Even now, while the CARES Act has admirably set aside billions to help school districts provide connectivity and hardware to low-income students, we’ve seen no parallel investment in the mentoring and digital literacy training urgently needed to help teachers, parents and students fully join the digital community. We shouldn’t be surprised that more than half of students in some districts simply aren’t logging on.
If we’re serious about ending these inequities, we should recall James Baldwin’s words: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And pretending that the digital divide is merely a connectivity or infrastructure challenge fails to face the real roots of this failure.
Closing the digital divide will require nothing short of a revolution — a massive cultural change in institutions, from our public institutions in Washington to the gleaming corporate campuses of Silicon Valley. And this change must be led by Black entrepreneurs, activists and policy leaders — from venture firms like Lightship Capital, Black Girl Ventures or HBCU.vc to activist groups like Data 4 Black Lives, Civic Hacker and the Algorithmic Justice League — which have been all been ignored by the Silicon Valley power structure to date.
Changing institutions requires a sustained commitment, not just a series of COVID-specific legislative Band-Aids or well-intentioned but largely empty corporate blog posts conceding that Black Lives do, in fact, Matter. We must turn protest into policy — for example, by pressing to enact the Digital Equity Act of 2019 and Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s Computer Science for All Act. We need a concerted, sustained effort to build Black Tech Ecosystems — not just in Silicon Valley but in communities across the country.
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