Here’s Jesse Jackson’s Plan for Diversity in Silicon Valley

Jesse Jackson is the first to admit he is not technologically inclined. “I have a rotary dial phone,” he tells me. But if you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, you also don’t need an iPhone to understand the dismal state of diversity in the tech industry. He has charts and graphs. They aren’t pretty. "This is not reflective of our capacity,” Jackson said by phone ahead of a conference on diversity in tech. “That’s not a talent deficit. That’s an imagination deficit. It does not reflect the marketplace.” Not surprisingly, Jackson has a definite point-by-point plan, and describes it so efficiently, it’s like a verbal infographic.

First of all, he wants to know, why are they not recruiting at colleges beyond Stanford and USC? “At the tech levels, black colleges have been most proficient at training youth in these sciences, but [those students] are not recruited. Part of what we’ve worked out with Intel is to create a pipeline [between] Silicon Valley and black college campuses.” In addition to engineering jobs, Jackson pointed to numbers regarding support jobs at tech companies, which also lag behind national averages. “Overwhelmingly, there are non-tech jobs -- secretaries, advertising and marketing, legal work, accounting work -- we are fully capable of fulfilling. There’s been no plan for inclusion at non-tech levels.” And then there are corporate campuses. Why not build them in areas like Detroit (MI) that could use the boost and have underemployed populations? “Given what’s happening in Baltimore, it’s a great opportunity not just to rebuild a CVS but to build a tech center. We represent talent, location and growth.” Diversity is a trendy topic and, so far, the response from the Silicon Valley luminaries who attended the conference seems genuine -- the exclusion not a result of resistance, but of ignorance. “They were like one-eyed quarterbacks that can’t see half the field,” Jackson said of tech companies. “Silicon Valley has been looking eastward, [to the Far East -- Asia and India], not westward [America]. It was just a failure of imagination.”