Читать книгу Upper Hand - Sherrell Dorsey - Страница 7

Long before I ever sat down to write this book, the unfairness of how innovation and access are distributed among and favor certain communities over others haunted me.

After leaving my hometown of Seattle at 18, drifting across several mid‐size and big cities over the years, visiting home was always deflating. First, there was the excitement of discovering an old‐new city and its latest fanfare of restaurants and elevated shopping experiences, newly installed light rail systems, music venues, and galleries. But when I returned to my old neighborhoods or checked in with old friends and community folks, it was clear that they had not been benefactors of much of the city's growth.

Through the years, in my work reporting on innovation (and lack thereof) in communities of color, I have been frequently reminded of the unfairness of progress. Personally, perhaps by way of proximity, I was able to access opportunities to take part in learning the language, skills, and social networks of technology throughout my childhood and teen years. These small, yet significant, slivers of access empowered me to position myself for a future that would be largely shaped by discoveries and advances neither myself nor my family could have imagined were on the horizon. But those same resources that empowered me were not widely accessible to the vast majority of my peers, let alone the neighborhoods and schools that we were raised in. The evidence of this loss of potential talent and potential for greater social and economic mobility is much more than a by‐product of the passing of time lending itself to growing up and moving out. By design, and in the vast majority of American cities boasting deep innovation centers and entrepreneurship environments, communities of color have been left behind.

“Essential” workers, a moniker we assigned to lower‐wage, service workers at the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic, are largely made up of Black and Latinx people, who remain overrepresented in these fields. As technology advances and machines and robots perform many of the tasks once executed by humans, we're left with a series of questions about how we will ensure that those who are most economically vulnerable can gain access to and learn the skills of the future.

A few years ago, when I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was asked to sit on a conference panel with the city's workforce development leaders and other employers to discuss the future of work in Charlotte and beyond. At the time, I was building up BLKTECHCLT, a tech hub I co‐founded with my partners and friends Enovia Bedford and Freda Hendley, that provided networking and training tools to the city's rising Black tech entrepreneur community.

The panel and audience gathered in the basement of Grace A.M.E. Zion Church, a historic African Methodist Episcopal Zion church built in the early 1900s, set in the neighborhood of what is today referred to as Uptown. The conference was hosted by the Charlotte chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Unlike the many fancy tech conferences and gatherings I've attended and reported on around the country over the years, this room wasn't filled with high‐profile CEOs, venture capitalists, or college graduates who'd spent years teaching machines how to think. No, these were regular folks. They were grandparents and caregivers, deacons and truck drivers. The crowd of older men and women were curious about the new world of work, some of them visibly nervous about what that new world meant for them and their families.

I'll never forget my interaction with Ms. Smith (not her real name) that day. She sat in the front row, nodding softly as the conversation ran its course, shifting between keeping her eyes locked with mine and taking notes on the piece of paper she'd retrieved from the black purse that rested in her lap. Next to her sat a slim young man who you could tell was forced to spend his Saturday morning in a place he'd rather not.

During the question‐and‐answer period, Ms. Smith was the first to raise her hand. She shared with us that she had lived in Charlotte her entire life and had watched the city during its many transformations, noting how she had been here before Uptown was built, when folks would have never even thought about living in a boxy apartment in the center of the city. Ms. Smith, as she revealed, was raising her grandson, the young man sitting to her right. She had been raising him since he was a toddler and she was having a hard time feeling confident that she was able to guide him into a good life and career for himself. She came to the panel because she knew technology was important but knew very little about what that meant for folks like her, trying to find opportunities for her grandson.

The city boasted a youth employment program for teens, but there were very few options for young people to get access to paid technology internships. Local schools, depending on where you attended, had few resources for computer science programs. Overall, Ms. Smith didn't have a clear guide on how to navigate the resources available in the city or whether they'd be the right kind of resources her grandson would need to get a job that paid well and would put him on the right path.

After years of toiling with ideas on how to discuss the future of work for communities of color navigating opportunities within tech, my encounter with Ms. Smith reminded me to look toward the baseline. The majority of the books on tech are written from what reads more like science fiction or are so heavily laden with inaccessible language and concepts that they offer very few solutions for the everyday person.

This book is for Ms. Smith and for those of you serving as the source of information and guidance for your families and communities.

Navigating the plethora of programs, research, statistics, and opportunities available across tech and tech‐adjacent industries can be overwhelming. More important is deciding how to go about accessing these opportunities; determining the best strategies for what works requires time, knowledge, know‐how, and networks. Upper Hand is dedicated to helping make this process and pathway easier.

Upper Hand is designed to provide and expand options to an innovation alternative—one where communities that have been historically excluded or left behind are part of the movement toward a future as technology furthers its influence and impact on society.

Upper Hand helps us think about how we strategically shape the next decade of our lives and our communities.

My hope is that you'll find and use the information in this book to your advantage, to help you think critically and strategically about how you see yourself, your family, and your community navigating the new world of work.

This is the book I'd like for you to share with your family members, friends, houses of worship, community centers, mentor groups, and more. It is not designed to sit on your coffee table. You can pick it up each quarter to be used as a frequent resource and guide as you navigate your plans for shaping your career or educational pursuits. It is filled with case studies from people who, like me, came from communities that have been historically left behind in the innovation conversation.

The resources you'll find here include definitions of terms and directories you can access and search on my website. The exercises I've pulled together are designed to spark conversations you can have with your family and community groups as you think about how to take advantage of the moment defining the future.

I can't wait to see you all on the other side.