Читать книгу Upper Hand - Sherrell Dorsey - Страница 9

By the end of 1983, my mom had finished college and left Detroit to join my grandfather in Seattle. By that time, he'd married his new wife Rosella, had my aunt Rhonda from a previous marriage, and had become stepfather to my uncle Philip.

When I came along, it was Grandpa who helped fill in the gaps. Single‐parent life for my mom was facilitated by a village of family and friends. My grandfather, who lived a two‐minute drive “up the hill” and had long since retired, was the designated helper of pickups and drop‐offs. He was the one with the patience to help us with science products, cutting wood and metal in his garage to help me build a robotic arm for my seventh‐grade science project. His knack for technology and the mundanity of retirement made me and my cousin prime targets for his evangelizing of technology into our lives.

Grandpa was also the “Inspector Gadget” of our family, known for his affinity for gizmos, the latest television and VCR home equipment, and any other electronics he could wire into his home or garage workshop. Before home security tools became the norm, a keypad would let you enter the garage. A push of the doorbell triggered a camera upstairs to confirm guests before someone would travel downstairs to unlock the door.

He even set us up with our very first personal computers in the mid‐1990s, convincing my mom to get an extra phone cord for dial‐up internet. As the default designated babysitter for me and my cousins when school was out, our morning activities included accompanying Grandpa to Costco for groceries and an afternoon perched in front of his upstairs computer learning how to type via the Mavis Beacon CD‐ROM program that circulated in the computer's disk tower.

Mavis was a beloved annoyance in my grandfather's house. She was our very first engagement of a Black person's face on a software program. She looked more like an Ebony magazine cover model than a woman who spent her days forcing children to learn the quintessential home row on the computer keyboard. My cousin Otis and I would take turns going through each lesson while Grandpa watched a game of golf or built a new piece of furniture in his garage.

Grandpa normalized technology and our access to it in our everyday lives as a tool for learning, discovery, and a route to greater efficiency. Since he was retired and spent his days carting us around or running back and forth from the hardware store for any given random construction project he was managing at home, he had a lot of time to also curl up in front of a series of infomercials. This meant that every new CD‐ROM available for the low price of $19.99 was ours to behold.

We had digital literature on the anatomy of the body with the ability to build 3D models of every body part we were curious about. Grandpa believed these tools would help us advance in our learning of science as well as technical skills. He bought us other software tools for increasing our reading comprehension, even making us sit for speed reading instruction. Grandpa was adamant about introducing tech‐based learning games and software programs that were supposed to turn us into instant geniuses. We toyed around with these for a while before eventually begging to take a break from the screen to go outside to play with the other kids who would begin to gather around my grandfather's garage in the late afternoons to take advantage of the basketball hoop that hung over the garage and the miniature putting green he'd built into the yard (that to this day he has used maybe once).

What we were learning and discovering at Grandpa's was supplemented at home through my mom's intentional collection of an analog library of books and literature written by Black authors and researchers. After my dates with Mavis Beacon, my mom encouraged my relationship with Maya Angelou, Mona Lake Jones, Toni Morrison, Jawanza Kunjufu, Walter Dean Meyers, and other Black literary voices.

As the digital age became more accessible, and our collection of encyclopedias became obsolete, she purchased CD‐ROMs like Microsoft's 1999 Encarta Africana—one of the early digital encyclopedias that used text, images, and storytelling to present narratives on Black Americans and African culture. For personal exposure, and for research for school projects, having access to a living, digital encyclopedia was my early experience in doing research online.

My mom was certainly no technologist, but she adapted to the environment as technology at work transformed and she prioritized its usage at home. She worked in leadership roles across social service agencies, running the office of child welfare before transitioning to nonprofit management and foster care advocacy work, where keeping up digitally was a requirement to staying competitive in the market. In addition to ensuring that we replaced at‐home equipment once new models came out, Mom frequently purchased gadgets like Game Boys and Walkmans, and upgraded the home sound systems for playing Anita Baker for Saturday morning cleaning sessions. In 1996, she even owned a Palm Pilot—an early rendition of the tablets we use today.

She stressed the importance of possibility, and she did this well with how she shaped our “village.” Growing up in a middle‐class Black family with others who had migrated meant that our parents were keen on exposing us to “Blackness” outside of Seattle. Representing a very small percentage of the total population meant that we had all grown accustomed to being one of very few Black or brown students in a classroom. For us, underrepresentation, outside of our immediate homes and circles, was the norm.

On Saturdays, after we cleaned the house and ate breakfast, Mom transported me to the Central Area, a predominantly Black community, for a few hours of Black history and entrepreneurship learning at the Delaney Learning Center. We met at the Central Area Motivation Program (CAMP) space on Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackson Streets—a space that got its start in 1964 as a community‐led initiative during the War on Poverty, as one of the first programs to receive funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity.

A group of volunteer parents and their children would spend a few Saturdays a month with us. We'd dig through history books, as they helped us contextualize the lacking information on African American experiences our classrooms were neglecting to share. We learned about the economic and cultural contributions of Black Americans. We designed projects centered around group economics and how building community wasn't just a nice thing to do, but was part of our responsibility to work together to progress and support our neighbors. We hosted car washes, where we would sell stock in our informal business to our family members in order to help us purchase supplies. We developed business plans using a curriculum designed by the national student entrepreneurship education program Junior Achievement.

I hated not being able to sleep in on Saturday mornings. Instead of letting me watch cartoons and eat cereal, Mom dragged me to class, or a board meeting, or anything that did not include me staying home and playing with my friends.

Looking back, I now appreciate the environment and understand the privilege of learning and growing in the community I did, and the intentionality our parents instilled as they shared responsibility in our growth, development, and leadership.

Delaney was just one of many groups that defined Black Seattle and my learning experience. Black legacy organizations like the Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha sororities spent time in local schools helping young Black girls explore college options. The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) chapters of professionals set up groups at select schools across the city to help connect students to professionals in engineering who looked like them.

Black Seattle worked hard to ensure that Black and brown kids growing up in a mostly white city had access to cultural as well as educational opportunities they might not otherwise have experienced.

Annual fundraising efforts to take students on tours of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were organized by alums, and local organizations that aided in exposing students to college options helped to cover fees. Black‐owned businesses like the Wellington Tea Room in Columbia City served as a staple for Black community gatherings, parties, fundraisers, nightlife, and debutante balls.

Family friends with elder children became immediate surrogate older siblings and mentors, filling me with stories about the software games and programs they were developing at their respective schools and boasting about their co‐op and internship programs at companies like General Electric. They filled me with dreams of a life of success and capabilities through what I could build with my mind and my hands—just like my grandfather.

Fortunately, I would get a chance to do just that.

Just before I was set to enter high school, Mom grabbed a flyer off a community board at one of my after‐school programs. A technology training program through a nonprofit called the Technology Access Foundation was accepting students for its program teaching computer literacy and programming languages, and providing college readiness and mentorship support. The program was just four years old at the time, launched in 1996, and was quietly changing the trajectory of some of Seattle's most vulnerable families. As the story went, Trish Millines Dziko retired from Microsoft as a senior software engineer and was making it her mission to help kids of color learn about and get into the field of technology.

The program would provide training, paid internship opportunities, college prep support, and a $1,000 scholarship for each year of program completion. Best of all, there was no cost to families. For a single parent who needed to keep a rambunctious teenage daughter busy and on the road to college (with added financial support, of course), my mom needed little coercion to add my name to Millines Dziko's initiative.

I was accepted and started the introduction to technology programs, taking apart and learning the different components of the computer, eventually spending time learning things like C# programming, a bit of JavaScript, ASP.NET, and my favorite class, network administration.

TAF ran the duration of the school year, with summers dedicated to paid internships with local technology companies. Twice per week, I'd hop the 48 bus from Franklin High School in Seattle's South End and get off at Judkins and 23rd in front of Parnell's corner store in the Central District—the same community in which I'd attended the Delaney Learning Center just a few short years prior. Classes ran from 3:30 to 5:30, which meant long days juggling classes and homework and taking the bus back home to the South End.

Both were predominately Black and brown neighborhoods of mixed‐income economic situations and social paradoxes, harboring stories of gang violence and community picnics, Black, Hispanic, and Asian‐owned businesses contrasted with street‐corner weed dealers, poverty, and affluence.

Beyond the offered classes, TAF also provided SAT test prep, interview techniques, and resume building, and even took us on tours of local colleges. It was kind of like the Motown of training centers—they taught us how to walk and talk and land opportunities afforded to very few teenagers in the city. Between the fall of 1997 and spring of 2008, TAF trained 500 Seattle‐area high school students of color within its technical teens internship program.

Today, the TAF Academy is a public 6th‐ through 12th‐grade learning campus and operates as one of the leading public STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) schools and consults with school districts around the country. Over 75 percent of the students are students of color, and many come from households where English is not their first language. Over 95 percent of students graduate on time and 100 percent of students are accepted to a two‐year or four‐year college.

TAF also runs a fellowship program teaching a body of diverse current and future instructors' best practices for delivering a STEM curriculum to kids of color. Two of my cousins attended and graduated from both the middle and high school programs.