The Technological Inferiorization Of Blacks By Racism Chasers

The Grio: Blacks May Bear The Brunt Of The New Police Data Capture Technology

This year I had the opportunity to attend the "Cellular Telephone Industry Association" meeting in Orlando Florida.

As I walked around the massive conference my eyes were opened to the global view of all that various people are doing in this industry. The 3D matrix of geographic breath of application (global), the various market segments that individuals where focused upon (from wholesale auctioning of used phones in South America to mobile payments for "the unbanked) and the final dimension of WHO was there as movers and shakers (racially and nation of origin).

As I departed the conference I thought that THIS is what Black Americans as well as other people within the "Diaspora of Black people" are missing out on. Too much the consumers, not enough as key players who are leveraging this technology to support higher order processes that would make our lives easier and advance business operations.

Those with engineering skills, programming skills, system architectural skills would thrive in this unfolding world of mobile communications.

Unfortunately there is a prevailing mindset that is being massaged and maintained WITHIN the Black community that appears to always take the wrong road when it comes to technological innovation.

• When given the opportunity to consider how Location Based Services have drastically improved efficiency in business logistics and personal travel - likely saving several millions of gallons of otherwise wasted fuel.........
• THEY choose to focus on the THREAT that location tracking MIGHT cause Black people - "BWBWSF" - "Breathing While Black With A Smart Phone"
• THEY have not nurtured the competencies by which some innovative Black person with programming skills could scan the iPhone, assess any "cookies" that Apple has put on the device as "bread crumbs" for tracking purposes and wipe the data clean - OR "trick da man" by putting new geo-location points
• After a decade of complaining about "The Digital Divide", showcasing how Blacks that have survived the "Environmental Racism" of toxic pollutants and who did not eat the lead paint that was on their window sills are still thwarted by the system. Despite having the a high intellectual acumen per their lead-free existence - their location has shut them out of their connection to the Internet
• When years later the reports showed that Black Americans were leading the way in the area of Internet access via mobile devices, making the wired 'Digital Divide' a nearly moot point - they introduced "Net Neutrality" as the big boogie man that threatened to pull the plug of the Cat5 cable in Black America as the lily White suburbs had upgraded their cable plant to Cat6.
• From them we heard nothing about:
• Shared Use Computers In Internet Cafes
• Low Cost Computing Devices To Make Home Computing More Affordable

Simply put the "Grio-Root" / "Color Of Change" consciousness is NOT about "Innovation" - creating "green-field opportunity" for Black Americans to apply ourselves in addressing market need. They are about "polluted brown-field grievance chasing" in which "The Vulnerable Least Of These" have a high radiation signal jammer directed at them from their enemies which shuts down their computers and possibly gives them cancer from the radiation of the beam.

Fear not people. The government already has the means of tracking you IF they want to. And it is done indiscriminately.

CALEA - Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act

(Pssst - how do you think they are now able to do wiretaps on cellphones?)

While indeed the ability to access "tracking cookies" on a smart phone which is capturing geocodes from the devices GPS would indeed be more accurate - IF the government wanted to track you - they ALREADY can go to the phone company and get an approximate fix upon you based upon the cellular tower that you have connected to.

Street Pirates - if you are on the lamb -

• Do not steal a cellphone
• Give your cellphone to another partner in crime and tell him to go in the opposite direction that you plan to go in

It is stunning to see that "The Grio-Root" chose to apply this "inferiority" to Black people. The logical leap that since Blacks are more frequently stopped and that we are prevalent users of mobile phones leads them to believe that we are more vulnerable to police abuse of our Fourth Amendment rights.

Everyone one of us leaves hundreds of potential "electronic bread crumbs" for the authorities to track us with. Even though surveillance cameras are largely independently owned by individual businesses - the incident that happened last year in Philadelphia proved to be instructive. The Street Pirate who shot a lady downtown was captured because a series of surveillance camera feeds where stitched together from several businesses and he was caught on camera walking from the crime scene into his job at a hospital.

While I do agree that we should be conscious about our personal privacy and that in this highly connected world we need to make sure to retain the balance between convenience and privacy - I believe that "The Grio-Root" is taking advantage of "Black fear" by promoting the "threat" to Black people above other individuals.