> I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages?
I'm largely speaking from Gedaliah Braun's "Racism, Guilt and Self-Deceit"[0] which speaks to the lack of "abstract entities" like the Future, the Past, and things like Obligations. It would be problematic to compare horizontally across languages (Spanish, French, English, Zulu) strictly in terms of their actual evolutionary maturity. But "English" as the Mother language of programming does introduce a vertical stricture; however, evolutionarily this stricture might be negligible since English's dominance is a societal pressure.
But it must be stated that even authors/researchers like George Lakoff to Pinker and onto Physicalists believe in things like "Language Centers" of the brain, or "mentalese". I am trying my best to speak in line with racialism while still acknowledging that all humans alive today exist with roughly the same Human Potential. Environment is important; and so, socioeconomic structures are important.
My assumption is Wittgensteinian, or let's just say Constructivist-about-Cognition: If your native language lacks linguistic world building capabilities (even a world of abstractions), programming will be tougher to grok. That said, those who have mastered the conventions of the Computational World (think Mathematical Objectivities) will be less welcoming to those who have not.
> Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking an African language as their native language, there's no excuse besides both an ingrained societal disadvantage and perhaps a specific repulsion of black people by hacker culture.
Yes, structural oppression is a real thing. I want to reiterate my point about MLK's biggest contribution to this debate: There's no equality until Blacks are able to fail at the same rate as Whites. Generalizing from this: There's no equality until all members of the species are able to fail at the same rate. This would be a true homeostatic structure of social norms.
> Why is this group so under-represented? Existing societal disadvantages exist, but why are they so drastic for computer science - and what can we do to change that? That's what I'm asking.
My immediate naive response? Computers are less economically viable in our country. Surely Blacks could roll and build their own. But where are the parts? Re-sale shops, pawn shops, etc. — and can there be an explicit aesthetic and obvious need to engage in hardware hacking of this sort when considering the aforementioned structural oppression?
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Racism-Guilt-Self-Deceit-Gedaliah-Brau...