Upper Hand

The Future of Work for the Rest of Us

Sherrell Dorsey

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119839309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Learn how to secure a place at the professional table for Black, Latinx, and other marginalized groups

In Upper Hand: ?The Future of Work for the Rest of Us, celebrated Founder and CEO of The Plug, Sherrell Dorsey, delivers a personal and eye-opening exploration of how to ensure that marginalized communities aren't left behind as technology continues its inexorable march forward. In the book, readers will learn to think about how we can strategically shape the coming decade to include Black and Brown communities.

Upper Hand offers guidelines, insights, and frameworks for navigating the new world of work that is dominated by Silicon Valley-rooted technologies, inaccessible networks, and constant automation that continues to slash jobs in the Black and Latinx population. You'll find ways to:

• Help families and community leaders design clear pathways to understanding alternatives to obsolescence
• Thrive in an ever-changing, tech-driven economy that is beginning to leave people of color behind
• Embrace new strategies that guarantee a place for Black and brown people in the new economy

The startling and insightful discussion in Upper Hand will earn it a place in the libraries of families, teachers, community advocates, workforce development leaders, professionals of color, as well as anyone interested in learning how to distribute the benefits of the new tech economy to those historically left out.

1
Soul of a City

“Are there even any Black people in Seattle?”

I've been answering this question over and over again through the decades, especially when I meet Black people who hail from very Black cities and are wondering exactly how Black folks have managed to build their lives, for generations, in some of the whitest places in America.

But that's truly the story of our history, is it not? Whether we had “our folks” in the room or found them missing in action, migration across land and industry—particularly within places that used to be less than welcoming—Black people have not been deterred from finding or building doors to access.

My grandfather, Jerry Dorsey III, had mastered migration and placemaking by the time Seattle's Black population began to swell in the 1960s. Born in 1933 in a colored hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, just like his sister Alberta and brother Willie, he learned early in life that the only difference between his current circumstances and opportunity was a decision to choose the path that had the potential to lead to something more.

Most Black folks left the Jim Crow South in search of better wages, better treatment in racially hostile environments, and upward economic and social mobility between the early 1900s and the 1970s. The Dorsey family was no exception. They made the transition from the bowels of the deep South, landing in Detroit, Michigan, when Grandpa was just shy of 13 years old.

My grandfather's father, “Big Poppy,” found work at a tire factory in the bustling manufacturing industry that defined Detroit's local economy. “Big Mommy” worked as a domestic, like most Black women during the era, cleaning white folks' homes and doing their laundry.

Five years later, just shy of finishing high school, Grandpa was drafted into the Korean War, where he drove tanks and worked on switchboards. Like in the wars that preceded it, millions of Black men were asked to fight along with white men in a country in which they had little to no guarantee of civil rights or expected economic mobility. Grandpa could help serve his country, but he had not been granted the right to vote. Nor was he paid on par with his peers.

During the 1950s, most Black families were making on average just $1,800 annually, compared to $3,400 for white families. The stark economic racial wage gap has persisted up to this day.

By 1954, Grandpa was back living in his family's Detroit home, deciding what he would do next with his life.

One afternoon, as he sat at the family dining table, poring over applications to college and even considering an art program, there was a knock at the door. A salesman from a local trade school program would upend Grandpa's plans to “figure it out” and point him in the direction that would shape his life, and eventually my own. Grandpa only had to say yes and commit to two years of part‐time training at the Detroit Radio Electronics Television School. And so he began a schedule of working during the day and attending classes at night. Around this time he'd settled down with his first wife, Anna, gotten married, and began his journey into fatherhood of two young children (my mom and uncle).

The work paid off. Just before completing his certificate at RETS, Grandpa had two job offers in hand. One was based in Jacksonville, Florida, and the other was from aircraft manufacturer Boeing. At the time, Boeing was in desperate need of workers, managing the boon of commercial and military contracts it had secured following the Korean War. My grandfather was hired as one of many of the company's electronic technician engineers, and one of a growing group of Black workers getting access to what was considered back then a high‐paying job.

Boeing expanded its employee pool of Black workers during a time America was seeing significant changes in its workforce. The company hired its first African American worker, stenographer Florise Spearman, in 1942, and by the following year had employed over 300 Black workers—86 percent of whom were women. By the time my grandfather arrived at the company nearly two decades later, in 1960, that number had surged to over 1,600 Black workers.

It was jobs like these through companies like Boeing, IBM, General Motors, and other big industry players opening their gates through need, and some through affirmative action policy in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that helped Black people enter the middle class and chart new trajectories out of low wages and into family‐stabilizing jobs in manufacturing and engineering. Very few of these jobs required any education credential beyond a high school diploma or a certificate.

Prior to the Civil Rights Act, the service sector was overwhelmingly Black and brown. Black Americans, and slowly growing Latinx populations, were likely to hold jobs in janitorial services, secretarial support staff, or in lower‐level machine work that made very little room for promotions or long‐term economic stability.

Boeing's move to hire Black workers in critical roles was thus monumental, particularly as large employers in Seattle like Nordstrom, Safeway, J.C. Penney, and the Bon Marché (before it was purchased by Macy's) refused to hire Black workers at the time.

The wave of corporate America's shifting attitude toward the employment of Black workers spelled change and opportunities for Black communities and became the bedrock on which my grandfather would thrive.

Ultimately, my grandfather chose Seattle for what he believed would be a calm transition. Riots were erupting across Florida as Black residents protested mistreatment and demanded the right to vote. My grandfather elected to skip out on the unrest and get to earning money to send home to his family.

So, in 1960, with his trade certificate in hand, he took off on the three‐day journey to Seattle on the Greyhound bus, with one small suitcase and a few sandwiches he'd stuffed into a brown paper bag.

He arrived in Seattle a year before the iconic Space Needle was constructed, with just $30 in his pocket and no place to stay. He didn't have any “people” or family members to help him get set up. He had no housing, no vehicle, or any idea whether the job in a mystery city would work out long term. But he no longer had a choice. He'd have to make it work.

The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) on 23rd and East Olive Streets would be the place he'd call home for $10 a day. With limited resources, he ate only french fries, awaiting his first day of work and his first paycheck from Boeing, where he earned $2.38 an hour.

At the time of my grandfather's arrival, Seattle's Black population hovered at just over 16,000 people or just 2.4 percent of the total population, which was overwhelmingly white. A farming and manufacturing class of people ushered in a melting pot of migrants from Mexico, traveling from working in California agriculture, and Southeast Asian communities setting up businesses across the neighborhoods that bordered downtown, and a trickling influx of eastern African immigrants.

My grandfather was an early settler in a slowly changing demographic of the city. His timing was perfect, entering an industry that would have gross implications for progress as the city increasingly became an industry leader in aircraft manufacturing and then eventually software development.

Boeing proved to be the launching pad my grandfather needed to enter into a middle‐class life. With a paycheck or two under his belt, he'd been able to secure long‐term housing and advance within his career. He spent seven years at the company before moving on to operate the cameras at the local television station KING‐TV, where he remained for 25 years until his retirement.

There's no way he could have predicted how much his life, and decision to move to a growing city sight unseen, would impact my world and an environment that would define the world's trajectory by the time I came onto the scene in 1987.

Living Legacy

By the end of 1983, my mom had finished college and left Detroit to join my grandfather in Seattle. By that time, he'd married his new wife Rosella, had my aunt Rhonda from a previous marriage, and had become stepfather to my uncle Philip.

When I came along, it was Grandpa who helped fill in the gaps. Single‐parent life for my mom was facilitated by a village of family and friends. My grandfather, who lived a two‐minute drive “up the hill” and had long since retired, was the designated helper of pickups and drop‐offs. He was the one with the patience to help us with science products, cutting wood and metal in his garage to help me build a robotic arm for my seventh‐grade science project. His knack for technology and the mundanity of retirement made me and my cousin prime targets for his evangelizing of technology into our lives.

Grandpa was also the “Inspector Gadget” of our family, known for his affinity for gizmos, the latest television and VCR home equipment, and any other electronics he could wire into his home or garage workshop. Before home security tools became the norm, a keypad would let you enter the garage. A push of the doorbell triggered a camera upstairs to confirm guests before someone would travel downstairs to unlock the door.

He even set us up with our very first personal computers in the mid‐1990s, convincing my mom to get an extra phone cord for dial‐up internet. As the default designated babysitter for me and my cousins when school was out, our morning activities included accompanying Grandpa to Costco for groceries and an afternoon perched in front of his upstairs computer learning how to type via the Mavis Beacon CD‐ROM program that circulated in the computer's disk tower.

Mavis was a beloved annoyance in my grandfather's house. She was our very first engagement of a Black person's face on a software program. She looked more like an Ebony magazine cover model than a woman who spent her days forcing children to learn the quintessential home row on the computer keyboard. My cousin Otis and I would take turns going through each lesson while Grandpa watched a game of golf or built a new piece of furniture in his garage.

Grandpa normalized technology and our access to it in our everyday lives as a tool for learning, discovery, and a route to greater efficiency. Since he was retired and spent his days carting us around or running back and forth from the hardware store for any given random construction project he was managing at home, he had a lot of time to also curl up in front of a series of infomercials. This meant that every new CD‐ROM available for the low price of $19.99 was ours to behold.

We had digital literature on the anatomy of the body with the ability to build 3D models of every body part we were curious about. Grandpa believed these tools would help us advance in our learning of science as well as technical skills. He bought us other software tools for increasing our reading comprehension, even making us sit for speed reading instruction. Grandpa was adamant about introducing tech‐based learning games and software programs that were supposed to turn us into instant geniuses. We toyed around with these for a while before eventually begging to take a break from the screen to go outside to play with the other kids who would begin to gather around my grandfather's garage in the late afternoons to take advantage of the basketball hoop that hung over the garage and the miniature putting green he'd built into the yard (that to this day he has used maybe once).

What we were learning and discovering at Grandpa's was supplemented at home through my mom's intentional collection of an analog library of books and literature written by Black authors and researchers. After my dates with Mavis Beacon, my mom encouraged my relationship with Maya Angelou, Mona Lake Jones, Toni Morrison, Jawanza Kunjufu, Walter Dean Meyers, and other Black literary voices.

As the digital age became more accessible, and our collection of encyclopedias became obsolete, she purchased CD‐ROMs like Microsoft's 1999 Encarta Africana—one of the early digital encyclopedias that used text, images, and storytelling to present narratives on Black Americans and African culture. For personal exposure, and for research for school projects, having access to a living, digital encyclopedia was my early experience in doing research online.

My mom was certainly no technologist, but she adapted to the environment as technolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Soul of a City
• 2 Rainier Beach to Redmond: Internship Required
• 3 Playing the Game Around Us
• 4 Don't Let the Robots Scare You
• 5 Money Talks
• 6 Brand or Bust?
• 7 Owning the Moment
• 8 Learning the Language of Innovation
• 9 Narrowing the Digital Divide
• 10 The Jobs Driving the Future of Work
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement