Justin Edmund is a designer for Pinterest. He's the company's seventh employee.
He is also a black man in America. And a black man in Silicon Valley. Two percent of Silicon Valley employees are black people, and at Pinterest, it's 1 percent, Edmund says. What's that like? Uncomfortable, and a bit weird, he tells USA Today.
He is "isolated," the newspaper writes, despite working in tech in San Francisco and living in the Mission District, two situations in high demand.
During the troubles in August in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, Edmund told his Twitter followers that he didn't feel comfortable going to the corner store for a Coke.
Even in San Francisco, he was worried about being "shot dead in my tracks because of a misunderstanding, or perhaps for no reason at all," feelings he expanded upon in a Medium essay that was widely-shared.
He has much to boast of: he is the first person in his family to graduate from college, earning a degree from Carnegie Mellon.
But, meanwhile, he's in a field that prides itself on changing the world... and he recognizes how much needs to change about that field.
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He thinks companies should go around to schools and engage minority students and get them excited about technology: but more than that, get them excited about the idea that they can work on technology rather than just work on it.
"If the people who have the money and the power funnel them the right way and to the right places, we can solve these problems," he told the paper.
