In my Editor's Note this week, I wrote about the fact that this year's Computerworld IT Salary Survey found that African-American IT workers are just as underrepresented in the profession and just as inequitably compensated as they were last year. But I noted that we have reason to be hopeful that positive change lies ahead.
I expressed that view because I had witnessed something unlike anything I'd ever seen before when I was standing in the middle of the crowd in Times Square on election night. This is how I described that scene:
"At the moment the screens flashed the numbers that meant our country had elected its first African-American president, I found myself immersed in a wave of elation that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. People of all races cried. Strangers of different races hugged and posed for photographs with each other. Inching their way down Broadway, taxi drivers of all colors extended their arms out their windows to slap hands of all colors. People gazed at the streaming news banners for which Times Square is so well known, their thoughts no doubt spinning at the magnitude of what they read."
As I noted in that column, "there was an electricity pulsating through the crowd that made New Year's Eve seem sleepy in comparison. No garish ball of lights was dropping. Instead, a virtual ball of hope was rising."
1 comment:
So many Blacks are told they won't be able to make it in highly technological fields, many others do not have the courses or resources offered to them until they get to college and then they are way behind some of their peers.
The question becomes how does this problem prioritize with a heap of other problems each grasping for a limited amount of attention and resources.
I don't doubt that we can, but I hope that this hope does bring about change.
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