Black Tech Ecosystems: How Black Adult Learners Use Computer Code Bootcamps for Liberation

Black Tech Ecosystems reports on a year-long ethnographic study of low-income Black adult learners attending Clearwater Academy, a nonprofit computer code bootcamp that teaches coding literacy to help end racism and poverty. While Clearwater Academy offers pathways into a lucrative career that promotes Black social mobility and a diverse tech industry, Antonio Byrd describes a more complicated story. The core challenges of weak social-support networks, embedded cultures in tech, financial strains, and racism persistently present roadblocks to Clearwater Academy’s Black adult learners’ success. However, through this experience, Black adult learners develop new knowledge and frameworks that change their relationship with coding literacy and labor. Instead of solely focusing on learning computer programming for work, Black Tech Ecosystems describes a liberatory and transformative use of computer programming that centers Black lives instead of the tech industry.

Antonio Byrd is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, composition pedagogy, qualitative research methods, and Black digital rhetorics. His research focuses on how the legacies of using literacy for liberation carry forward into present day Black digital literacies and media features. His work has appeared in Composition Studies, College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, and College Composition and Communication. In 2021, his article “‘Like Coming Home’: African Americans Tinkering and Playing toward a Computer Code Bootcamp” received the Richard Braddock Award for best article in College Composition and Communication.