The Digital Divide Is Fixable Right Now — The Will Is What’s Missing

When the schools closed in March of 2020, fifteen million American children discovered that they lived on the wrong side of an invisible line. Not a racial line, though race predicted which side you were on with sickening accuracy. Not an income line, though income mapped onto it like a transparency laid over the same photograph. It was a bandwidth line — a distinction between households that had reliable broadband internet and households that did not — and overnight it became the most consequential boundary in American education. Children on one side of the line logged into Zoom classrooms, submitted assignments through Google Classroom, accessed Khan Academy and virtual tutoring and every digital resource that the twenty-first century had produced. Children on the other side sat in McDonald’s parking lots trying to catch the free Wi-Fi, or they simply disappeared from the educational system entirely, their screens dark, their attendance unmarked, their futures receding with every day the divide held.

The pandemic did not create the digital divide. It revealed it, the way a power outage reveals which buildings have generators and which have been running on hope. The divide was already there — measured, documented, reported, discussed at conferences, lamented in white papers, and then left in place because the people on the wrong side of it did not have the political power to make anyone care. What COVID did was make the divide visible to people who had previously been able to ignore it, and even then, the visibility produced outrage without remedy, concern without consequence, a year of headlines followed by a return to the same structural indifference that built the divide in the first place.

The Broadband Gap by the Numbers

Twenty-five percent of Black households in the United States lack home broadband access, compared to 16% of white households. In rural Black communities — the Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black Belt, the eastern counties of North Carolina — the rate of households without broadband exceeds 35%. These are not households that chose not to subscribe. These are households in areas where the infrastructure does not exist, or where it exists at speeds that qualify as broadband only by the grace of an FCC definition that the telecommunications industry lobbied to keep as low as possible, or where it exists at prices that are not affordable on incomes that reflect a century of economic exclusion.

The nine-point gap between Black and white broadband access is not a natural phenomenon, like a difference in rainfall between regions. It is the direct product of investment decisions made by telecommunications companies that deploy infrastructure where the return is highest and neglect areas where the population is poor, rural, or both. It is the product of regulatory failures at every level of government. And it is the product of a specific historical pattern: the same communities that were redlined by banks in the 1930s, bypassed by the interstate highway system in the 1950s, and ignored by cable television companies in the 1980s are now being bypassed by fiber-optic deployment in the 2020s. The technology changes. The neglect does not.

The Tech Employment Chasm

The broadband gap is the foundation. Built on top of it is an employment disparity that represents one of the largest missed economic opportunities in American history. Black workers constitute 13% of the American labor force and 7% of the technology industry workforce. In the epicenter of the technology economy — Silicon Valley — Black representation drops to approximately 3%. At the individual company level, the numbers are worse: major technology companies have spent the last decade publishing diversity reports that document single-digit Black representation in technical roles, expressing concern, establishing programs, and producing essentially no change.

The pipeline argument — that there simply are not enough qualified Black candidates — is the technology industry’s equivalent of the old real estate industry claim that there simply were not enough qualified Black buyers. It is a self-fulfilling diagnosis. There are not enough Black candidates because the pipeline that produces them is constricted at every stage, and the technology industry benefits from the constriction because it reduces competitive pressure on compensation and because a homogeneous workforce is easier to manage than a diverse one, whatever the corporate communications department says in February.

Only 27% of high schools serving majority Black student populations offer AP Computer Science. When you do not offer the course, you cannot blame the students for not taking it. When you do not build the on-ramp, you cannot express surprise that people are not on the highway. This is not a mystery. It is a decision — a resource allocation decision made by school districts, state legislatures, and a federal education infrastructure that has consistently underfunded the schools that serve the students who need the most.

The Funding Desert

For Black entrepreneurs who do enter the technology industry, a second divide awaits. Black tech founders receive less than 2% of venture capital funding in the United States. Two percent. In an industry that distributed over $170 billion in venture funding in 2022, Black founders received a sliver so thin that rounding it down to zero would be statistically defensible.

This is not a function of a lack of ideas. It is not a function of a lack of talent. It is a function of a venture capital ecosystem that operates on pattern matching — investing in founders who look like, sound like, went to the same schools as, and travel in the same social circles as the people making the investment decisions. And the people making the investment decisions are, overwhelmingly, white men who attended a small number of elite universities and who have built their networks in spaces that Black Americans have historically been excluded from.

The result is a technology economy that extracts from Black communities — their data, their attention, their cultural production, their consumer spending — while returning almost nothing in the form of ownership, employment, or wealth creation. The Black community is a customer of the technology economy. It is not, in any meaningful sense, an owner. And in an economy where technology is the primary engine of wealth creation, being a customer without being an owner is a formula for permanent economic subordination.

The Programs That Are Actually Working

There is a reason I insist on documenting what works alongside what fails, and the reason is this: despair is a luxury that Black communities cannot afford, and the narrative that nothing works is as dishonest as the narrative that everything is fine. Things work. Specific, measurable, documented things work. The problem is not that solutions do not exist. The problem is that they exist at the scale of pilot programs while the crisis operates at the scale of a population.

Year Up is perhaps the most rigorously evaluated workforce development program in the country. It provides young adults aged 18–29 from underserved communities with six months of technical training followed by six months of corporate internship. The program has been evaluated through a randomized controlled trial — the gold standard of program evaluation — and the results are unambiguous: Year Up graduates earn 30% more than the control group, and 70% are employed in professional jobs within four months of completing the program. This is not an anecdote. This is a randomized trial with a large sample, published in peer-reviewed form, demonstrating that when you provide the training and the access, the talent was always there.

Black Girls CODE, founded by Kimberly Bryant in 2011, has introduced tens of thousands of girls of color to computer science through workshops, hackathons, and after-school programs in cities across the country. The organization addresses the intersection of race and gender in the technology pipeline — the double exclusion that Black girls face in a field dominated by white and Asian men. Its model has been replicated and adapted by organizations worldwide, and its alumni are now entering the technology workforce and founding their own companies.

/dev/color provides ongoing support for Black software engineers already in the technology industry, addressing the retention problem that diversity hiring programs ignore. Getting Black engineers in the door matters less if the culture inside pushes them out within two years, and the attrition rate for Black technology workers is significantly higher than for their white peers. /dev/color’s model — peer support, career strategy, executive coaching — attacks the problem at the point where most diversity efforts abandon it.

The HBCU Advantage

Historically Black Colleges and Universities enroll 9% of Black college students. They produce 27% of Black STEM degree holders. Read those numbers again. HBCUs are overperforming the rest of American higher education by a factor of three in producing Black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and they are doing it with a fraction of the per-student funding that predominantly white institutions receive.

This is not because HBCUs have better laboratories or larger endowments. Most of them have neither. It is because they have something that no amount of diversity programming at a predominantly white institution can replicate: a culture that expects Black students to succeed, faculty who look like the students and serve as proof that the path is walkable, and an institutional identity built around the assumption that Black excellence is not exceptional but normal. When you remove the psychic tax of being the only Black person in the room, the perpetual representative of your race, the subject of low expectations disguised as progressive concern — when you remove all of that, it turns out that Black students perform at exactly the level their ability predicts.

The policy implication is straightforward: invest in HBCUs. Not as a charitable gesture. Not as a diversity initiative. As a strategic investment in the most efficient producers of Black STEM talent in the country. For every dollar invested in HBCU STEM programs, the return in Black technical workforce production exceeds what any other institutional model delivers.

The $65 Billion Promise

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 allocated $65 billion for broadband deployment, the largest federal investment in internet infrastructure in history. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program alone directs $42.45 billion to states for broadband construction in unserved and underserved areas. On paper, this is the investment that could close the broadband gap within a decade.

The reality is more complicated. States have wide latitude in how they deploy the funds. Telecommunications companies lobby aggressively to direct investment toward areas that are technically “unserved” but commercially attractive, rather than toward the rural, low-income, predominantly Black communities that need it most. The deployment timelines stretch years into the future, and the bureaucratic requirements for accessing the funding are complex enough to disadvantage the small, community-based internet service providers that are often the only entities willing to serve the hardest-to-reach populations.

The money exists. The stated intent exists. Whether the deployment reaches the communities that were promised help depends on whether those communities have the political organization to hold their states accountable — which is itself a function of whether those communities have the connectivity to organize.

The Self-Taught Path

I want to address something directly to the young person reading this who lives on the wrong side of every gap I have described — the broadband gap, the educational gap, the funding gap — and who is being told, implicitly, that the technology economy is not for them. The institutional path may be obstructed. The self-taught path is wide open, and it is free.

freeCodeCamp has provided free, self-paced coding education to millions of learners worldwide. The Odin Project offers a complete web development curriculum at no cost. YouTube contains more programming instruction than most university computer science departments. Harvard’s CS50, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and dozens of other elite institutions publish their complete course materials online, free, available to anyone with an internet connection — which is itself a barrier, but one that a library card can overcome in most American cities.

The technology industry, for all its failures of diversity and equity, has one structural advantage over every other high-paying industry in America: it does not require a credential to enter. A self-taught developer with a strong GitHub portfolio and demonstrable skills can be hired at companies that would not look at them without a degree in any other field. This is not an adequate substitute for systemic investment in education, infrastructure, and opportunity. But it is a path that exists right now, today, for the person who cannot wait for the system to fix itself.

The Decision

The digital divide is not an enigma wrapped in complexity, awaiting some brilliant policy innovation that no one has yet conceived. The broadband gap can be closed with infrastructure investment that has already been appropriated. The educational gap can be closed with curriculum requirements that cost almost nothing to implement. The employment gap can be closed with hiring practices that every technology company claims to already have. The funding gap can be closed with venture capital allocation decisions that require nothing more than expanding the networks from which deal flow originates.

Every tool needed to close the digital divide exists today. The technology to build broadband networks exists. The curricula to teach computer science in every high school exist. The training programs to prepare adults for technology careers exist and have been validated by rigorous evaluation. The self-taught resources to enable individual access exist and are free.

“The question is not whether we can afford to close the digital divide. The question is whether we can afford the cost of leaving it open — a generation of Black children locked out of the economy that will define their century.”

What is missing is not knowledge. What is missing is not resources. What is missing is not even, at this point, money — Congress has appropriated the money. What is missing is the will to deploy what exists, the urgency to act on what is known, and the honesty to admit that a country that can put a rover on Mars and a supercomputer in every pocket has chosen — chosen — not to connect its Black communities to the broadband infrastructure that determines who participates in the twenty-first-century economy and who watches it from the outside.

The digital divide is not a mystery to solve. It is a decision to make. And every day that the decision is deferred, every day that the deployment is delayed, every day that a Black child sits in a McDonald’s parking lot trying to do homework on a phone screen because the richest country in human history could not be bothered to run a fiber-optic cable to her neighborhood — that is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of conscience. And it is fixable. Right now. Today. If the will existed to match the words.