Are Black People Becoming 21st Century Digital Slaves?

by Phillip Jackson
The Black Star Project

If you are not able to code and if you are not computer literate, you are pretty much a 21st century digital slave. If you don't have access to and are using the internet for personal growth and development, you are pretty much a 21st century digital slave. If you are not encouraging your schools to teach coding and computer literacy to your children, and if you are not allowing your children to learn, read and write code, you are promising your children 21st century digital slavery.

Phillip Jackson

If your children are playing video games, rather than creating video games, they too, will be consigned to 21st century digital slavery. If you are not learning coding yourself, you have relegated yourself to the old way of being educated and the old way of existing. You have made yourself obsolete. You have volunteered to be a 21st century digital slave!

It is time for all people, but especially Black people, to run away from digital slavery to digital freedom and digital excellence! The most widely spoken language in world in the near future is not going to be English, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili or Spanish-it is going to be a language of computer coding. People in every country will speak this language. 90% of all new jobs in the world will require employees to speak this language. You will not be able to live (well) anywhere in the world without this language.

The Black Star Project will offer introductory classes to coding and computer literacy during the holidays. Effective education can no longer occur just between 8:30 am and 2:30 pm, Monday through Friday, for 200 school days a year. Learning has become too important to leave to schools! Learning must be driven by parents, families and communities, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!

Learning is no longer a local activity, but a global imperative. Just as some slaves became accustomed to chattel slavery, some people are becoming accustomed to the new 21st century digital slavery. The only way to break these bonds that rob people of dignity and freedom are with "new learning".

Equal Internet Access is a K-12 Must-Have

COMMENTARY by Helen Brunner

The days when spiral notebooks, No. 2 pencils, and a backpack full of textbooks served as the mainstays of the American classroom are rapidly giving way to a new school environment. Interactive whiteboards, online classes, streaming lectures, and digital textbooks are revolutionizing the way students learn and communicate with their teachers. Technology is blurring the brick-and-mortar boundaries of learning in 21st-century schools.

As a result, access to the Internet has become a need-to-have-not just a nice-to-have-when it comes to student success. After all, according to documents the Federal Communications Commission's broadband task force released in 2009, about 70 percent of teens said the Internet had been their primary source for a recent school project, and at least 65 percent went online at home to complete their homework. Teachers routinely assign homework that requires Internet use to complete, and more than half of American schools expect to adopt e-textbooks in the next two to three years.

But with this increased reliance on the Internet as a basic resource in our education system, we can't forget about the infrastructure that makes it all possible. We must ensure that all students-no matter their location or socioeconomic status-have access to affordable, reliable high-speed Internet both in and outside the classroom.

Even if students have reliable Internet access at school, many become digitally disconnected once they leave. This is especially true for minorities and those who live in rural or low-income communities, and it makes their homework harder to complete.

Read the rest of this Black Star Journal commentary here.

America's Dangerous Tech Gap

The digital divide in this country is accelerating, with poor and minority kids still less likely to have access to critical tech tools, from laptops to the Internet. Chelsea Clinton on why this threatens all our futures—and how to tackle it.

Read the full Daily Beast article.