Zuckerberg, Imma let you finish but…

In this week’s When Keeping It Racist Goes Wrong, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohammed was arrested for being smarter than I ever was at 14 (and arguably at 25) for making a clock from scratch.

Here’s the synopsis via Mic:

The tech savant built the timepiece in an attempt to impress his teachers. Its resemblance to an old-fashion movie time bomb, however, prompted response from law enforcement after an English teacher discovered the device.

When Mohamed first met with police officers in the principal’s office of MacArthur High School, he reportedly became acutely aware of his race. Upon seeing him, an officer he had never met remarked, “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

“But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated,” Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, told the Dallas Morning News.

Of course when I first heard the story, I hoped it wasn’t here in Texas; but for some reason Texas and Florida lead the country in racist asshole moments, so sure enough seeing the Dallas-area suburb of Irving pop up, I wasn’t shocked.

Dallas is the asshole of Texas anyway. Okay, that was a personal Houstonian jab, but I would argue there is some accuracy to my claim though. But that’s for another blog post.

An outpour of love for Ahmed and his awesomeness came from all ends, including President Obama:

The tech and science community rallied around Ahmed as well.

The hashtag #IStandwithAhmed took off and became the number 2 trending topic globally by noon. A STEM scholarship fund was set up to help Ahmed reach his full potential. Facebook’s Zuckerberg weighed in on the idea and invited Ahmed to the Facebook HQ. Twitter offered him an internship.

There seemed to be a silver lining to a horrible situation for Ahmed.

It was awesome. The support made my day. But it also made me think. When Ahmed visits Facebook, will he even see anyone who looks like him? While twitter is offering internships, are they doing something to address their issue with the lack of diversity amongst their staff?

I get it. Literally, I do. In the world of social media, you say stuff for the buzz, for the press. I’m not doubting sincerity here; I work in media-so I can admit to being overly cynical about things. However, how do we go about addressing these REAL issues?

A somewhat personal story, this lack of diversity isn’t just apparent in STEM fields. In media, I’ve often been discouraged at the lack of women; specifically black women in the field. Even living in the country’s “most diverse city”, I find large PR companies keep few brown and black faces around to meet the quota, although there are way more wildly talented professionals of color who can’t break into the field. It isn’t a coincidence. It’s made me question if I “belong” in the media. It also has made me realize a harsh reality that no matter how far I go in the field, I’ll always be an “OTHER”, the very small minority in such a large field. It’s discouraging at times.

However, this is an epidemic in STEM fields. A USA Today study disclosed that top universities graduate black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering students at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them. These companies are quick to state they don’t have a qualified pool of applicants, the evidence does not support that claim. Go figure.

Facebook reported that in 2014 it had employed just 81 blacks among its 5,500 U.S. workers.

This homogenous hiring trend is dangerous because STEM fields are the future, and arguably the present. We’ve all heard it, we all know it, and if kids of color and girls can’t physically see it, they will be lead to believe that their dreams are unattainable.

Representation is important. For various reasons.

1) A diverse workforce works better to serve their audiences. Different perspectives give companies the ability to innovate and deliver better results. A good-ol-boys convention should not and cannot speak for what women, various religious groups and minorities want from their brands.

2) It makes the “impossible” possible. Growing up, I really believed no black,hispanic, asian person or woman could be President. Why? Because before Barry came through to change things, the President’s poster that we all had in our history classes looked like an Texas A&M frat class officer display.

That poster lead me to believe that the Presidency was something limited to well-off Caucasian MEN. Of course, our parents never discouraged us as minorities and women when we said we wanted to grow up to be president, but I have to wonder if they believed that we could actually make it to the white house.

So, while its cute, inspiring and totally amazing that Ahmed will be walking the halls of Facebook soon, and learning from awesome techies in Twitter meetings, I challenge the tech community to do something to ensure more amazing scientists and techies of color and awesome women STEM pros can put their companies on their resume.

It’s time to back up your words; yes diversity matters. Articulate its importance and put action behind it. Create and implement a strategy for making their companies more diverse and creating programs to make that process/strategy more effective.

Because, like Zuckerberg, I agree, we need more passionate, awesome science loving students like Ahmed in our schools. The future does belong to the Ahmeds of the world.

And we need them on the front-line and visible in the tech world.

Jessika Davidson is a multimedia communications professional with over three years of experience as a journalist. When she’s not busy completing graduate coursework in journalism, she’s blogging at www.jessnthecity.com or taking naps.