BLACKS AND TECHNOLOGY VOLUME II

An analysis of the failure of blacks to embrace and benefit from the technological revolution and a prescriptive to change the tide.

According to Chukwu, the black community is mired in poverty because it has not harnessed the promise of economic stability offered by technology and medicine. But the author (My American Dream: From Orphan to an American Success Story, 2007) notes that blacks do not have any influence in the medical or technology arenas because they do not have any products to offer. This imbalance is exacerbated because African-Americans, Chukwu contends, prefer to pursue careers in athletics or entertainment, instead of seeking education in medicine, engineering and computer technology, and when they do achieve success in those fields they do not reinvest their money in organizations that promote science. Chukwu believes that only by embracing technology will they finally shed the shackles of their oppressors and colonizers and take full advantage of the richness of sub-Saharan mineral resources for wealth and progress. Blacks must become involved in medicine, he argues, because they must develop medicine designed specifically for blacks; from the beginning of civilized medicine, they have been diagnosed with instruments and tests that were formulated through early research and trials from which they were excluded. Because of this, Chukwu is skeptical, for example, about the purported incidence of high blood pressure in black men and claims that “no accurate medical diagnoses currently exist to justify” that finding. The “total isolation of the black population from the early medicinal or medical research,” he argues, reverberates today in the “unfavorable” relationship between black patients and white doctors and in the inability of white doctors to properly treat blacks. He concludes with a call to unite in prayer for black economic power and offers a sample syllabus for teaching black leaders. His plea for blacks to lift themselves out of poverty by pursuing careers in the fields of technology and medicine is good-natured, but his cyclical logic, repetitive prose, statistics and charts without citations, and questionable claims hardly inspire confidence that many people will heed Chukwu’s call.

Impassioned but misguided.