

So I've always been super, super impressed with your ability to do that and to do it unapologetically, and to stand there against all the people that level hate at all of us just to be there, complete yourself and let it go off. So always been inspired by that and I don't think you should underestimate that as a superpower.

PARISS: Thank you! See, I didn't consider these things superpowers, but I guess, now I do. [laughs]

JOHN: There you go.

PARISS: Thank you. You're making me realize things about myself. [chuckles]

TIM: Oh, yeah. That's one thing; we'll tell you about yourself. Whether it's good, or bad, we'll still tell you.

PARISS: I love it. I love to hear the feedback.

CHANTÉ: The other thing you might want to do now is we can ask #BlackTechTwitter what they think your superpowers are. I'm sure that they'll give you lots of insights of interacting with you over the last few years.

PARISS: Yeah. I think the whole saying kind of what I want to say no matter what will probably be a big one.

JOHN: Yeah.

CHANTÉ: Yeah.

PARISS: For me, I like doing that. I guess, I don't mind losing opportunities because I wanted to be honest, like it just is what it is, but I feel like I've always been that way. Maybe because I've been bullied for so many years and I'm just one day I just had it. I was like, “You know what? I'm fed up.” I'm done trying to appease people and I didn't care if I didn't have any friends, or whatever. I was like, “I was tired being a pushover,” and from there, I've just always been very vocal and transparent.

CHANTÉ: Ah, there it is. It's like the superhero wound that turns into your superpower.

PARISS: Yeah. Some people will say that. Some other people will be like, “Oh, that’s my villain origin story.” But I don’t know, I’m at a breaking point [chuckles] and I was like, “All right, I'm done. This is just whatever.”

TIM: See, I always thought that was interesting because the “villains,” or “heroes;” any character in a story is most sympathetic when you understand where you're coming from. It's interesting that we talk about the villain origin story. It's because my favorite villains would be heroes in a different setting. You take like Magneto and I take Magneto because for me, the X-Men comic books, for those of you don't follow, has always been about civil rights.

PARISS: Yeah.

TIM: Always from the get go. Always about civil rights, always about the marginalized, and always about the people who are different. Sometimes they're different in ways that you can't tell and sometimes there's different in very, very obvious ways.

I think that I always spoke to marginalized folks because some of those mutants had powers that you wouldn't know by looking at them. So some people are marginalized in ways where they're neurodivergent, where they have disabilities that you can't see, and some of them are very, very obvious about what they are.

But the big thing that made the villains sympathetic is you understood why they did what they did. You may not have agreed with the methodology, but you could understand and were sympathetic to those costs. It’s like I said, Magneto from the X-Men was a great one.

The heroes oftentimes had to endure the same kinds of problems that the villains did, but they went about it by a different approach and I think that's what makes a real big difference in our society today. It's not that whether folks are marginalized, or not, it's not whether folks have been bullied, or anything like that. It's how they choose to use that experience to go forward from that.

PARISS: Right.

TIM: So people who haven’t had those kinds of experiences say, “Yeah, it's a choice.” People can simplify it, or oversimplify it and say, “Oh, well they just had a choice to do good, or bad,” and it's like, no, it's never that easy. It's never that easy. In the right circumstances, all of us would probably do something that we would consider and the privilege that we do enjoy now—bad, or wrong, or whatever. But it was a thing that was necessary at the time.

So I think we, as folks, especially as Black people, or other marginalized folks in this industry, need to be able to look back and to reach down and pull folks up and say, “Hey, there's a different way to go about