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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.
>> 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.