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Prince Quietly Helped Launch a Coding Program For Inner City Youth (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Though many would say Prince changed the world through his music, the artist also took a hands-on approach to changing the world beyond music. The global superstar was the inspiration behind YesWeCode, an Oakland nonprofit, which works to help young people from minority backgrounds enter the tech world. The idea for the program came from a conversation between Prince and his friend Van Jones, who heads Rebuild the Dream charity, following the 2012 shooting of teenager Travoyn Martin. "Prince said, 'A black kid wearing a hoodie might be seen as a thug. A white kid wearing a hoodie might be seen as a Silicon Valley genius. Let's teach the black kids how to be like Mark Zuckerberg.'" Jones told CNN. The program is aiming to teach 100,000 low-income non-white teenagers how to write code, and was launched at the 20th Anniversary Essence Festival in New Orleans in 2014.
Let's teach the black kids how to be like Mark Zuckerberg.
Teach all those Ivy League/Government Intelligence/Google interpersonal networking connections that one is typically born into?
I'd love to learn that one as well.
"Let's teach the black kids how to be like Mark Zuckerberg"
So, thugs?
I don't think so! Homey ain't no asshole! Homey don't do that!
Because the tech industry doesn't have enough self-absorbed dousche bags as it is.
He was amazing!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"Prince Quietly Helped Launch a Coding Program For Inner City Youth "
I heard he could heal the sick and raise the dead.
He was awesome.
I knew he was one of those Republican sympathizers, but this goes over the line into Nazi territory. Saying someone should die because of their racist is known to most people as something that is racist. Only a Republican would argue otherwise.
How the hell is this acceptable?
"The program is aiming to teach 100,000 low-income non-white teenagers how to write code"
This is racist, pure and simple. If it was just low-income, fine. If it was just low-income teenagers, fine. If it's low-income teenagers from certain economically devastated cities, fine. But if it's only for non-white teens, that is the definition of racism.
>> young people from minority backgrounds enter the tech world
The whole "special access due to skin color/gender" bit is getting a bit old, when what's really probably needed is "special access to people from impoverished backgrounds." When you've never seen anyone in your family working in a corporate office, it's a little hard to see understand what a career in IT/legal/other-cushy-white-collar-job could be, and there are plenty of "non-minority" kids stuck in that world too.
...the solution is racist comments that paint every white kid as privileged.
Racism is bad, and it's no better when it's racism against white people which seems to be the new trend.
The program is aiming to teach 100,000 low-income non-white teenagers how to write code,
I guess poor white people don't matter? What if we changed that from "non-white" to non-black? Non-Mexican? Or non-gay? That would suddenly make this program racist or homophobic.
The way we've been treating each other in the US or on the planet, for that matter, has been embarrassing for most of my life as far as I can tell. But the recent trends do not give me much hope. It's a step in a different direction, but I'm not entirely sure it's a good one, just different.
1. A white kid walking around at night in a hoodie looks like a thug also. He does not look like a tech billionaire.
2. All low income kids need help regardless of race.
3. Sure programing and tech can be a good way to make a living but studies have shown that people that go to vocational schools leave school with jobs and little debt.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Listen, as one of your duly enshrined plutocratic oligarchs its my duty to insist upon you coding. Code. Do it. Come one come all and learn the code. Seriously it wasnt this hard to get you to start eating fried processed chicken "nuggets" or pick up another credit card, and yet here we are toeing the line again. Weve installed "code" into all your pop culture, even the prince, in a very transparent attempt to get you start doing this for us. We've even taken the initiative to market gender-specific coding pitches to males and females, as you've grown so fond of for everything from food to deodorant. Code is in your movies, your TV series, your cartoons, and your social media. The faster you start coding, the faster we can get to shuffling "programmer" and "system engineer" back to the bottom of the dung heap of salaried wageslave positions.
Im serious. im getting really tired of dealing responsibly and reasonably with employed programmers and sysops just because they have 4 job offers at any given time to pick from. I want..no..I need a world where I can get up at 10 AM, shit on a man for screwing up an egg mcmuffin, and then turn around and with the same disregard for humanity shit on a man for arguing the need for patching before features. Its just what ive become.
Good people go to bed earlier.
* How to code up guns to shoot other blacks
* How to write code to steal from people
* How to make code run from the police
* How to make code that never runs any jobs
Only if you're not white. We have enough rich white bastards, we need more diversity among the rich bastards.
Beats me why, but I keep hearing good things 'bout it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Doesn't seem so quiet if it makes the news.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's Prince except its lame ass inner-city projects that he could have funded with all the blow he stuck up his nose. And he wasn't fraught. And considering his self professed Christian faith he was a colossal fucking hypocrite of the first order.
The reason the rich send their kids to Harvard and Stanford is not that they receive a better education there, but rather that they make contacts with the kids of other rich families that they have a good chance of getting hired by or starting a company with. So I agree, a lot of being successful is WHO you know, not WHAT you know, and that cannot be taught. On the bright side, I've seen some very talented lawyers and other professionals mentoring poor minority kids, and that assistance may be more valuable than going to an Ivy League school.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That's racist on it's face dude. You're a fucktard
It's not racist. It isn't racist because it's not true. I can't find any legitimate news source or any reference on the organization's website saying anything about 100,000 non-white youth. Their goal is to help 100,000 low-income youth. The summary is absolutely wrong and it's embarrassing that Slashdot let racist trolling into a summary. While the low-income segment the program targets likely has a disproportionate amount of non-white youth relative to the overall population, that is due to the overall characteristics of the US population and not because they're excluding white youth. It's fucking embarrassing that Slashdot posted racism in the story. It's also bullshit that the parent has been censored to -1.
Been teaching myself to code for ten years or more and can't even get an entry level job. How is this program supposed to actually work? Somehow I doubt teaching Jamal how to code For loops is going to make him employable, when there are plenty of people like me who still can't find entry into the industry...
I love watching you babies shit your diapers the second something isn't available to white folks. It's so entertaining I think more groups like these should be founded, if only because you people are so damn entertaining.
Your profanity and baby metaphors aren't doing much to clear you of the "fucktard" allegation, incapable as you may be of comprehending why someone might be categorically opposed to racist idiocy, despite your correctness that many people in any category you create by labeling them on some physical characteristic will show some signs of fitting poorly into such a characterization (with the occasional emotional outburst, in many cases)
Haha, suckers! Want my job? Take it!
Seriously, I am so fed up at this point with tech. I am tired of being a "wizard." I am tired of other people expecting me to do their jobs because in the course of my duties I learn things about their jobs and provide them tools to help them do their own fucking jobs. I am tired of people looking to me as some kind of keeper of records and archivist simply because I tend to keep copies of older documents around in an organized manner. If an archivist is what they fucking need, then they need to fucking add it to my job description, title, and most importantly my paycheck! I am tired of other people whose fucking job is to communicate with the customer expecting me to somehow have some kind of better fucking knowledge than they do about a customer!
Sure, I can do all those things. Maybe I'm just an extra-capable nice guy with a long memory and experience in many different walks of life. Maybe I really am "smart" or a "genius" like everybody keeps fucking assuming. (And also fucking assuming that they're not "smart" or a "genius" so they can't program computers, but hell, maybe they're fucking right!)
If all that's true, I want to drive an Aventador starting tomorrow. You know, like a tech company CEO!
(And no, I'm not much of a nice guy any more. Too fed up and burnt out.)
Clearly, Prince believed that tech industry salaries were too high, and was attempting to pull them down by increasing the labor supply. It is natural enough that he would target a relatively unrepresented demographic, since that is where the greatest number of likely candidates would be.
I love how this place quickly turns into Stormfront the second anything comes up that helps blacks. 14 words, my white brothers.
All hail the celebrity. The celebrity is king! All hail the celebrity.
LOL at that then - because the average IQ of American blacks is too low for them to become coders, not to mention their 'culcha' which means that they jump on any fellow black who is actually intelligent or works hard...
I don't expect a high level of editing on Slashdot, but you could at least give Trayvon Martin the respect of spelling his name correctly.
Coding jobs are not the factory jobs of the modern age. They are highly specialized, need a lot of talent and dedication and coding above a very low difficulty and quality level can most decidedly not be taught to everybody. Please stop teaching these already disadvantaged youth something most of them will never be good at and where the available jobs on the lower levels are in a fast downwards spiral with regards to pay, job security and upwards mobility. You are just screwing them over.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You need Harvard to help with crawling into upper class, but you do not need tit to become a normal middle class coder.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You need Harvard to help with crawling into upper class, but you do not need tit to become a normal middle class coder.
Eh...not really. I know a lot of people with >120k/yr salaries who have nothing more than community college degrees. Hell, at the rate I'm going, I'll be there soon-ish, and that's all I have. (I'm at about $80k only two years out of community college.)
>. I know a lot of people with >120k/yr salaries who have nothing more than community college degrees
That's not upper class. Not at all. Trust me.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Teach all those Ivy League/Government Intelligence/Google interpersonal networking connections that one is typically born into?
Aka "the old boy's network". Yeah, good point. Apart from that, we don't actually need more huge internet services - that train has already arrived - and left again. What we really need is people who understand bio-technology, bio-medicine, advanced genetics and genomics, advanced materials (like graphene, phosphene, meta-materials etc), and a long list of other, advanced technologies; plus the fundamental research that goes before all of this, which must be independent of industry ties. We have enough, bloody useless entertainment services already.
You need Harvard to help with crawling into upper class, but you do not need tit, to become a normal middle class coder.
I was always told breast feeding was better.
You also need to qualify this with a location. 80k in california isn't much but 80k in detroit is decent pay.
whatdoyoumeanyoupeople.png.gif.jpg.exe
Fight bigotry, you must fight ALL forms of it, just not the kinds you don't like.
Firefighters who fight forest fires by consuming their fuel in small controlled fires might disagree with the analogy: "Fight fire, you must fight ALL forms of it, just not the kinds you don't like."
Cite the laws which discriminate against minorities.
One set of laws was an apartheid regime called Jim Crow, which was in place in several U.S. states in the early to mid twentieth century. Though apartheid became unenforceable in the United States in 1965, their effects continue because of other laws, such as property law and inheritance law. Parents who had been impoverished by apartheid had less wealth to hand down to their children. Having to work harder to make ends meet caused families to sacrifice education in favor of survival.
Drug prohibition is another one. Michelle Alexander argued in The New Jim Crow that African Americans are disproportionately arrested for possessing recreational psychoactive substances compared to their proportion of users of such substances.
It's never who you know,
But who you blow.
Ask Tim Cook :P
It's 2016 get the fuck over it. You seriously bringing up Jim crowe laws? Now you are fucking reaching.
Leave you hateful biggot.
Though apartheid became unenforceable in the United States in 1965, their effects continue because of other laws, such as property law and inheritance law.
It's 2016 get the fuck over it.
Said other laws make it difficult for families to "get [...] over it." Even if all genetic causes of prejudice were eliminated, socioeconomic status is still heritable despite not being genetic.