As someone who grew up poor (albeit white), I'm going to try to explain a core problem to you - role models. When I looked at the adults around me growing up,

As someone who grew up poor (albeit white), I'm going to try to explain a core problem to you - role models. When I looked at the adults around me growing up, I didn't see educated people. The responsible adult professionals were motorcycle mechanics, truck drivers, stuff like that. The less responsible were day laborers or petty criminals. The only people I encountered who were educated were teachers and doctors, and the wealthy men my father often worked for whom he condescendingly called "edjicated mow-rawns" in his thick Kentucky drawl. What I knew of success was seething class resentment. I don't think I knew a single adult who was an engineer or technical professional. But I was clever, and read a lot of science fiction. I was originally interested in automotive/motorcycle engineering, having grown up around racing. But I discovered computers in high school, and that was that. The boundaries we can imagine are limited by our childhood experiences. If you grow up wealthy and privileged, surrounded by doctors and lawyers and executives, you expect adulthood to look like that. If you grow up in a world where the only adults you know are hustlers and criminals, that's what you can imagine. So why aren't there more black engineers? In part, because there aren't black engineers. And what black engineers there are, are underemployed, because they didn't necessarily go to the elite schools or have the other earmarks of privilege. Fixing this is going to take more than the myth of rugged individualism.