Get Online or Get Left Behind – If Our Ancestors Could Be Us Now!

African-Americans today are decedents of a strong, resilient race of people who died for freedom, equality and the right to get an education. They knew that mastering the written word gave them the power to communicate. They saw gaining this power as a crucial step on the road to freedom. Now if they HAD back then what we HAVE now when it comes to technology, you can be sure that they would have risked their lives to sneak online and use it to their advantage.

Can you imagine Harriet Tubman using MapQuest to map out the route to the Underground Railroad and passing it out to slaves on the run? How about Frederick Douglass making his speeches available on podcast and having his own online radio show to share his inspirational talks with the global community? Madame C.J. Walker, the first woman millionaire, would have had an e-commerce web site or used E-Bay to sell her hair products that made her wealthy and kept a Black woman’s head together! Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have had a blog, noting his daily courageous battle to fight for equality and justice for all. Imagine getting up every morning and going to your computer to read his thoughts and encounters online. So if you can imagine the empowerment our ancestors could have received from our technology – just image what YOU can do with it now!

The internet is an even playing ground where people from all walks of life, and all age groups and races have the opportunity to learn, interact, research subjects important to them and generate online income beyond their wildest dreams. Is the digital divide a thing of the past? Are there more Blacks online taking advantage of this technology and all the things they can do with it? As I travel around the digital globe I read about a number of webpreneurs who have found success and have taken hobby’s and turned them into their own online gold mines. I read about White internet marketers such as Ali Brown, Seth Godin, and even some of my own clients who generate from a few thousand to over 20k per month from selling digital information and running membership sites. I read about the young White teen that started a free MySpace graphic site and earned enough in a year to buy her mother a $250,000 home just from her Google Adense revenue alone! Now I do run into success stories or find out about African-American webpreneurs online, but they are still few and far between.

Now those are the big players on the Internet I just spoke of, but even on a smaller scale we still need to get in the internet game. Even if you don’t have a business that you will need to market online or get a website for, I’m pretty sure you will need to look for a job in your lifetime. Companies nowadays are only posting their jobs online or at least the good ones and sometimes that’s the only way they will accept your resume. Government officials are using the Internet more often to disseminate information. You can search for grants, obtain a tax ID, get vehicle reports, and even check up on a new boyfriend to see if he has a criminal record, owes child support, or has bad credit! Our students are asked to do homework that requires Internet research. However not enough of our Black youth don’t have the internet in their home. You can get the Internet in your home for less than $20 per month (the library offer access for free) and computers are being offered at prices so low they’re practically giving them away! Speaking of education, adult classes, especially continuing-education and degrees, are being offered more and more on the Internet. The bottom line is when it comes to the government, commerce, education and jobs; the web is leaving those that don’t participate behind! This is especially true for African-Americans.

So the next time you get timid about using the internet say to yourself “Get Online or Get Left Behind.” Embrace it, be empowered by it, educate yourself about it and enjoy all that technology has to offer. Because, I know if our Ancestors could be us now – they sure would.