For over 10-20 years, I have and others African-Americans with real STEM backgrounds have been trying to reach out to African-Americans on the topic of STEM and applied solutions to deal with the many challenges facing African-Americans.  There is no dispute on the efforts to educate on the Digital Divide discussion because there is a ponderance of Internet archives and artifacts that goes all the way back to 1994 IRC channels and 1996 ListServs floating around and Tony Brown been trying to educate African-Americans on the Y2K bug opportunities on his own show back in 1999 – that’s nearly 20 years ago so the facts are established. No African-American can make the statement with truth there was no attempt to help African-Americans get up to speed in technology. 

In general, the African-American women appear to “get it” and have formed digital and physical groups, movements, clubs, vision board planning to better understand technology, urban challenges, solutions and opportunities to pursue and collaborate. However, with African-American men it always appears to be a problem area and it’s been nothing but a journey of fighting a man versus himself battle where African-American men constantly resort to ego defense, running from responsibility and excuses.  Again, these are not made-up generalizations, there is ponderance of Internet archives and data that spans over a decade showing this stubborn battle go on and on among African-American men focusing on ego and other toxic behaviors that lends no positive contribution to the progress of black people and black communities. 

There are 3 main problems I observe trying to work with African-American men on STEM and economic development and progress. 

Toxic Black Masculinity. This is where I see black men focus on physical masculinity and carry themselves like they going to put paws on someone and beat the living shit out of them for challenging their thoughts and methods.  Toxic black masculinity views black women as being conscripted to serve the sexual desires of the alpha black male concept and this is reflected in our Rap/R&B music, at black-orientated social events and even at places of African-American worship. Even the African-American barbershops have become a toxic black masculinity cesspool and this is another story. These toxic African-American men are the same dumbbells that fight over women at a club, run to Brazil to treat Brazilian women as a sex tourist attraction and got the biggest mouth about sports-related talk and add no overall value to the greater black community.  When these toxic black masculinity types enter a black forum, the atmosphere turns into ego defensive battleground versus a productive environment. 

Alternative Black Escapism.  This is the scene in the Matrix movie where the one guy is plugged into a Matrix eating a fake steak and stated he rather enjoy eating the fake steak than real life. Among the bro talk, there is also reference to the red pill/blue pill scene and what most African-Americans are doing is choosing the fake steak and blue pill. I seen over and over for 10 years when a technology or innovation come out, these African-American guys do not want to learn the technology but instead turn to conspiracy theories, get-rich schemes or appoint some “leader” of a technology instead of create the necessary innovation collaborative ecosystem to develop platforms, patterns and practices. Instead of trying to create a better future, these African-Americans focus on falsehood rhetoric such as they were once East African Egyptian Kings and Gods when their actual ancestral lineage is West African. Black escapisms create the environment for black charlatans to create “pro-black” perspectives on matters where those who are committed to doing actual work are drowned out by streams of fake news data from the alternative black escapism celebrated among African-American men. 

Perception of Normalized Drug Culture. This is the one that harms us the most; the conversation of pretending African-Americans can use illicit recreational drugs in a hipster, normalized fashion.  Not only is the African-American community targeted by the criminal justice system for petty drug use and a conviction record to marginalize blacks from gainful employment and right to vote, our own black communities have been devastated and our own family has been torn apart for over 40 years of drug use, particularly crack and heroin. We see African-Americans talking on the Internet or creating videos of using drugs and they bragging about selling cocaine but don’t show the image of the young black schoolgirl that has to walk to school past a junkie with a needle still in his arm in Harlem or Chicago or the schoolboy looking at his female neighbor giving oral sex to a drug dealer for a hit while passing an alley.  When these African-American men start normalizing drug use in the African-American community, we basically damaged our whole credibility on pursuing economic opportunities in Asian nations with no tolerance of drugs and our ability to expand into other global markets because of the perception.  And we African-American men are lying to ourselves about the devastation drugs inflicted on our own communities. 

Those are the major 3 things I seen over and over among African-American men when trying to engage with my brothers on how to better our communities and people. Ego-matches and back-and-forth attempting to troll and be provocative instead of productive. Too busy over staring at the black women at the professional gathering instead of focus on the business at hand.  Talking about rappers and sport teams in a loud voice and with passion while black children in the inner city trying to figure out if they going to get shot tonight or going to eat something other than canned chicken franks and beans. Talking about running to Brazil to find a black woman who don’t understand a word of English because the black women in America don’t like him when the African-American guy is engaged in defending his black ego, sharing pics of black women on the Internet and cannot maintain a job because he has violated his parole on a petty drug conviction. 

The ADOS Digerati movement is a focus on patterns and practices, not black identity. I’m seeing a lot of the same African-American guys who are on YouTube following stuff like Tariq Nasheed, Boyce Watkins, Umar Johnson and more are trying to come at the ADOS Digerati and bring the same patterns of toxic black masculinity, checking out the black women in the ADOS Digerati movement, trying to major in minors and introduce misinformation to mislead. But that not going to happen because these African-American men falsely think the ADOS Digerati is a black-identity when it is actually a global pattern and practice that anybody in the world can adopt.  And here is the rub. 

Anyone from Lithuania, Taiwan or India can adopt ADOS Digerati practices to create a cloud-based tokenized broker service that can serve an underserved African-American community. Anybody around the world can crowdfund and purchase buildings and real estate in the African-American community to create retail showrooms and pop-up shops. The ADOS Digerati is going to provide the information, the steps and the resources for anybody in the world to learn the information to go out and create solutions for African-Americans or anybody else in the world because we are based on patterns and practices, not black identity. If we put information out there on how to create better urban communities, that knowledge is for anybody to take, we cannot create artificial information barriers for only African-Americans to consume. 

We are living in a global world with global competition, opportunities and limited resources and it going to take skills and talent to maintain competitiveness to stay running in the game. That means anybody can get what’s ours but it also means we can get what is theirs as well. African-American men has long been stewards and strength of the black community but for some strange reason the brothas have turned negative and focused on blaming others, ego-defense, engaged in misinformation and too much time has been wasted on trying to engage African-American men to do right by their people and community. 

African-Americans men better learn that time is up – we better look at ourselves as black men and check all this ego stuff, not treating our sistas as our equal partner, all this misinformation and escapism and celebrating drugs and start focus on becoming global competitive to have ourselves, our people and our community remain relevant in the 21st century.