Digital divides – new ideas at the Congressional Black Caucus

By Gregory Fossedal

If some high-tech corporate ceos are to be believed, digital and internet technologies will soon solve all human problems, from a cure to AIDS to wars to the racial gaps and tensions that still remain in America. African-Americans and their leaders, however, while certainly hopeful, aren’t betting on the idea that computers alone will bring about social equality or the end of racism. In many ways, in fact, they are thinking much more practically than many in the private sector.

Recently the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution surveyed and interviewed members of the Congressional Black Caucus and their staff to see just what they think what the explosion of computer and internet technologies means for African-Americans. While we didn’t speak to every member, we did compile comments from every member of the caucus, and held interviews with enough CBC members (6) and staffers (more than 25) to compile a fairly extensive portrait of what this group thinks.

What we found was great diversity on a number of policy issues, and even some sharp disagreements about fairly straightforward questions such as, “are private companies doing a good job of reaching out in the black community?” Even so, some common threads emerge.

1. Training

Black Caucus members, as one might expect, would like to see programs to address the digitial divide. But they’re not insistent that such efforts be dominated by government, either on the funding or management side.

“We’re not putting all our eggs in that basket,” as Congressman John Conyers confided to a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee last fall.

Maxine Waters, who has sponsored the nation’s first extensive effort at building training bridges across the digital divide, shares that emphasis. “Training has to hook up to jobs,” she comments. “The companies are the ones that hire people. Therefore they have to be major partners, and, in fact, I’d like to see more of them, not less.”

This is not to say that CBC members won’t vote for training – or ask for more funds. “We’d like to take it from $10 million,” she says of her present effort, “to the $50 million the Administration budgeted.” But, she adds, “we can do a lot of good at $10 million. We’re doing it.”

In any case – and this may be the most remarkable fact of all – these amounts all pale against what private companies are doing. For whatever reason – generosity, self-interest, or some mix – private industry has stepped up to the plate.

When we asked Donald Payne about digital divide issues, for instance, the first words out of his mouth were, “Just don’t ask me to say anything against Bill Gates.” After donating $1 billion for black college scholarships, and more recently $300 million for teacher training software, “he’s stepped up to the plate.” Payne, one of the CBC’s senior and most respected members, was one of the first to issue a statement acknowledging Gates’s generosity.

“The companies have been pretty good, too,” Waters adds – and ticks off the names of executives at Cisco, Novell, Microsoft, America Online, and others.

2. Regulatory battles

A similar reserve predominates when it comes to regulatory issues related to technology, such as the anti-trust suit against Microsoft, the arm-wrestling between America Online and AT & T over cable access, or the merger of AOL with Time Warner.

“Those are big boy battles,” Waters comments. “To me, it doesn’t matter whether AOL has to pay, and then bill me, or whether I have to go through AT & T, and they bill me directly. I think that’s just one special interest versus another.”

“Of course, they all come to us and try to convince us that our voters will live or die by whether they win or not. They have all sorts of reasons why their special interest is critical to us. But it’s not very persuasive.”

Opinion is soft on the Microsoft case, but the direction is almost uniformly against the Justice Department’s effort, and for the company. CEO Bill Gates’s generosity with black colleges and education generally is only one reason.

Another, probably more important politically, is the perception that the company’s Windows operating system, by virtue of its widespread acceptance, makes it easier for African-Americans and others who are less computer literate to cross the gap.

“Windows has made it easy for everyone,” argues Representative Carolyn Kirkpatrick. “There may be another product that will come along and be even better,” she adds, but if so, it should “be allowed to prevail in the marketplace.”

A strong tone of free-market thinking prevails when talking to such members about the various regulatory and legal struggles. “You can’t have a law that applies only to Bill Gates,” comments Congressman Danny Davis. “You can’t single people out and say Mike Tyson hits too hard and you need to take the sting out of his lick, or that Wilt Chamberlain is too tall, so cut his legs off.”

Davis demurs on the particulars of the case, but is an example of the general suspicion that companies are often singled out (by both Republicans in Congress and the Administration) for special treatment – with little attention to the CBC institutionally and, more important, to the interests of minorities generally.

3. Internet taxation

“They’ll use us to get the tax passed, and take the blame, then the programs will never amount to anything more than a small fraction of what we bring in,” Jessie Jackson Junior reportedly responded when a pro-internet-tax advocate tried to corner him. Jackson hasn’t stated a flat-out position of opposition to the tax, but he hasn’t supported it yet either. Other CBC members seem equally non-committal: Only two of the six we spoke to support the idea, and others on record are, like Jackson, at best lukewarm.

This is not tax-revolt groundswell, but it is a subtle shift from the politics of the 1980s and even the early Clinton Administration. “Any internet tax we did vote for,” Payne commented at a Democratic fund-raiser last fall, “should and will be looked at carefully.”

An aide to Representative Charles Rangell endorses that assessment. “We’d like to see a lot more studies and information looking at the digital divide from lots of different angles,” the aide says. “You can definitely say, however, that there is no clamor among the caucus for an internet tax. The opinion is against it, in fact, and it’s broad, though the sentiment is mild and not deep – you could see a change.”

4. Political reform

Indeed, the most interesting play coming out of the CBC on internet and technology issues isn’t an economic play, either tax or spending, but a political reform Jackson is pushing for digital democracy – including internet voting. Elitists of both parties have qualms about the idea, but true “small d democrats” of both parties, as Jack Kemp calls them, will find the measure intriguing.

In taking digital divide issues into the political realm, Jackson has adopted both a principled idea and a shrewd political strategy. Whether you like online voting or not, it’s hard to argue against the idea without expressing a frank, elitist, anti-democratic opinion about the people who would be voting that way, or the way they would be voting.

It’s one reason why Jackson, along with Waters, is seen as a leading (and rising) voice among CBC members on technology issues.

Beyond good and evil

Overall, Conyers, and others seem to take the sensible view that technology isn’t going to solve racial gaps all by itself, nor is it going to make them inevitably worse. It’s not a force for evil or a force for good, just a force – with the evil or good determined by how it’s used by human beings.

"They usually cite the technological marvels our society has achieved," commented Dr. Martin Luther King in a 1967 lecture, dismissing the techno-files of his day. "However, that only reveals their poverty of spirit. Mammoth productive facilities with compuer minds, cities that engulf the landscape and pierce the clouds, planes that almost outrace time -- these are awesome, but they cannot be spiritually inspiring."

Indeed, on a practical level, King insisted, technology as such may merely fuel "alienation... a form of living death." The only answer, he realized, were changes in human minds, hearts, and institutions – not "blind faith" in the "exhaltation of technology."

The truth may be somewhere well in between Dr. King’s understandable skepticism about the large claims made by 1960s science, on the one hand, and the mindless messianism of corporate CEOs proclaiming an “internet century” (as one AOL exec gushes) on the other.

For now, Black Caucus members are hoping that the technological gold rush has widespread trickle-down effects. But they’re sensibly inclined to give the inevitable a helping hand, and noticeably open to working with new friends to get there.