Engineering While Black

Alex Animashaun shares stories of discrimination and reinventing the wheel.

By Peak Design

September 23^rd, 2020

Meet Bay Area engineer and inventor Alex Animashaun. We first connected with Alex about a year ago to talk shop about his soon-to-be first Kickstarter project, the Tuck Bike. We're stoked about his product, and we're looking forward to his launch.

Our conversations with Alex have delved into a number of topics of mutual interest: the benefits of crowdfunding, the joys of inventing, the virtues of being your own boss, and the inequities and biases that exist in the engineering field.

We've been developing a series of Field Notes that share the experiences of Black people in the spaces that Peak Design holds dear: the outdoors, and the photography world. But at the very core of our being, we are a design company. And like photography and the outdoors, the engineering world is one that is predominantly white and male, and lacking in equal opportunities for women and people of color. Today, we're sharing Alex's experiences as a Black engineer. From here on out, enjoy Alex's words:

Why do so many folding bikes have tiddly wheels? I asked myself as I flew from London to Nairobi. I doodled on the plane and wondered—why can’t a normal bike fold up small? The answer is simple: wheels are the last indivisible part of a wheel.

My reaction should have been "of course!" and then back to the inflight movies, but it wasn’t. To me, the wheel was just a structure. If you look at bridges you can see there are many different ways to build them, from the brute force of a wooden plank, to the wizardry of cable suspension and the beautiful simplicity of a stone arch. So why not fold the wheel? I soon embarked upon the quest of an archetypal shed-dwelling, lone British engineer, and came out the other side with the smallest full-size folding bike in the world. And it's mainly thanks to the innovation of folding the wheel.

The pre-launch page for Tuck Bike, the first folding bike with folding wheels, is here.

Inventing was a fun side project. I was working in Kenya at a car startup at the time and I enlisted the help of a few local welders-for-hire to cobble together my first prototypes. Lumpy, heavy as an elephant with no brakes, but the joys of riding those early creations were sublime and it has come a long way since then.

In 2019, my wife and I left Kenya for the San Francisco Bay area to be closer to her family and for my first taste of The American Dream. Everybody told me that the Bay area was desperate for engineers and I’d be snapped up in no time to design teleportation devices and cars that run on garbage. I’d wanted to be an inventor as a kid—though there were no "inventor" jobs in the UK when I grew up, and looking under “i” in the career book gave you insurance agent, immunologist, investor. I’ve learnt, if you want to be an inventor, the only person hiring is you yourself.

Job hunting is never fun, but a few rounds of interviews left me with the lingering aftertaste of coordinated gaslighting. I had first-class honours (the highest grade in the UK) from a top 10 university. I had worked at Jaguar Land Rover and a boutique consultancy, and I’d led the design team for a car startup. I had colorful professional stories about building a Jaguar driven by wrestling star Batista in a Bond film, and demonstrating a Range Rover Hybrid to Prince Charles at his castle. I was clearly a decent candidate.

It’s normal for interviewers to ask questions about your qualifications, but I found that my interviewers were instead questioning my qualifications regularly and consistently, with suspicion and disbelief, as in "How could you have done that?". Starting from a position of having to counteract disbelief and mistrust will always put you at a disadvantage. In one interview, I pulled a folded wheel out of my backpack like a magician and erected it before their eyes as an example of my work. The CEO, who had been aggressive the whole interview, dismissed the wheel--and his very next question was if I could give examples of creative concepting.

This is the insidious part of racism: you’re told that if you work hard enough and if you’re good enough then you get your reward. But you can literally reinvent the wheel and people will say that’s not good enough.

It leaves you doubting whether you really are qualified enough, it pushes you to settle for less than you’re worth, to walk instead of flying high.

When you look at things on a macro level you can’t deny there is discrimination. For example, women and people of color are grossly underrepresented in the Bay Area’s famously over-compensated tech scene. Guess how much of the Bay area’s free-flowing venture capital money has been invested in Black women (7% of US population) founders in the last decade.

0.06% of nearly half a trillion dollars (stat from projectdiane.com). A teardrop in the ocean.

One of the hurdles for Black people in the US is called implicit bias. Implicit bias is when a person consciously rejects a bias such as racism, but subconsciously still displays a preference for (or aversion to) a certain group. They are unaware that they have a preference for a group even though their actions and words manifest it. I’m confident the people interviewing me wouldn’t like to think of themselves as racist, but as Katheryn Russell-Brown says "an implicit bias approach minimizes individual responsibility," establishing what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva refers to as "racism without racists." In other words, people doing racist things while claiming they’re not racist. Often if people are called out for discrimination they find an alternative socially acceptable excuse to post-rationalize their behaviour. This is the pernicious hidden racism that contributes, among other factors, to inequality. The popular concept of implicit bias allows people to relax and neglect doing the personal work to challenge their discriminating internal views and continue perpetuating racism. Implicit bias shows up when a cop says they’re not racist, but tests show they are more likely to mistakenly shoot a Black unarmed suspect than a white one (Plant, 2005). It shows up when interviewers reject Black sounding names on resumes (Bertrand, 2004), and when they are more aggressive towards Black candidates like me in interviews. Of course, these could all be conscious racism since we don’t know the mental states of the actors.

It can be very tempting to deny this is happening, to say someone is paranoid or maybe the interviewer was having a bad day or maybe there were just better candidates.

With racism—or any kind of discrimination—and job hiring, you never get the counter-factual. You don’t see how other people perform in interviews, and who ultimately was hired. This makes it hard to fight back; you can either settle, be even better, or stop competing.

I decided that I wanted to be master of my own destiny, so I went full time on Tuck Bike. Not everyone has this option. My name is Alex Animashaun and I’m the founder of Tuck Bike, the first folding bike with folding wheels. It’s for space-limited commuters living in small apartments who want a full-size bike and a bit of magic. It’s for the people who wouldn’t be seen dead on a small wheeled bike. I’m the lone inventor in the kitchen. I’ll be following in the Peak Design teams’ footsteps and launching on Kickstarter later this year. If you’d like to be the first to know when Tuck Bike launches then sign up to our email list at www.tuckbike.com.