Race and the digital divide

"Imagine going into low-income neighborhoods across the nation and creating one million new high-tech jobs for people who had never even seen computers before. The widely respected Hudson Institute called for just such an ambitious jobs creation initiative in its Workforce 2000 report, published in 1987. Nearly 20 years later, much of the nation is mired in a prolonged jobless recovery.

"Many of the new jobs that are being created are located in India, China and other lower cost, overseas locations. For far too many Americans, the dream of economic prosperity that comes with growing numbers of high-skilled, high-wage jobs has been postponed or abandoned. The African-American community has been particularly hard hit. New business opportunities for people like John Henry Thomspon, the Harlem native who created Lingo, the scripting language that powered the Internet in the 1980s, and Philip Emeagwali, a 1989 IEEE Gordon Bell Prize winner, seem few and far between."