The reverberations coming off George Floyd’s murder in May of 2020 begged the reckoning of every industry, company, entity, and person, challenging us to think long and hard about how to respond. Some responded in fleeting, performative ways: platitudinous statements released, black squares posted to Instagram, and big talk with no concrete actions to back it up. But others used the tragedy of Floyd’s death and the ensuing cultural outcry as an urgent moment to effect real and long-lasting change. Omari Souza, an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the University of North Texas, did just that, organizing the State of Black Design Conference that same year.
What Souza started as a grassroots effort to build an event featuring 13 Black designers on an online panel has now blossomed into a bi-annual program that serves as the only national effort to establish young Black professionals and recent college graduates in design careers.
This year’s State of Black Design Conference will be held this week (in-person and virtually, on March 15 and 16) in Nashville at Tennessee State University’s Art and Design Department. To learn more about the history of the conference, its offerings, and its impact, I had the pleasure of speaking with Souza. He opened up about the struggles he’s faced as a Black designer himself in the design industry and academia, the difficulties of putting on the SOBD Conference, as well as the extreme joy and fulfillment he feels from creating opportunities for so many Black students and designers who have otherwise been excluded. Our conversation is below.
(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)
What has your personal experience been like as a Black designer navigating the lack of diversity in this industry?
There’ve been a lot of difficulties in many regards. My current institution has been the most supportive of my work and my line of research, but at past institutions, there have been a series of things. I’ve had faculty members who went to school in time periods when people who looked like we weren’t allowed to study with them. So when you have a professor who’s getting published, getting a certain type of attention, and challenging the status quo, that is often met with resistance. There have also been power struggles, especially regarding some of the positives that I’ve attempted to do with the State of Black Design.
When you have a professor who’s getting published, getting a certain type of attention, and challenging the status quo, that is often met with resistance.
Being the only Black person in a particular space is difficult. I teach UX design, and we talk about ingroups and outgroups all the time. As an example, I ask my students, “Who has an iPhone?” The majority of the students raise their hands. Then I ask, “What color is it when someone who doesn’t have an iPhone text messages you?” And they all go, “Oh, my God, green!” And then I ask them, “What inconveniences them when you text back?” And no one has an answer. When you’re in a space where you’re the only Black person or the only person of a particular group, and you fall within that outgroup, no one cares about what your experiences are, what inconveniences you have, or what makes it difficult.
When you talk about those issues and bring them to the forefront, because you’re not in the ingroup, they act in greater annoyance to you for bringing up something that they don’t care about, especially if you’re asking them to change. That’s been my experience as a professor and designer. If I talk too much about race, it annoys some people. If I’m getting too much attention about my work around race, it annoys particular people. If I’m raising too much money and creating too much change, and certain groups don’t feel included—even though there’s not much work to make me or other people like me feel included in the industry—there’s pushback given as well.
How did you first get the idea for the State of Black Design Conference? How did it develop?
In 2020, I taught at Texas State University (south of Austin in San Marcos, Texas). It was a Hispanic-serving institution (similar to the one I’m currently at) that was predominantly minority— I want to say it was 53% or 54% Other. I was one of 80 faculty members in the Art and Design College, and I happened to be the only Black one who was tenure-tracked. So when the George Floyd incident happened, many students were trying to figure out what they could do, especially in their field of practice. When they began looking at faculty members, they asked, What are we going to do? All of them looked towards me as the sole Black professor. They asked, So what are you going to do?
There were ideas around potentially getting a Black designer or two to talk about what it feels like to experience racism, and I told them I didn’t want to do that. Because who wants to relive their trauma for an audience? At the time, there were few conferences featuring people of color on their stages, and when asked, the typical response that we would get was that there weren’t enough qualified designers of color or they didn’t know of any.
So, when considering what I could do, I thought about gathering a number of Black designers from different corners of design and having them speak about what they wanted to talk about, which was very different from what other conferences were doing.
We were expecting about 100 people, and ultimately got 5,000 people registered for the first event.
I got 13 designers and broke them into four categories: entrepreneurs, professors, design activists, and people working in the industry. I asked them what they wanted to discuss, and then we made 30-minute panels for each category. We live-streamed it on YouTube; we didn’t even get real estate on the university’s website— we had to share it with our students via Eventbrite. But then our students shared it with their friends, and their friends shared it with their friends, and so on. We were expecting about 100 people and ultimately got 5,000 people registered for the first event.
How did the SOBD continue to grow from that inaugural year in 2020?
We started getting contacted by several companies and a number of those same organizations that weren’t featuring speakers of color in the past, with interest in partnering with us and recruiting from our next conference. So we added a career fair to the following conference, and instead of 13 speakers, we had close to 50 speakers of color. IBM recruited from our event— they were our title speaker—and within a day at our event, they recruited between 12 and 19 Black designers from their partnership with us, which was more designers than they had recruited in the history of their design program. We also had companies like Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, USAA, and several other tech companies come to recruit.
The following year, we were able to repeat having 50 speakers and having the career fair, and we were also able to raise sponsorship dollars for scholarships— we gave about $50,000 worth of scholarships away. My mother was a design aspirant and dropped out of college when she got pregnant with me. So I named the scholarship after her and told the students who received it that my mother couldn’t finish it due to cost and life, so giving them the scholarship felt like I was giving my mother a second chance. Our third event was headlined by Nikki Giovanni, which was amazing considering her history.
What was the development process like for this year’s conference?
We had a long conversation about what we wanted to do for our first in-person conference and how we wanted to be different. We found that many conferences, especially those focused on equity in partnership with companies attempting to recruit people of color, usually go to destination cities like New York, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Although these cities are beautiful, they’re wildly expensive to visit and stay in. Many people who need these events get priced out often before they can attend.
The goal for me was to find cities with high Black populations that resided in flyover country instead of going to these destination cities and bringing our partner companies to these locations. This would make these types of careers more tangible for people who traditionally don’t see people who look like them in these roles and never see these types of companies visit their communities.
With that, we started looking at cities like Jackson, Mississippi; Jackson, Florida; St. Louis, Missouri; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Mobile, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Nashville, Tennessee, where we landed on hosting this year’s event. Nashville is uniquely situated with three HBCUs in one city, including Tennessee State University, our host institution. We also secured a partnership with Scarritt Bennett in Nashville, who is willing to rent dorms at a much cheaper rate to students for the events, making it more accessible.
What are you most looking forward to regarding this year’s conference?
I’m really excited to see how the students of Tennessee State University respond to this. I don’t think anything like this has happened on their campus. For these students to see designers that look like them, walk like them, talk like them, and have the same cultural backgrounds as them, end up in some of these areas that they’ve never even heard of before, I feel like a lot of students will have their minds blown.
For many of our partners and allies who aren’t of color and are coming to a historically Black college, it will be a cultural exchange that will also be really interesting. I think it will be amazing for them to see some of the Black Greek organizations, some of the bands, and the cultural offerings of Nashville in general. I’m looking forward to the conversations that will be had afterward, too.
What do you hope participants of the SOBD walk away with?
For the students of color who attend, I want them to look at the designers and careers there and feel like they belong. I want them to feel like there’s an opportunity for them and that even if they’re not confident in their skill sets yet, they leave with a better understanding of what they need to do to improve.
For designers not of color who are attending, I want them to come willing to experience something different and gain an understanding of people who belong to an outgroup. We don’t always do a great job of taking people who belong to an ingroup and placing them in a scenario where they have to learn more about outgroups. The conference not only exposes them to another world but also gives them an opportunity to understand a demographic they may be designing for and designing with in the future.
For the companies that are coming, I’ve been trying to challenge the recruiters to show up and look at it differently. Instead of saying we want your best and your brightest, I want them to look at it from the standpoint of investing in this particular audience to make them the best and the brightest. To work with and nurture versus going to destination institutions that everybody goes to to recruit. In my opinion, that keeps design extremely incestuous and locks people out, and not just people of color. There are plenty of white designers in Nashville and white designers in these flyover countries who also don’t get an opportunity to speak to these companies. So, if we shift how companies build relationships with institutions and how they recruit, I think it would benefit us all.
I can throw something together and then open a pathway for others so that when they graduate, it makes it easier for them to get into a field that was extremely difficult for me.
What aspect of the SOBD are you proudest of?
Every time I throw this conference, I tell myself I will never do it again because of how difficult it is. The day the conference ends, I go home, turn off my cell phone, and go to sleep because I am just exhausted. But then the next day, and for the next two weeks, I am flooded with “thank you” messages from people telling me they got an internship with this company that they never thought they were going to. I’ve had friends who have gotten partnerships with companies to do design work because they saw their participation in the event. Or people who get internships with companies like IBM or Amazon just because of the strength of the conference. For me, that’s what makes it worth it. I can throw something together and then open a pathway for others so that when they graduate, it makes it easier for them to get into a field that was extremely difficult for me.