Race and Digital Opportunity in the Delta

“You’d better bring the books back, or we’ll tie a rope around your neck.”

Yesterday our Samaschool instructor Terrence Davenport called me from Dumas, a town on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta. He was out of breath. He’d been showing around a film crew covering our work for a documentary, and as part of their visit Terrence took them to the local chamber of commerce.

The Chamber had just published some books on the history of Main Street. Terrence, a local history buff, asked if he might borrow the books to show the film crew. The older white lady behind the counter gave him a long look, and then, without smiling, told him coldly, “you’d better bring the books back, or we’ll tie a rope around your neck.”

Terrence is about the nicest person you’ll meet. He grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, high-fives everyone in town, and moved back to Dumas after getting his degree in Fayetteville in order to help his community.

This kind of overt racism isn’t new to him, or the dozens of students who’ve graduated from Samaschool classes on the Internet Economy. Earlier today four of them met me outside our computer lab for breakfast. They told me about a KKK march in the neighboring town of Monticello, about 20 minutes away. The rally was escorted by local policemen and advertised widely.

Racism is the injustice that gets swept under the rug in our country. It makes it that much harder for Sama to do our work. How can we convince people to get motivated and seek projects on Internet-based platforms when their personal histories include so much overt discrimination that they’ve lost hope? When they’ve been paid 30% less for the same job at the local furniture store, or told to be careful after dark? (The latter was seen on a sign in a town about an hour’s drive from Dumas, the former headquarters of the KKK.)

This kind of systematic, deeply hateful speech and bullying leads to mental health problems. Can you imagine what it would be like to live in constant fear? Under the expectation of inferiority from authority figures? In a town where only .5% of the businesses are owned by people who make up 70% of the population? Many of our students report depression, stress, and anxiety about the future. Most of them are deeply religious, and use their faith as a buffer against hopelessness.

This is not the full story of Arkansas. This state has a remarkably progressive side. Many people fight for racial and economic justice for the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who still struggle to have their basic human needs met. On this trip, we met with leaders of the Walmart Foundation, arguably one of the biggest development agencies in the world with over 2.4 million workers, guaranteed employment for veterans, and millions more employed in the supply chain. We met with the Women’s Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, both deeply invested in moving people out of poverty in rural parts of the state. I heard from wealthy white Little Rock residents who are lobbying for more state funding for programs like ours.

But even with this support, our battle is uphill. Two of our students, for example, got great job offers as virtual call center agents. But these were canceled when they discovered that they can’t get sufficient bandwidth at home to meet the call center requirements. The ISPs simply don’t serve rural communities with the same products, cutting them off from desperately needed income.

High-speed connectivity, like clean water, is a basic human need in the twenty-first century. There’s no excuse for the richest country in the world to deny its poorest citizens what they need most: a chance to connect.

Leila Janah is the CEO and founder of Sama and Laxmi, and co-author of America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age. You can subscribe to her updates here.