Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Still "Shuckin' n Jivin': Not All Our Fault
And the battle of "Race and Rights" continues to duke it out in my mind. It's so much to consume and process. Just watched CNN's "Black in America:Silicon Valley" screening Thursday night. It was a handful of Black entrepreneurs competing for investors to launch their online businesses. It was sad, interesting and eye-opening. they make us "battle each other," while the watch and laugh at us. We are still shucking and jiving. They did not began to work together until an Indian man came and pointed out to them that the problem with our race is that "We do not work together enough." I went to a session about the Criminal Justice System." I found out how prisons are deliberately built in small, remote, low-income, minority cities to make locals excited about jobs and continue to "enslave" the poor, minority people. There then forms a hierarchy in the prison system among black people. Now, no one else has to enforce slavery, they just sit back, watch us, and laugh. We're still shucking and jiving. Yesterday in my Caribbean History class I watched a documentary based on Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place," called "Life and Debt." it talked about how America gives these countries subsidies and trumps interest on them, so that the country ends up in even more debt than they did before the accepted the loan. I learned about "Free Zones" and how America puts strict laws on exported goods and capital to be spent on Health and Education." We are enslaved today by golden chains. Is there any escaping? What can we do? What can I do? What do you do when you've been "Bamboozled" [Spike Lee Film] ?
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This is deep and it really got me thinking about a lot of things. That was extremely insightful and very true. We all need to come together as a community and work together instead of competing against one another. By working together, we can break a vicious cycle of injustice that becomes harder and harder to see everyday.
ReplyDeleteYasmine,
ReplyDeleteWhile I think you're right about the supports that the NewMe accelerator participants gave one another increased after Vivek Wadwa of Duke said that was an issue, I don't think they competed against each other so much as they were competing against a machinery -- Silicon Valley -- that they were just beginning to understand.
The production aspects of the show... like Real World style -- heightened some storylines to create dramatic interest and some red herrings. As I've said online, Silicon Valley is a state of mind, not a destination. We need to bring the mindset of creativity, innovation, failure AND money to wherever we find talent. Where they were "shucking and jiving" was in believing that had to happen in Silicon Valley as some "promised land." What they'll find is that there's no "wizard" there in Oz, just a little man behind a curtain. They had the talent they needed all the time.
If we continue this mythology as Silicon Valley as Oz, we will have people remove themselves from the communities, families and financial networks that they need most to chase dollars they are unlikely to see. We create a few "basketball stars" in Silicon Valley, but the majority never make it on that level. Should they not try? Not in Silicon Valley. They should find ways to network with those in and around the communities in which they live. Three (or more) of the people in the accelerator were from North Carolina -- Charlotte, Fayettesville and Raleigh I think. That tells me that there's talent right here we should be building, not exporting to the West coast.