[troutpanda]

Mostly because of Reflection. The "black dude", who was already featured a bunch of times on HN and works on C/C++ (we'll have #embed thanks to him) was invited as keynote speaker (start of the day).

Now, since he was working on his own rust compile time reflection framework/proposal/vision, he decided to talk about that. Made it clear immediately to anyone he interacted with, and made clear that the whole idea was his own and doesn't reflect any opinion of the language team/etc.

Someone probably felt like making this a keynote talk would give the impression that his compile time reflection was actually going to be implemented. So after a week or so someone awkwardly decided the talk wasn't going to be a keynote, just a regular talk. After this, JeanHeid simply refused to attend RustConf at all: no one was accountable, no one really told JeanHeid they had a problem with his talk up until later, it wasn't clear if the decision came from RustConf organizers or Rust foundation, blah blah.

On the racism part, I can't say it's entirely irrelevant. You only see white rich dudes complaining about "all the woke stuff and the inclusivity". The fact that "no rustconf keynote speaker has ever been black" isn't really shocking to me, but simply because I don't see "being a keynote speaker" as something relevant. But when you could've been the "first black keynote speaker at rustconf" and then suddenly someone changes his mind about it, it's probably going to ring some bells if you've faced systematic discrimination for your whole life.