'They are a group that's willing to work a bunch of angles and try a bunch of tactics inside and outside, but even when they're on the inside, they bring it.'
Zoom to create a chief diversity officer position, following a flood of racist Zoombombings in the early days of the pandemic.
Color of Change's outspokenness and visibility have come with their own risk. Its leaders have often been subject to the same online harassment they seek to stop, forcing them to hire a security team and move offices for their own safety. And the organization's status as a media darling has led some of its collaborators and targets alike to quibble privately about who should really be getting the credit.
He recruited his friend Van Jones to be the co-founder of a new organization that he hoped could apply the MoveOn model to civil rights issues. Rucker built the first version of the website himself, and in late 2005, he pushed send on Color of Change's first email blast, which went out to around 1,200 people. The subject line:"Kanye was right."
Though it was still relatively small, with a full-time staff of five and an email list of around 600,000 people, Color of Change scored some big wins. Shortly after Robinson joined, Fox canceled conservative commentator Glenn Beck's show, following a two-year campaign during which Color of ChangeRobinson remembered sitting in Color of Change's Bay Area office, watching the final episode with the team and taking note of the last remaining advertisers on Beck's show.
Color of Change's leaders set about fundraising for a new effort aimed at tech companies and hired Collins-Dexter, who previously worked at the Center for Media Justice, to head it up. Airbnb was one of its early targets. "Rashad described his grandfather's experience feeling unwelcome while traveling. No one should be made to feel that way, and I certainly don't want anyone on our platform to feel or be treated that way," Chesky said.
That pick impressed Collins-Dexter."She had the credentials we valued," she said."She brought a different lens of seriousness to the work." Even four years later, Collins-Dexter said Airbnb's response is still"the most robust plan I've ever seen a corporation lay out." And when the company was forced to make layoffs due to COVID-19, she was impressed to see that Airbnb didn't cut its anti-discrimination team.
Zuckerberg and Robinson didn't meet face-to-face until years after Color of Change began its campaign against Facebook, first for allowing Black activists to be doxxed, later for Facebook's work with police departments, and more recently for its spotty enforcement of policies around hate speech and violent threats.
Sitting in a glass-walled conference room, Sandberg apologizing profusely for the"hurt" the story had caused, Robinson recalled. When Zuckerberg wandered by, Robinson said Sandberg waved him inside. Robinson remembered standing awkwardly with Zuckerberg for a few minutes, exchanging platitudes about how there was a lot of work to be done, before Zuckerberg slipped away again.
"I interrupted him, and he interrupted me," Robinson said."It was never loud, but it was like: What are we doing? I felt like we had a good meeting earlier."But Facebook crossed a bright line for Color of Change and the broader civil rights community in late May 2020. Shortly after George Floyd was killed, sparking protests across the country, President Trump wrote aon Facebook threatening to shoot looters in Minnesota.
So they agreed to join in. So did the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, Common Sense, Free Press, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the League of United Latin American Citizens and Mozilla. As part of the boycott, the groups set forth a list of 10for Facebook, including that it create a permanent civil rights infrastructure, find and remove groups focused on white supremacy and other extremist ideology, and, crucially, eliminate the political fact-checking exemption.
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