Sleeping Giants co-founder accuses counterpart of unconscious bias, racism & misogyny

One of the Sleeping Giant’s co-founders has left the organisation after stating that her “white male co-founder gaslighted her out of the movement” even though she didn’t want to leave Sleeping Giants.

Writing in Medium, Nandini Jammi wrote,

“Nearly four years after I began building Sleeping Giants, the campaign to make bigotry and sexism unprofitable, I’m leaving — but not because I want to.”

Explaining that Matt Rivitz and her are equals, Nandini Jammi continued to write,

“We independently had the exact same idea one week apart. He found me less than a day after I published a Medium post urging marketers to add Breitbart to their exclusion list, and after I had tweeted a screenshot at Old Navy. We hit it off, and began working together immediately.”

But then they fell apart when they both came out together and she disappeared,

“Without my knowledge, my story was being defined by someone else — a white man who could use his platform to exclude me, diminish me, or disappear me entirely. He never once invited me to join him. I never had any idea he was doing any of these interviews until it was too late.”

And she also wrote in the same article,

“The work I had done for Sleeping Giants was also appearing on his conference bio. The vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group bigger than we were was now being claimed solely by him.”

But this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Jammi,

“A few weeks ago, I told Matt I was researching ways to put pressure on Facebook. He told me he had just gotten off a call with the ADL about a potential campaign. He was having meetings about what they would later announce as the #StopHateForProfit campaign. Once again, he was leaving me out of the room. I’m sorry I have to leave Sleeping Giants. There was always space for both of us, just not on this campaign.”