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Tennessee is a tech leader in the U.S., the Silicon Valley of the South, if you will.
In particular, Nashville has experienced explosive growth in this lucrative industry with trends continuing to spike upward. In fact, the industry is expected to grow 16% over the next year, with the entire Middle Tennessee tech industry now valued at $8 billion.
With this rise comes untapped potential — potential for high-paying jobs, potential for economic security, potential for advancement — and also opportunity. And the opportunity I am most engaged in is ensuring that Black Americans are represented in this burgeoning 21st century sector.
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Why Blacks in Tech is coming to Nashville
A diversity of races, cultures, and experiences makes any friend group, community, workspace, and industry richer. Diversity broadens base knowledge, makes space for increased understanding, allyship, and acceptance, and in the end, leaves everyone better off. It’s only fair that all races are afforded equal opportunities.
While a long-overdue focus on diversity, equity and inclusion has been embraced by much of corporate America, the hard work is not over and the real work must be consistent, meaningful, and coordinated if efforts are to be more than performative.
Fortunately, in the tech industry, which I have been a part of my entire career, there are so many ongoing efforts to ensure young adults of color get the direction they need to move into this space. Nowhere is that happening at such an impressively fast clip as Nashville, as evidenced by Blacks in Tech (BIT) choosing our city as the site to host its next global conference.
BIT is an international nonprofit organization that is “Stomping the Divide” by establishing a blueprint of world-class technical excellence and innovation. By working through community-focused activities, events and media, BIT is committed to seeing more people of color represented in technology jobs, a mission that I, personally, am committed to as well and have worked to manifest here in Nashville.
The work is paying off.
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Stories go untold without opportunities for discovery
A recent Social Justice Hackathon, co-sponsored by Belmont University and the Nashville chapter of BIT, saw the winning team, comprised of all Black undergraduate students from Fisk University, analyzing banking data compiled from two Nashville ZIP codes.
The numbers these students crunched told a story that is all too familiar to many Black families. Black households were forced to take out more predatory quick loans subject to higher interest rates for money then used for utilities, groceries, and other necessities as opposed to their white neighbors, who used their lower interest loans for home improvement and other equity-building expenses.
If we don’t have people of color represented in a data ripe field like technology, stories like the one revealed at the hackathon go untold and the racial divide deepens.
The combination of our diversity, our strong community engagement, and our thriving technology center leave Nashville ripe to host BITCON — the upcoming Blacks In Technology global conference being held in early September. As hosts, we can demonstrate to the world not only the extent to which Black tech experts are represented and excel in the field, but we can also showcase the myriad of opportunities that a robust tech sector can bring to a city, like Nashville’s Riverfront Park, a redevelopment made successful in part by the tech companies that headquartered there. But also, BITCON is a sign of where we’re going, of a future of potential, and I’m here for it.
One reason I was drawn to tech in the first place is because there is such beauty in numbers. Numbers don’t lie. Numbers aren’t biased. Numbers aren’t gendered and don’t have a race. That doesn’t mean that my race and my gender have made it easy to break into this sector, but now that I’m here, I am committed to working with BIT and other community groups to ensure that more people who look like me are exposed to this fulfilling and exciting career.
Valencia Gooch is a data engineer at RegScale, a Knoxville-based technology company. She is active with the Nashville chapter of Blacks In Tech, a proud graduate of Nashville Software School, and proud alumna of both Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School and the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
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