A day in the life of a young black male engineering “coding” student | Hacker News Reader

A day in the life of a young black male engineering “coding” student

storify.com

122 pointsbootload30 comments

Wow. I expected to hear his challenges in learning to code. It seems that for some people in the world the challenge is to be treated as a legitimate person, and AFTER that you get to be stumped by learning to write code.

That is of course assuming your spirit was not broken by the process of getting to school.

Codestart sounds like a great program. This is the description on their gofundme page:

> #CodeStart is a 13 month coding, entrepreneurship, career readiness and financial readiness program innovated by Atlanta Workforce Development Agency, TechSquare Labs and Opportunity Hub. Our current cohort includes 17 disconnected youth and under-employed young adults from neighborhoods in the City of Atlanta. Over the 13 month period, the students commit to a 12 week fulltime, immersive coding bootcamp in which they learn Java. After successful completion, they receive career readiness, culture fit and financial literacy training. At that point, we work with the students to gain employment as a junior entry level computer programmer/developer/engineer. It gets better as the students will then participate in a part-time entrepreneurial pre-accelerator and incubator program for the remainder of the program. At the end, we aim to create a new software programmer and a technical cofounder of a high growth startup. The sky is the limit. It gets better. The students receive housing and a monthly living stipend.

Here are more details. It looks like it costs $50,000 to sponsor a student for a year, so the current fundraiser will pay for about 7 students.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/293263194/TechSquare-Labs-Atlanta-...

Thanks for sharing this story.

I used to have a job working with poor and homeless people, and the lack of banking services available to our clients was really frustrating, especially because on top of getting ripped off by check cashers, homeless people carrying around an entire benefit check in cash were frequently targeted for theft.

My roommate runs a company called Bee (http://www.beecard.us) that's working to put check cashers out of business and provide banking services for people who wouldn't otherwise have them, and its one of the best uses of technology to solve a real social problem I've seen.

There are also various proposals to restore somethign like the old US Postal Savings System [0], where post-offices would (not for the first time) provide very basic bank-services.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...

I wonder if you could build a viable bank/credit union with the specific focus to provide free/extremely lost cost banking to persons who otherwise don't have access. Perhaps subsidized by patrons with more money.

This has been done. Remember the 2008 housing crisis? That's what the bad MBSes were: subsidizing those who couldn't make their mortgage payments with money from those who could, by packaging the bad loans and good loans together.

I know we're talking about checking accounts. That was tried too -- it was called Washington Mutual, and they were my bank when I was finding my legs out in Portland, OR. Free checking account, no questions asked? Sure, I'll take that.

Biggest bank crash in U.S. history.

So no, such a financial institution is not viable as such. It would have to be run explicitly as a charity.

There are no easy solutions here. To change the situation will require multiphasic, multipartite, cultural AND systemic efforts.

> I know we're talking about checking accounts. That was tried too -- it was called Washington Mutual,

Is there evidence to suggest the "free checking account no questions asked" was large portion of it being one of the "Biggest Bank crash in U.S. history". It looks like Washington Mutual crashed for the same reason the others did: it had all this loans out on people who couldn't pay them. Not because it offered checking/savings accounts to underprivileged. It's weird you reference the 2008 collapse then fail to mention that being the exact time when WaMu crashed.

Sad to see this young man treated poorly.

Those check cashing places are notoriously shady. In future, might I suggest Walmart. They cash any check with proper ID for a mere $3 and won't call the police because you're black.

> won't call the police because you're black.

[Citation needed]

You...did read the article, right?

Nah, they'll just pay their workers minimum wage into accounts with exorbitant fees, thereby circumventing minimum wage laws. Many of those workers being black.

I really don't wanna hear about Walmart as a solution to any sort of inequality, that's ridiculous.

It's not being proposed as a solution to inequality, only as a way to cash a check.

Meh, liberals and conservatives like to immiserate the poor in different ways: conservatives try to drive down wages and liberals try to drive up prices.

As a simple matter of increasing purchasing power at the low end of the economic scale, Wal-Mart has done an amazing amount to reduce poverty. Financial services are hugely overpriced for poor people, and Wal-Mart providing financial services could be a fantastic way to lower those costs.

I suggest a bank. One of the most basic institutions of our society.

I want to be clear, I mean I would like this person to have as easy access to banking services as I do. I would like them to be able to bitch and moan because my credit union decided to change their login system and it takes me an extra 10 seconds to login.

Heck every walmart in my area has a separate bank in it!

That was my first thought too. But I'm guessing this happened in an urban area, and most Walmarts are in suburban and small town locations.

This story is so messed up on a few levels.

First, a question, why money order and not cheque? Naively I think the latter would be a better system.

Second, why is a place that charges 10+% the best way the (first? best? only?) option for this person? It's not even a case of not having ID here.

> I stood in amazement watching the police tell this young man that they did him a favor by not hauling him off to jail immediately.

Wow, what a god damn favor. The sad thing is, is it even the police' fault in this case.

> He was livid. I was livid. I literally wanted to break down crying on the spot. It took everything in me to stand tall & resolute.

Just depressing.

> Opening more bank accounts. Teaching financial literacy. Teaching wealth building.

So here's something I think is sad. I'm pretty awful with my finances. I made a very good wage and while I'm not over extended I don't tend to save as much as I should. It's something I work on. But! I have a savings account since I was about 10, and a chequing account since I got my first job. The idea of being denied banking access, whether explicitly or by societal issues, is simply not something I have ever even had to worry about.

I was unbanked for a couple months when I first moved to New York years ago, because I couldn't open a bank account without a utility bill. Eventually the way I got a bank account was because my employer brought one in to sign up employees.

Huge numbers of people cash their paychecks at check cashing places. This is just what it's like to be poor in America. You take 10% off the top to cash your paycheck, literally everything costs more, and then you get a bunch of lectures from privileged people about how you need to be more responsible.

Not saying that this wasn't racially motivated, but aren't a huge proportion of people who use these check cashing places minorities? Looks like the store employee was black, too, based on the image.

It's definitely messed up what they did (and completely messed up that calling the police got the kids threatened with arrest), but I wouldn't be surprised if this boiled down to the stipend being for more than the normal amount that they usually see from people in his age cohort.

Either way, it's a good thing he had people he could call to settle this for him.

>but I wouldn't be surprised if this boiled down to the stipend being for more than the normal amount that they usually see from people in his age cohort.

I would bet that this, together with the fact that it didn't show up in their system, was the cause, not predatory racism.

The article is claiming that the student was "being impacted by predatory racism." I don't see any proof of this. The cops are black, the employee is black. If everyone would have skin colour $skin_colour, would it still be racism?

Is it the result of racism that it is so unusual to see young black children with valid money orders?

We're used to seeing "racism" as the action of some individual bus driver pointing someone to the back of the bus, or some individual water fountain monitor pointing people to a different water fountain. But that form of racism was much more common two or three generations ago, and didn't just affect the lives of people who lived then, but also affected their descendants. There may be no racist bus drivers today (and even that story leaves out that the bus driver was undoubtedly under racist orders by their own employer), but we still have the lasting cultural impact of racism to deal with.

It's racism if someone is being treated differently based on skin color. It doesn't matter whether they have the same skin color.

>It's racism if someone is being treated differently based on skin color

Did that happen here?

Yes. If you think the same thing would have happened to a white student, you are nuts.

I think what he meant by "predatory racism" is the very existence of the check-cashing industry with predatory fees for cashing checks (in this case, 10%, which is actually a low rate for the industry). It used to be payday loans, but when Georgia ruled those illegal, the same companies simply changed their names to some variation of "check cashing" and continued to charge exorbitant fees to teens working through (or instead of) high school and immigrants, most of whom are minorities, who can't get a bank account because of their age and/or immigrant status.

Those workers are paid via check, and since they don't have a bank account to deposit the check into, they often resort to the check cashing robber barons who will do anything they can to take as much money as possible from their "clients". Holding a teen's ID and money order ransom because he "fits a profile" sounds like par for the course when it comes to those morally bankrupt businesses.

As for the race of everyone involved in this particular case, I take it you've never been to Atlanta. I live there, and I can say first hand that even black cops in the city will profile black youth.

"who can't get a bank account because of their age and/or immigrant status"

Or because of Chexsystems, which bars you from getting an account pretty much anywhere for 5 years. I was a victim of that years ago, and it really screws your life up. you have (or had at the time) no choice but to utilize check cashing services like the shady one in the article. It isn't always as simple as "go to the bank that the check was written from" either.

It can cost a lot to be poor in the US.

Yes, it would still be racism. As others have said, black people can be racist towards other black people and it's actually MUCH more common than you think, and is largely a result of growing up in a culture that teaches that "black is bad" and "white is good". It's impossible to escape all of those hidden subliminal messages in real life, on tv, etc. Here's an interesting article about it if you're interested: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/black-on...

By law the bank issuing the check has to make good on the check.

The non-profit should use a large, well known commercial bank for their business account, cut the students checks from there and give them a ride down to the local branch.

Bank of America for instance would take a BofA check, cash it for the full amount in cash the same day without taking a cut. It's what checks were originally designed to do.

I've been unbanked before and it sucks but, it's not impossible to overcome. Also, why are they give young people such large checks and/or money orders?

If it's a money order, you can get cashed at various places for free. All you need is legal government ID. The whole point of a money order is that it's pre-secured. The money is already set aside for it. The only thing to be done is to validate that it hasn't been cashed previously. In theory this is near zero-risk for the cash issuer.

It's not so much that we need to create more options, those exist. We need to educate people on this so that you aren't taken for a ride of 10%+ off of giving out cash for a money order.

People need to be more informed of the market options and understand how the market works. What the difference between a check and a money order is.

I grew up poor and had to educate myself on these matters. It's incredible that there aren't even basic financial literacy classes in middle school and high school.

These ideas contribute greatly to society in helping people become and stay financially stable which leads to a great number of social outcomes.

10% for cashing your paycheck is a hell of a hidden tax. Taking that 10% and using it wisely will in aggregate keep people out of poverty longer, let families be more stable, food secure, etc.

Weirdly, this was marked dead, so I vouched for it. I'd appreciate it if others could keep an eye on it, as I have to head out for dinner now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com