Speaking

To get more Black girls in tech, we must ensure that she has a computer with the internet, that she learns how to build technology products, and that she has exposure to Black women in tech

Patricia Hill Collins states that social justice is elusive where the rules themselves may appear to be equally applied to everyone. INTech serves as a counterspace against saturated sites of violence that exists in k-12 classrooms. The history and the design of the INTech program supports the social justice construct of intersectionality by specifically focusing on Black girls, recruiting a staff and speakers that reflect the student population, pivoting to a virtual model to reach more students, providing hardware to students that needs it to participate, and lastly by engaging in projects where students focus on social justice issues, allowing them to learn tech for good.

You may ask, why the focus on minority girls? Well, the Knight Theater has 1,000 seats. If we were to rope off this first 3 rows, that would be representative of the amount of women in the tech industry today. Of those 3 rows, if we were to just look at half of the first row, that would be representative of the Black and Latina women in the workforce - and that's the problem.

I had the opportunity to work full time at Apple's headquarters out in Cali and I remember having a manager say to me "it seems like you should be doing Inclusion & Diversity work since you have this camp". And I looked at him and said well let me help you understand that when I go speak to students and when they come to our camp, and they see me and my friends leading by example in tech, that actually gives me the fuel to go back to work.