Antiracist and Diversity Educational Resources

From its inception, IDPro has had inclusivity and equality as goals. The thought went that by providing free access to vendor-neutral educational resources, we would help remove some of the barriers that prevent people from joining our industry. While that is a nice thought, it is not sufficient. There is more we can, should, and will do. 

There is more to being an identity professional than just knowing about the plumbing, the protocols, and the processes. We, as identity practitioners, are custodians of data about people and inherent in that is a duty of care. 

The murders of people such as George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have catalyzed society to acknowledge systemic racism and injustice. Furthermore, implicit and explicit bias around race and racial identity directly manifest in the technologies that we design and build. With that duty of care on our minds and with this injustice around us and within our technologies, the IDPro Board knows there are practitioners who are asking “How can I help? Where can I start?” 

In that spirit, IDPro has collected anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion materials to share with everyone, members and non-members alike. The resources below are by no means exhaustive. The journey of a practitioner must include an examination of their privileges, their biases, the systems wrongs around them, and ways they can be allies. We offer these materials as a starting point for that journey.  To build identity systems that are inclusive we must have diverse teams building them and empower each individual member to stand up, speak up for anti-racism and diversity. We must be conscious of the terminology we use when we build these systems and acknowledge our mistakes such as the use of the term “whitelist” or “blacklist”  and replace with “allow” and “deny” and be thoughtful and aware of the language we use while we design and engineer identity systems.  Much of this is unconscious bias creeping in and we have to consciously watch for it, acknowledge it, and correct it immediately.

Here are some ways to get started:

As a professional development organization, and a relatively young one at that, there is a large field of opportunity for both dialogue and collaboration on this subject, including in our work with partner organizations like Women in Identity (WID), and Women in Security & Privacy (WISP). Our Body of Knowledge can and should reflect this commitment, with future contributions on how to make some of these principles work in practice. We know we can do better, and we welcome conversations that meet that goal.