Via a reader tip comes news that Jesse Jackson is bringing his race hustling enterprise to Silicon Valley:
Civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson brought his campaign for more diversity in Silicon Valley workforces to The Chronicle Editorial Board Wednesday, noting that the racial separation of 50 years ago wasn’t as great as the inequality today. First Google, and then other Silicon Valley firms, released numbers depicting shockingly low racial and gender diversity in their workplaces, stories routinely reported in The Chronicle.
The Rev. Jackson said Silicon Valley companies are operating outside the equal opportunity employment and anti-discrimination laws and should know better. These companies have been created long since those laws were passed, and well after cultural expectations of equal access to jobs had taken root. The most frequent defense from the companies is that these jobs are technically demanding and that there are few blacks or Latinos with the needed skills. “Then why not invest in a plan to produce the engineers you need?” Jackson asks.
Jackson is promoting the idea that Silicon Valley firms, who have billions of dollars in offshore bank accounts that bypass U.S. taxes, could invest some of those funds in education and scholarships to train people of color as programmers and engineers. “Grow your own food, so to speak,” he said.
From Jackson’s view, the workforce should represent the marketplace. If 12 to 20 percent of the technology marketplace is black or brown, then shouldn’t 12 to 20 percent of the technology workforce be black or brown? The companies’ bottom line would benefit from the added value of inclusion, he said. (SF Gate)
You can read more at the link, but I eagerly await Jackson to start a campaign to get more whites and Asians into the NBA to better reflect the population like he wants Silicon Valley to do.
