Upper Hand. Sherrell Dorsey
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their families.
I'll never forget my interaction with Ms. Smith (not her real name) that day. She sat in the front row, nodding softly as the conversation ran its course, shifting between keeping her eyes locked with mine and taking notes on the piece of paper she'd retrieved from the black purse that rested in her lap. Next to her sat a slim young man who you could tell was forced to spend his Saturday morning in a place he'd rather not.
During the question‐and‐answer period, Ms. Smith was the first to raise her hand. She shared with us that she had lived in Charlotte her entire life and had watched the city during its many transformations, noting how she had been here before Uptown was built, when folks would have never even thought about living in a boxy apartment in the center of the city. Ms. Smith, as she revealed, was raising her grandson, the young man sitting to her right. She had been raising him since he was a toddler and she was having a hard time feeling confident that she was able to guide him into a good life and career for himself. She came to the panel because she knew technology was important but knew very little about what that meant for folks like her, trying to find opportunities for her grandson.
The city boasted a youth employment program for teens, but there were very few options for young people to get access to paid technology internships. Local schools, depending on where you attended, had few resources for computer science programs. Overall, Ms. Smith didn't have a clear guide on how to navigate the resources available in the city or whether they'd be the right kind of resources her grandson would need to get a job that paid well and would put him on the right path.
After years of toiling with ideas on how to discuss the future of work for communities of color navigating opportunities within tech, my encounter with Ms. Smith reminded me to look toward the baseline. The majority of the books on tech are written from what reads more like science fiction or are so heavily laden with inaccessible language and concepts that they offer very few solutions for the everyday person.
This book is for Ms. Smith and for those of you serving as the source of information and guidance for your families and communities.
Navigating the plethora of programs, research, statistics, and opportunities available across tech and tech‐adjacent industries can be overwhelming. More important is deciding how to go about accessing these opportunities; determining the best strategies for what works requires time, knowledge, know‐how, and networks. Upper Hand is dedicated to helping make this process and pathway easier.
Upper Hand is designed to provide and expand options to an innovation alternative—one where communities that have been historically excluded or left behind are part of the movement toward a future as technology furthers its influence and impact on society.
Upper Hand helps us think about how we strategically shape the next decade of our lives and our communities.
My hope is that you'll find and use the information in this book to your advantage, to help you think critically and strategically about how you see yourself, your family, and your community navigating the new world of work.
This is the book I'd like for you to share with your family members, friends, houses of worship, community centers, mentor groups, and more. It is not designed to sit on your coffee table. You can pick it up each quarter to be used as a frequent resource and guide as you navigate your plans for shaping your career or educational pursuits. It is filled with case studies from people who, like me, came from communities that have been historically left behind in the innovation conversation.
The resources you'll find here include definitions of terms and directories you can access and search on my website. The exercises I've pulled together are designed to spark conversations you can have with your family and community groups as you think about how to take advantage of the moment defining the future.
I can't wait to see you all on the other side.
1 Soul of a City
“Are there even any Black people in Seattle?”
I've been answering this question over and over again through the decades, especially when I meet Black people who hail from very Black cities and are wondering exactly how Black folks have managed to build their lives, for generations, in some of the whitest places in America.
But that's truly the story of our history, is it not? Whether we had “our folks” in the room or found them missing in action, migration across land and industry—particularly within places that used to be less than welcoming—Black people have not been deterred from finding or building doors to access.
My grandfather, Jerry Dorsey III, had mastered migration and placemaking by the time Seattle's Black population began to swell in the 1960s. Born in 1933 in a colored hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, just like his sister Alberta and brother Willie, he learned early in life that the only difference between his current circumstances and opportunity was a decision to choose the path that had the potential to lead to something more.
Most Black folks left the Jim Crow South in search of better wages, better treatment in racially hostile environments, and upward economic and social mobility between the early 1900s and the 1970s. The Dorsey family was no exception. They made the transition from the bowels of the deep South, landing in Detroit, Michigan, when Grandpa was just shy of 13 years old.
My grandfather's father, “Big Poppy,” found work at a tire factory in the bustling manufacturing industry that defined Detroit's local economy. “Big Mommy” worked as a domestic, like most Black women during the era, cleaning white folks' homes and doing their laundry.
Five years later, just shy of finishing high school, Grandpa was drafted into the Korean War, where he drove tanks and worked on switchboards. Like in the wars that preceded it, millions of Black men were asked to fight along with white men in a country in which they had little to no guarantee of civil rights or expected economic mobility. Grandpa could help serve his country, but he had not been granted the right to vote. Nor was he paid on par with his peers.
During the 1950s, most Black families were making on average just $1,800 annually, compared to $3,400 for white families. The stark economic racial wage gap has persisted up to this day.
By 1954, Grandpa was back living in his family's Detroit home, deciding what he would do next with his life.
One afternoon, as he sat at the family dining table, poring over applications to college and even considering an art program, there was a knock at the door. A salesman from a local trade school program would upend Grandpa's plans to “figure it out” and point him in the direction that would shape his life, and eventually my own. Grandpa only had to say yes and commit to two years of part‐time training at the Detroit Radio Electronics Television School. And so he began a schedule of working during the day and attending classes at night. Around this time he'd settled down with his first wife, Anna, gotten married, and began his journey into fatherhood of two young children (my mom and uncle).
The work paid off. Just before completing his certificate at RETS, Grandpa had two job offers in hand. One was based in Jacksonville, Florida, and the other was from aircraft manufacturer Boeing. At the time, Boeing was in desperate need of workers, managing the boon of commercial and military contracts it had secured following the Korean War. My grandfather was hired as one of many of the company's electronic technician engineers, and one of a growing group of Black workers getting access to what was considered back then a high‐paying job.
Boeing expanded its employee pool of Black workers during a time America was seeing significant changes in its workforce. The company hired its first African American worker, stenographer Florise Spearman, in 1942, and by the following year had employed over 300 Black workers—86 percent of whom were women. By the time my grandfather arrived at the company nearly two decades later, in 1960, that number had surged to over 1,600 Black workers.
It was jobs like these through companies like Boeing, IBM, General Motors, and other big industry players opening their gates through need, and some through affirmative action