Let’s invest in black kids who pursue STEM the way we do black kids on the football field
Our students must develop tech skills or risk unemployment at the hands of AI
In a crowded hotel lobby in New Orleans the day after Thanksgiving, primary and secondary students and playful adults threw paper planes towards a target for a prize of $50. The game at the carnival-style booth was meant to teach attendees about the basic parts and functions of airplanes.
The throngs, of course, were not there for that science-lite lesson; they came for the annual Bayou Classic football game between two historically black universities: Grambling State University, and Southern University and A&M College. In the past five years, attendance at the event has been on the upswing, with an average of 65,000 fans attending each year.
Taking advantage of the event’s popularity, organizers of the Bayou Classic teamed up with Louisiana-based NexusLA, an economic development organization, to host a pitch competition between teams of tech-savvy college entrepreneurs. It’s a prime event to draw attention to black talent in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Teams of students representing Southern and Grambling, Xavier University of Louisiana and Southern University Law School pitched various STEM-inspired products in the fourth annual BizTech Challenge for a total of $15,000 in prize money.
While the winners can use the prize money toward the development of their own technologies, organizers hope the funding will launch a new tradition of investing in black tech entrepreneurs and the development of black talent.
Earlier this year, the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company released the report “The Future of Work in Black America,” on the potential impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and automation on specific racial groups — and it spells gloom and doom for African Americans. The report found that robots and other CONTINUE READING: Invest in black in STEM like the way we do black kids on the football field
