The systemic factors that limit Black participation in the Tech sector

I learned a lot from Kamau Bobb’s recent Atlantic article, “The Black Struggle for Technology Jobs.”  In it, he details the systemic factors that limit Black participation in the Tech sector.  He uses the possibility of Amazon’s HQ2 going to Atlanta as a framing.

After Atlanta made the shortlist of cities vying for Amazon’s second global headquarters, HQ2, it submitted a multibillion-dollar investment to try to seal the deal. (Other cities’ proposals were even bigger.) At stake is nothing less than the city’s economic future: HQ2 promises more than 50,000 high-tech jobs with an average salary of more than $100,000. With the tech industry looking like the future of all industry, Atlanta landing Amazon’s HQ2 would be a dream come true.

But a dream for whom? Highly educated people, particularly those with technical skills, are the ones who are really eligible for these prized jobs. People without that kind of education risk becoming even more marginalized in an increasingly tech-driven economy. In Atlanta, one of the most segregated cities in the United States, history has already largely determined who gets to benefit from the potential of Amazon.

In 2016, there was only one census tract in Atlanta where the population was more than 65 percent black, and where more than half the population age 25 or older had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2000, there were 10. Here, many black and brown students, and poor students of all backgrounds, receive a substandard education that does not prepare them for entry to the select colleges and universities tech companies draw their workforces from. Consequently, with or without Amazon’s investment, the city’s black population likely won’t land stem jobs unless they can gain access to the rigorous educational paths required to compete for them. In Atlanta and the many other American cities still scarred by decades of racist education policies, the future of work is still largely defined by a past from which their residents of color can’t seem to break free.

I’m biased in favor of this article because one of the students he interviews in this piece is my daughter, Katie. I learned from Katie’s comments, too.  I knew that the public high school where we sent all three of our children was unusually diverse, yet it was a family conversation how the gifted/accelerated classes were almost all white and Asian.  Because of what Barb and I do, we kept an eye on the AP CS class at that high school, and were surprised every year at how few Blacks ever entered the class, despite the significant percentage of Black students in the school. I’m glad that, years later, Katie still thinks about those issues and why so few Black students made it into her AP classes.