Poverty and Classism: The Silent Diversity Issue

If you’re unwilling to stop silencing the voices of poor people and relinquish any of your socio-economic privileges in order for marginalized poor people struggling just to keep themselves alive in deep poverty while striving against impossible odds to gain a toehold onto even just the lowest rung of the middle class IT jobs ladder, then this article is not for you.

If you are active in promoting and supporting tech diversity initiatives then this article most definitely is for you.

Now that we’ve got that cleared up, let’s move on.

“Why aren’t poor people motivated” is the wrong question because those of us at the very bottom know all too well just how badly the entire game is rigged and that we don’t stand a chance, so it’s pointless to keep trying.

When I started learning programming at the age of 46 in 2013 at the behest of an advocate and ally to poor, marginalized, unemployable human trafficking survivors, I had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. Not because I really didn’t want to learn programming or learn a new skill that was perhaps too difficult for me as a dyselexic, but because I had every reason to believe that struggling to learn programming would be just one more thing I’d put a 1,000% effort into trying only to not have it work out for me so I’d be able to get a job and climb out of extreme poverty anyway.

Because nothing ever worked out for me no matter what I tried and how hard I tried is the…