When April Christina Curley went to bed on the night of September 10, she probably didn’t think she’d wake up the next morning and be out of a job at Google. But that’s exactly what happened.
According to NBC News, Curley announced in a now viral Twitter thread on Monday that she had been fired from her role as diversity recruiter with the tech giant even though she had been “their most successful” recruiter within the history of their company.
Initially brought on in 2014 to help improve relations between Google and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Curley says that before her role— the company had never hired anyone from an HBCU to serve in a tech role. And can anyone here guess why?
Yup, you guessed it. Racism.
Curley then went on to reveal a series of unfair and biased hiring practices that she felt disproportionately targeted students from HBCUs, including “‘screening out’ resumes of students with ‘unfamiliar’ school/university names, leaving demeaning and absolutely insulting feedback about students which would ultimately result in a rejection at the hiring committee stage, and questioning students in interviews about the quality of the computer science curriculum that they were receiving at their HBCU, and criticizing it for ‘not meeting the bar’ compared to ‘elite,’ white institutions.”
“The reason Google never hired an HBCU student straight out of undergrad into one of their key engineering roles is because they didn’t believe talent existed at these institutions- until I showed up,” Curley wrote in one tweet.
During her time working for the company, Curley insists she tirelessly advocated on behalf of HBCU students though it was consistently met with backlash from her superiors. And by backlash, she means promotion and leadership opportunity denials, compensation cuts, being placed on performance improvement plans despite having rave performance metrics, getting yelled at and intentionally excluded from meetings. One white woman manager even went so far as to tell Curley that her Baltimore accent was a disability that should’ve been disclosed to her peers. All of this she feels, is what ultimately led to her termination with the company.
“I could write FOR DAYS about alllllll the awfully racist recruitment and hiring practices I saw at Google, WITH RECEIPTS,” Curley added in a tweet. “Take it from ME- their most successful BLACK QUEER WOMAN recruiter who they fired in the middle of a MF pandemic because they were tired of hearing me call them out on their racist bullshit.”
At this point, Google is running 0-2 when it comes to their treatment (or rather, mistreatment) of their Black women employees. Earlier this month, The Root reported that the company came under scrutiny after news broke of the firing of another one of their top executives, Timnit Gebru. Gebru, who co-led the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, told Bloomberg she was fired by the head of Google’s AI division in response to an internal email calling out the company’s treatment of minority employees, particularly those who identify as Black and female.
NBC News notes that Google has yet to comment on these allegations.