expert generalist

Originally posted on August 10, 2001 on Geekhalla.org, the Geekcorps volunteers’ site:

I am now part of the G3 group of geeks. I am leaving San Francisco for four months. I have been here since the early 90’s, when the city was sleepy and cafes were filled with people writing novels and at parties everyone wore cool purple hats and sparkly clothing but didn’t have jobs. By 1995, I was working in a web company out of a garage and we knew what to do on weekends because Craig Newmark sent some of his friends an email list. I had gotten the job after reading Laura Lemay’s Learn HTML in a Week and I did. At my interview, I sat on a ripped couch in the garage and talked to a bearded Stanford computer science graduate who still had a Brooklyn accent after 20 years in the Bay Area. He asked me to describe a technology goal that I had.

Before coming to San Francisco, I had spent a lot of time in a small village in the north of Bali where the local rice farmers didn’t have electricity, and making a phone call meant borrowing someone’s motorbike and driving nine kilometers to the nearest town, going to the telephone office there and waiting while the operator tried to reach Jakarta. I imagined that one day technology could improve the communication in that village, that the junior high teacher with his tattered books could find materials online, that there could be a kind of clean economic development that wouldn’t rend the landscape with Industrial Revolution smokestacks and blackened rivers, wouldn’t mar that green and shimmering rice-paddy landscape filled with tree spirits. Continue reading »

My 5-year-old American son, whose father is from Ghana, knows that Barack Obama’s father was from Africa too. I have wondered, as his white mother, how race issues will affect him. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad when one day when I picked him up from preschool, he announced:

“We are all beautiful.”

“Yes, we are all beautiful,” I agreed.

“Even if we’re brown like me and Jackie, we’re beautiful,” he said proudly, climbing into his carseat.

I hated to hear him say even. And then…one day he told me he wished he had hair like my hair. I didn’t know what to think or say - did every 4-year-old with hair different from his mother say such a thing? Or was he starting to view himself in a certain way based on having a certain kind of hair?

Then, today, as we await the inauguration of President Barack Obama, my son announced to me, proudly: “Barack Obama has hair like my hair.”