Imagine you have been pre-assigned work [for life], and at best, you get the education for the work you have been pre-assigned.
No, really… imagine. Imagine a reality that before you were even born, still inside your mother’s tummy, you were pre-assigned a career which requires low skills and a career that is awarded low pay for the rest of your life. And get this. The education that is guaranteed for you will only get you the work which you have been preassigned. For life…
For the last 400 years, the fields, the chain gangs, and the jails are the final destinations of a “sharecropper education”
and Black folk have been, involuntarily, thrown in them all.
I first learned about this idea of “Sharecropper Education” when I was in the 11th grade while in a planning meeting at the Young People’s Project. Well…
“Not only do we [black people] need to function in the mathematical space, we need to also, in parallel, function in the Computer Science space, because our existence in the 21st century counts on it. ” -Cliff
In the book Radical Equations, Bob Moses and Charlie Cobb described, eloquently, the age-old problem revolving mathematics. They wrote about the transition of the 20th century and how the first programmable computer, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was developed one year before the first cotton-picking machine was used in Mississippi. These two technological innovations totally shifted the tides of how work was and will be done in this country. Bob and Charlie wrote “And just as automation and the mechanical cotton picker were changing southern agriculture, so, inexorably, would the computer push us from the assembly line by shifting…
Cliff Freeman
I think about how Black People should relate to Mathematics and Computer Science. Because… who else will?
