Black Lives Matter.

There’s been a lot of emotion felt at raywenderlich.com these last few weeks.

We feel sickened by the callous murder of George Floyd, as he said the words, “I can’t breathe.”

We feel angry that those meant to serve and protect us have killed so many other Black men, women and children, and that those responsible are not being held accountable.

We feel hopeful when we see so many people across the world stand up to show their support for Black lives, to protest inequality, and to stand up against police brutality.

And we feel saddened that those in power are not listening, empathizing, or changing, but are instead responding with more violence.

We Will Listen, Learn, Reflect, Act and Iterate

At raywenderlich.com, our goal has always been to create a friendly and inclusive community of developers and educators. We welcome anyone, regardless of your age, sexual orientation, disability, physical ability, race or religion.

However, despite the goal above, we know that our organization still has a lot of listening and learning ahead of us. We’ve benefited from the white privilege that dominates the tech industry, and we know that we can’t possibly understand the entirety of the Black experience or the experience of other people of color.

But we want, and need, to educate ourselves.

We have already begun meeting to reflect on what we can do to best support the protesters and the Black community. Through these discussions we are becoming slowly and shamefully aware that we are not doing enough as an organization. But we are ready to do the work.

We’re learning about the difference between equality and equity. It’s relatively easy to support equality: just give everyone the same thing. The same benefits. The same opportunities. The same attention. Yet achieving equity is far more challenging: We need to give some people more than others. More benefits. More opportunity. More attention. Until everyone is playing at the same level, we can’t say we’ve leveled the playing field.

We strive for equality, by believing that anyone in the global developer community has the same opportunity to apply to join our team and contribute. But we know we’re falling short when it comes to equity: We need to do significantly more work to balance the representation of Black developers, educators, and industry experts in our community.

And that’s just one of the things we must do.

We are committed to prioritizing this as an ongoing effort inside our organization, and also to executing a concrete plan (similar to our recent response to COVID-19). When we do take action, we might not get it right the first time — or even the second time. But we promise to do our best, to listen and to learn, and to keep iterating.

We Stand With the Black Community

raywenderlich.com stands with the Black community, the protesters, and all others suffering from racism, inequity and inequality.

We believe we can change our own actions and behaviors, and we are committed to doing the work to help build a more supportive, friendly, and inclusive planet for everyone. Expect to hear more from us on this in future posts.

To all of our community: We hope you are with us. If you have ideas about what we can do at raywenderlich.com to support our mission, email us directly at ray@raywenderlich.com and share your thoughts.