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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.
Because the tech industry doesn't have enough self-absorbed dousche bags as it is.
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.