Читать книгу Upper Hand - Sherrell Dorsey - Страница 12

A 2021 study by consulting firm McKinsey revealed that nearly half of Black workers are concentrated in occupations like healthcare, retail, customer service, and food preparation industries—essentially the jobs that provide some of the lowest‐paying wages—and rarely within roles that are considered professional or managerial.

Reporting from the Brookings Institution also revealed that the highest proportions of low‐wage workers are female (54 percent of low‐wage workers, compared to 48 percent of the total workforce) and women of color. Hispanic and Black workers are overrepresented in low‐wage work and paid less for equivalent educational attainment. While the typical wage for U.S. workers is $42,000 per year, 43 percent of Black workers are earning less than $30,000 per year, and 52 percent of U.S.‐born Hispanic workers are earning the same. Those who migrated to the United States, earn a median income of $28,000.

The Central District, like many American neighborhoods occupied by Black and brown people, was not an assumed pipeline into college, or career opportunities in general for that matter, for the descendants of those people who had been subject to redlining rules, or who had felt the impacts of terrible policy like the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which turned petty drug crimes into lifelong sentences for marijuana dealers, and enterprising opportunists whose only outlet and mentorship was from those who had been devastated by mass incarceration and a lack of jobs.

As Amazon set up shop in Bellevue and eventually transitioned to South Lake Union in 2007, just another 12‐minute bus ride from the Central District, opportunity stretched again, skipping the Central District and any other local school system that had not already been a factory of talent in good neighborhoods with decent funding.

As the city built its reputation and prowess through the progress of its major technology companies, with Amazon boasting some of the largest square footage occupied by any company in the downtown community, it also increased its taste for concentrated poverty, pushing Black and brown residents out of the proximity of the more desirable area to jobs, and leaving many untrained, distant, and without the opportunity to build wealth or land the kinds of jobs that locals could have been onboarded into had opportunities for college and growth been part of the city's plan for workforce development and local investment.

Whereas my public high school had touted just a handful of Advanced Placement programs to help students earn college credit before graduation, the private schools in affluent communities where Bill Gates attended had already been well‐equipped with computers and technical programs and courses that served as an on‐ramp to jobs within the tech sector.

The majority of the CD's schools did not broadly offer honors or Advanced Placement courses in computer‐related skills. The neighborhood schools barely offered any computer training beyond basic typing and internet navigation classes.

My middle school, which boasted a partnership with companies like AT&T for magnet status, was more an introduction to gangs and drugs than about opportunities and options for life skills that would prepare us for the jobs that existed just a bus ride away. Recruiters for the military were often at our schools, but not the tech companies.

Seattle is a proxy for most of our coastal urban cities, which have seen deep investment in their business sector with very little investment in their surrounding communities, which have been defined more for their statistics on poverty and challenges than for their workforce growth opportunities.

It is a narrative that mirrors that of every other unfortunate story about gentrification, disinvestment, and lacking economic mobility within the very communities that were left for the poor, the immigrants, and people of color who had never been invited to join in the city's progress and certainly not within a job that would govern the future. Seattle is Oakland and San Francisco. It is New York City and Boston, Atlanta and Miami.

But how did one of the most promising cities skip over the talent pools and pipelines they claim to desperately say they value now 20 years after I left Meany Magnet Middle School in Seattle's Central District in the late 1990s?

As I recall my grandfather's story, my mom's deliberateness, and my proximity to some of the most formidable and influential technology companies in the world, I recognize how fortunate I was to have the right information at the right time to access the resources available to me.

Navigating available opportunities is not an easy task, especially when information is scattered, time is limited, or you simply don't know where to start.

I think about my grandfather saying yes to the opportunity to attend a trade program and taking the risk to leave his family behind to seek out an unknown opportunity in a land unfamiliar to him. I think about how my mother trusted that saying yes to a training opportunity for me would help me navigate a world she was uncertain about but knew that I needed to understand.

We've made getting into the technology space extremely complex. But it doesn't have to be. And although historically we've been far too often on the receiving end of exclusion, we can include ourselves in the rooms and tables that will carry us into opportunities that enable higher salaries, strategies for navigating an education that won't leave us in insurmountable debt, and career prospects that allow us to be pillars within our families and communities.

The increasing problems we face in society today, like threats to our privacy online, climate change, inaccessible banking tools, and other socially inextricable challenges, won't be solved by white guys in hoodies alone.

For too long, many of us have felt stuck without a guide. In the next few chapters, we'll take a look at the tools, researchers, entrepreneurs, language, and programs that are providing new forms of access and opportunity to what it means to be included in the future of work. The guides, exercises, and activities provided will help you with a framework for shaping your own journey in the changing and growing world of technology.