Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com Inc., speaks during the WSJDLive Global Technology Conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. The conference brings together an unmatched group of top CEOs, founders, pioneers, investors and luminaries to explore tech opportunities emerging around the world.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce has said before that Black lives matter, but a message posted to the software company’s LinkedIn account last Friday expressed the sentiment about racial equality more vigorously than usual.
“Hey everybody, we just want you to know what while CPAC is going on, BLACK LIVES STILL F—–G MATTER. PEACE,” read a post on Salesforce’s account, which has more than two million followers. (Last week conservatives gathered in Florida to attend the annual CPAC, or Conservative Political Action Conference.) The post has since been deleted.
The incident highlights the challenges that minorities have faced inside Salesforce and other technology companies that have sought to boost diversity.
“Last Friday, we became aware of unauthorized access to one of our social media accounts. We took quick action and secured it,” a Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC in an email on Wednesday. The spokesperson didn’t comment on the content of the LinkedIn post but did point to a February blog post showing the status of diversity efforts.
As of November 3.4% of Salesforce employees in the U.S. were Black, up from 2.8% in November 2018, according to the company’s diversity reports. Black people represented 12.8% of the U.S. population in 2019, according to a U.S. Census Bureau estimate based on the American Community Survey.
In recent weeks two Black people have come forward to talk about their struggles working at Salesforce. Cynthia Perry, a senior manager who worked on design research, said in the resignation letter she posted on LinkedIn that she had “been gaslit, manipulated, bullied, neglected and mostly unsupported” as a Salesforce employee.
Vivianne Castillo, who had been a manager for design research and innovation, posted her resignation letter on LinkedIn as well, saying she was regularly asked to help with internal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts for free on top of her work.
Castillo alluded to miners sending canaries into coal mines to check for safety risks before going in. “I’ve grown tired of watching the canaries of underrepresented minorities leave Salesforce, only to watch Salesforce ramp up their efforts to throw more canaries into the culture that caused the previous ones to leave or worse — suffer in silence.”
In July, following protests of the killing of George Floyd while in police custody, Salesforce said it aims to increase the number of Black employees in the U.S. by 50% by the end of 2023.
Other companies also want to hire more Black workers, although not every effort is a smash hit. CNBC reported last month on issues that Black college students encountered while going through Google’s Howard West program, including discriminatory treatment from Google employees, with fewer participants than planned.
After Salesforce’s LinkedIn account published the message on Friday, hundreds reacted with emojis such as the thumbs up and heart, and some users left comments.
“Ohanaaaaa,” one Salesforce employee wrote, using the Hawaiian word for family, which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff regularly uses. “Yessss! You’re part of ours,” the Salesforce account wrote in reply. (In 2018, Bloomberg reported that some Salesforce employees had expressed that the company had misappropriated Hawaiian words and culture.)
“Language,” another Salesforce employee wrote in response to the original post.
“I’m Salesforce, b—-,” the company account replied.
“You are not,” the employee wrote back. “Your language demonstrates this.”
— Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
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