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7 Top Tier US Cities For Young Black Entrepreneurs

In a February report, NerdWallet released data on the 111 best cities that support the greatest prosperity for minority business owners. The list contained cities — big and small — that produced either large numbers of businesses or had high revenue streams. The list below shows major cities with mostly African-American populations and their impressive business gains.

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Atlanta

Georgia has the third-largest consumer market, valued at more than $73 billion. The city of Atlanta also has decent and affordable housing that contributes to the migration to the city. According to NerdWallet, the average yearly revenue of many businesses is about $52,000-plus. Also, the thriving entertainment industry adds to the prosperity.

Miami-Skyline-June-21

Miami

According to the NerdWallet data, Miami is 16th out of 111 cities, but the city has some impressive numbers nonetheless. Per 100 people, there are 14 Black/minority-owned businesses. The unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the country at 5.5 percent.

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The Digital Age May Not Be the Utopia Millennials Thought It Would Be

Millennials are the generation of racially accepting, diverse, progressives who are obsessed with technology and only have wonderful things to gain from the digital age.

That’s the idea of the younger generation that has been packaged, pitched and sold for years.

It’s also a perception that may not be as accurate as it initially seemed.

A report published by Al Jazeera proved that millennials aren’t as progressive as they claim to be and now Kentucky journalism professor David R. Wheeler is suggesting that the digital age has a clear message for the young people in its workforce.

“Drop dead.”

That’s what Wheeler says Silicon Valley is really telling millennials.

For years, the technology industry has been perceived as a saving grace for graduates and those who want to be CEOs rather than employees.

Young mobile app developers have high hopes of becoming the next emerging tech billionaires and the unemployment troubles for the younger generation will soon be nonexistent. Right?

Not quite.

“Silicon Valley is tossing millennials aside like yesterday’s laptop,” Wheeler writes in a blog post for CNN.

He lists some troubling and true statistics.

“But despite falling unemployment, college grads age 22 to 27 are stuck in low-paying jobs that don’t even require a college degree,” he adds. “The percentage of young people languishing in low-skill, low-paying jobs is 44 percent, a 20-year high.”

He adds that only 36 percent of college graduates are even working jobs with salaries of at least $45,000.

After adjusting for inflation, it marks a severe decline from the 1990s.

Statistics also revealed that more and more graduates are getting paid less than $25,000, and other studies suggest the younger generation is rarely given the benefits expected from full-time employment.

These numbers aren’t new. In the past, they have been used to suggest that the labor market is more competitive than ever and reveal the lack of value placed on young hires fresh out of college.

That’s always where Silicon Valley promised to be different.

Where other industries failed to value young, innovative minds, the world of tech was supposed to cherish them.

Wheeler says that’s not what’s happening.

The younger generation is not rushing off to become tech entrepreneurs or successful app developers, although that’s what their dreams may have been.

The rapidly growing digital age is actually forcing many young workers into “sharing-economy jobs.”

“The sharing-economy jobs are even worse than minimum wage jobs because they offer no stability or protections for workers,” Wheeler writes. “Sharing-economy jobs aren’t really jobs at all; they’re freelance gigs.”

Gigs like becoming Uber drivers.

Gigs where the major corporation receives the greatest economic benefit from a young worker’s service while the actual driver pulls in shockingly low amounts of revenue.

There are also those long-standing concerns with technology snatching jobs from blue collar workers.

It all points to a bleak reality of more high-tech jobs for some, while many current middle-class workers would be out of work.

It’s certainly something to consider and all the more reason why technological progression must come with balance and caution.

Tech’s limitations should also be defined by ethics and not merely by what is technologically and scientifically possible.

At the same time, one must understand that as time passes, certain jobs will certainly be replaced as other new types of jobs grow in demand.

Hey, at one point men and women were being paid to set up the pins at bowling alleys rather than having machines take over and reset the game in a matter of seconds.

When it comes to a happy relationship between tech and the middle class, Silicon Valley and all those involved will have to work hard to maintain a certain level of economic and ethical balance.

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The Childhood Disappointments of a Young African Girl Give Birth to the Super-Powered Black Teen Hero of the Future

At some point, nearly every child had dreams of being a superhero.

The most compelling conversations on the playground centered around what superpower would be the coolest to have or debating the end result of an epic Superman versus Batman battle.

It was action and fantasy that drove most children to have superhero-filled dreams.

For Milumbe Haimbe, that wasn’t the case.

Haimbe also shared a deep desire to become a superhero, but it wasn’t about a cool costume or unleashing vengeance on the evil villains of elementary school.

It was about the possibility of creating and defending a world of peace, a world of economic equality, a world free of stress and depression. She wanted to be the heroine who created a world that was essentially the exact opposite from that of her own.

“I grew up in Zambia in the 1980s, an era that marked the beginning of the country’s worst economic crisis,” she wrote in a special post for CNN. “My childhood memories are of a prolonged state of emergency that was characterized by acute food shortages and an economic decline where the basic needs of the average Zambian family were barely met.”

That very real universe that created Haimbe’s reality left her, her siblings and her close friends working to develop an extraterrestrial language that might be able to reach some of the most popular superheroes of the time.

“Our goal was to send an SOS out to the superheroes in the galaxies,” she added.”…[P]erhaps a spaceship would come down to Earth to save us from our dreary lives and carry us into outer space.”

With so many popular heroic figures to choose from, Haimbe had no idea if it would be Superwoman or the Incredible Hulk rescuing her and her siblings from their “dreary lives.”

What she did know was that the hero would probably be a male and would definitely be white.

At least that’s what mainstream America would want her to think.

The creative spirit inside her grew into an impassioned woman who knew it was about time that younger women in Africa had a young, Black super-powered girl to aspire to be like some day.

So Haimbe created Ananiya.

Ananiya is a 17-year-old girl who joined a fictional resistance at the age of 13 in Haimbe’s graphic novel “The Revolutionist.”

“The Revolutionist” is still described by Haimbe as a “work in progress.”

The series will follow Ananiya as she navigates the complexities of a distant future that is still far too much like the past.

“As the masses are thrust into a state of emergency, Ananiya’s world is characterized by curfews police raids, censorship and propaganda,” Haimbe continues. “Will the revolution overcome? With this literary and visual offering, I describe a world that is both like — and at the same time very much unlike — our own. As a young, Black female, my protagonist, Ananiya, is the most unlikely hero for the revolution.”

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10 of the Most Incredible STEM Programs for Black Youths

SEEK

National Society of Black Engineers’ Summer Engineering Experience for Kids

Every summer, this program gives 300 students between the third and eighth grades the chance to participate in the National Society of Black Engineers’ camp, known as SEEK. The program takes place in different cities across America and provides a free resource for students interested in STEM careers. Students are given the opportunity to work with Black college students who are on the path to obtaining their own degrees in STEM-related subjects. It’s a particularly stellar program considering the economic disadvantages that leave many Black parents unable to afford to send their child to science camps over the summer.

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Summer Math and Science Honors Academy

The Summer Math and Science Honors Academy, known as SMASH, gives students of color guidance and exposure to STEM subjects. Many students of color don’t have such classes available in their schools, but academies like SMASH help give them the foundation they need to excel in STEM careers even if such programs are missing from their daily curriculum. The program takes places every summer for three years for each student but also offers benefits throughout the school year. SMASH students have access to special college counselors and receive tailored SAT prep classes.

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SXSW Interactive Reminds Young Blerds of the Racial Disparities Facing Black People in Tech

Tech lovers, designers, creatives and many more convened in Austin, Texas, to join the South by Southwest interactive experience.

These innovators were prepared to find investors, share their unique ideas with business veterans or just mingle with other entrepreneurial hopefuls who were ready to become a part of the ever-expanding technology industry.

Unfortunately, Black and Latino members of this crowd were met with disappointment.

While the crowd of attendees has been more diverse than it has ever been, according to multiple reports, the diversity of investors and venture capitalists in the space is still just as whitewashed as ever.

Joshua Mitchell was one of the Black innovators whose trip to SXSW was also a bleak reminder that constant conversations about diversity in STEM are no promise that change has actually taken place.

Mitchell was hoping to link with a Black venture capitalist firm that would be interested in funding his start-up jeniusLogic, a company that focuses on building mobile apps for people in the music and entertainment space.

With so many aspiring musicians and entertainers paving their own paths to Hollywood, it’s an app idea that could certainly prove to be a major success.

That potential still wasn’t enough to overcome the racial barriers for Black people like Mitchell who are interested in the tech space.

“There’s a big disconnect between people of color’s culture and the technology industry,” he told USA Today. “Right now, it’s a little difficult to navigate.”

The lack of diversity in tech would never be considered breaking news at this point.

Consumers caused quite the uproar when tech giants released diversity reports back in 2014 that revealed that less than 5 percent of their employees were people of color.

Many of the companies had workforces that were less than 2 percent Black.

When it came to management positions, the numbers were even more troubling. Black leaders in the tech space were nearly non-existent.

It has caused tech leaders, major companies and national programs to shift gears to focus more on boosting diversity, but the team behind SXSW never had to bother with a major shift — they had always focused on discussing diversity in STEM.

This year, SXSW hosted more than 100 sessions that focused on diversity in tech and that number was only a slight increase from their usual numbers, proving that they have always found diversity in STEM to be an important topic.

SXSW is also one of the few major events that is being more direct with its approach to diversity.

Despite million-dollar plans and national initiatives being announced to boost diversity in tech, there are many cases where the details are murky and unreliable.

SXSW, on the other hand, is making a particular effort to not only discuss the issues but to discuss plausible solutions.

“We want to have a lineup that reflects what we think should be a more diverse tech ecosystem,” explained Hugh Forrest, the head of SXSW’s Interactive section, to USA Today. “We still have a long, long way to go.”

That’s the unfortunate part of many of these conversations. The realization that throwing money at the problem is not enough and that the path to diversity in Silicon Valley and beyond is still a long and winding one.

One key element to embarking on a successful journey, however, is realizing that tech success is not all about skill.

“The Silicon Valley perspective is that everyone’s here because they deserve to be here and they’ve worked hard and that’s really bull,” Hank Williams, the founder and chief executive of Platform.org told USA Today. “The reality is everyone who is successful had someone who helped them get there.”

When so few Black people are in leadership positions, it becomes increasingly unlikely that Black people can enter an industry that is reliant on someone giving a young talent a chance that could catapult them to success.

Studies show that leaders and hiring managers are attracted to what’s familiar, and when white males are dominating the tech industry, there is no mystery as to what it is exactly that seems comfortable and familiar to today’s biggest tech executives.