UnidosUS has been a proud partner of the National Urban League for many years. What unites us is a common goal of equality and justice for all and a common mission of improving opportunities for the communities we represent. Our work together has focused not only on ensuring civil and voting rights and ending discrimination, but also on achieving full economic opportunity for the 48 million African Americans and 58 million Latinos who call this country home.
Our organizations have worked together to ensure that communities of color have access to 21st century job opportunities, such as those in the renewable energy sector. During the economic downturn last decade, we partnered on a housing counseling initiative to help families save their homes from foreclosure. Last year, we worked together to fight for improvements to the tax bill that would help working families, rather than just the wealthiest individuals and corporations, and we partnered to protect federal programs that help vulnerable families, like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), from severe budget cuts.
We have also worked in coalition for more than 10 years to help close the digital divide that continues to affect both of our communities. The numbers are stark. More than 15 years after broadband became widely available in the United States, African-American and Hispanic households are still far less likely to have broadband in their homes. This situation is no longer tenable, as we believe that the digital divide is no longer just a tech issue but is, in fact, a civil rights issue.
There is simply no way to live a life completely offline in 2018 America. People looking for a job must increasingly apply online. Families seeking much needed benefits must do so on a computer. The most basic functions of one’s economic life—paying bills, banking, filing taxes, etc.—have all migrated to the internet.
But even more urgent is how the lack of access to broadband is affecting our children. The digital divide is exacerbating our educational divide. While there have been substantial improvements in the educational performance of Latino children in this country, and we are very proud of the fact that the dropout rate is at its lowest levels ever for both African-American and Hispanic students, our educational achievement levels—including test scores and graduation rates—still lag behind those of other groups.
The task of narrowing the achievement gap becomes even harder when success in education is heavily dependent on access to computers and the internet—yet access to the technology is limited. In other words, we cannot expect all of our nation’s children to be successful if they are competing in a two-tiered system where some students work with state-of-the-art laptops while others must sometimes resort to fast food restaurants to access free Wi-Fi.
UnidosUS and the National Urban League presented a united front against this injustice at the Federal Communications Commission and pressed the agency to prioritize closing the digital divide and push the federal government to create and implement a comprehensive, equitable national broadband plan. This is why we have also successfully worked with America’s largest broadband providers, such as Comcast and Charter Communications, to help these corporations develop their own low-cost, quality plans to help low-income families obtain broadband in their homes.
Beyond closing the digital divide, the most urgent challenge we are facing right now is developing best practices to increase diversity in the tech sector. Both UnidosUS and the National Urban League have spent decades advocating for greater representation in corporate America; and these efforts have had measurable effects on the make-up of many, if not most, large corporations in this country. A notable exception has been the younger, more recent companies, firms and start-ups of Silicon Valley. After much outcry, these companies finally began publically releasing their diversity numbers less than four years ago—and the numbers were predictably dismal. Only 2% of employees at tech giants Google and Facebook were African American, and only 3% were Latino.
The frustration is that after numerous promises from these companies to do better, the numbers were not significantly better in 2017. At both Facebook and Google, there was either a 1% to zero percent increase in diversity. The numbers are even worse for tech employees and those in senior management.
Going forward, the task at hand for the National Urban League and UnidosUS is to ensure that Silicon Valley moves beyond platitudes and vague promises to “do better” and takes the steps necessary to invest in and create diversity. This is not just a pipeline problem. While we support and actually run efforts to put more students in the STEM fields, there are steps that can be taken today to fill the void left by the dearth of diversity. We suggest recruiting at community colleges, where the majority of African American and Latinos in higher education are enrolled and where many of them are getting degrees in tech-related fields. In addition, minorities who are already established in their fields should be recruited for senior positions in other corporations.
The diversity challenge is not insurmountable. Silicon Valley need only look at the success of legacy tech companies to see how it can be done. Organizations like ours stand at the ready to work with tech firms to help them achieve the goals of their publically professed progressive values.
