Memo to Jesse: Focus on the Critical Issues

MEMORANDUM: To Jesse Jackson regarding your campaign to shine attention on Silicon Valley's dismal record of hiring blacks and Latinos for high tech jobs.

Even for a man who has made a career of shaking down businesses, you have stumbled to a new low with this attempt to shame the icons of America's technology industry into adopting hiring quotas, nonsensical diversity measurements and racial sensitivity training.

Your civil rights playbook needs some serious updating.  For starters, there would be more African-Americans and Hispanics in Silicon Valley if they pursued degrees in engineering, computer science and other technology fields.

The Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies issued a recent report detailing how blacks and Latinos in particular "fall short in preparedness for jobs in the technology sector."  In its report, the center called for increasing the number of minorities majoring in science and engineering in college to address the issue.

Apparently, Reverend Jackson, you must have been too busy jetting around the country to hustle a few million more dollars for your Rainbow PUSH organization to be bothered with the facts.

Frankly, African-Americans and Latinos have more pressing problems than scoring a corner office at some technology firm.  It might be a more productive use of your time if you spent considerable energy tackling these urgent issues:

1.  Blacks lead all ethnic groups in unemployment.  According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among African-Americans is 11.4 percent.  Just for the record, Hispanic occupy second place in the unemployment line.  July statistics pegged the unemployment rate for Americans at 6.2 percent.

2. Blacks have the lowest high school graduation rates of all ethnic groups.  Department of Education figures estimate that 66.1 percent of African-American students graduated from high school.  Hispanic graduation rates were 71.4 percent.  By comparison, 83 percent of whites achieved high school diplomas.

3.  More than 60 percent of the people in state and federal prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.  For black males in their 30's, one in ten is incarcerated in a prison on any given day.  These figures are from the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group for imprisoned minorities. Firearm violence rates for blacks aged 12 and older were 40 percent higher than Hispanics and 200 percent more than whites, reports the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

4.  More black children are raised in a single parent household than other ethnic groups.  In the African-American community, 72 percent of children are raised by a single parent.  For the country as a whole, 25.8 percent of children are brought up by one parent, based on studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

5. Blacks are more likely to receive welfare assistance than other groups.  Department of Health and Human Services data confirms that 39.8 of all Americans who receive food stamps, unemployment insurance or other forms of welfare are African-Americans.  White recipients comprise 38.8 percent of those collecting federal aid and Hispanics constitute 15.7 percent.  In the most recent U.S. Census, 72.4 percent of Americans were white, 12.6 percent were African-American and 16.4 percent were Hispanic or Latino.

Start with these five issues if you want to improve the plight of minorities, especially African-Americans.  Stop trying to make them victims and do something that actually provides blacks and other minorities opportunities to share in America's prosperity.

Sorry, but you have no right to grumble about hiring practices in Silicon Valley until you have done more than just blame others for the serious problems that are ravaging the minority community.  Just being a racial profiteer isn't enough to claim the mantle of Martin Luther King.