The Village Voice: Machine Age: Dash's Hopes
Published November 3 - 9, 1999
Darien Dash: "I speak in chips and bits, and also the language of
our community."
DASH'S HOPES
BY DONNA LADD
Bridging the Digital Divide
Darien Dash speaks two languages, even when he's waxing fondly about
Internet databases. Often, the 28-year-old Internet entrepreneur sounds
pretty much like the latest Silicon (V)alley millionaire: IPO this,
venture capital that. But put him in front of a crowd of inner-city
kids
and he finds his hip-hop roots, dropping rappers' names faster than you
can say Puff Daddy or Snoop Dogg. "I bridge the gap between Silicon
Alley
and constituents in Harlem," Dash said last week. "I speak in chips and
bits, and also the language of our community. I've got to wear a lot of
hats."
Dash started his company—DME Interactive in the industry, Digital Mafia
Entertainment in the community (www.digitalmafia.com)—in 1994 to
close the
digital gap for black and Hispanic communities while selling them
technology: e-commerce, Web design, advertising, networking. "My goal
is
to expand software and hardware within minority communities," he told
the
teen staff of HarlemLive.org in East Harlem last week. His clients
include
Motown Records, the New York Knicks, Bad Boy Entertainment, and
Roc-A-Blok
Records, which he cofounded.
"Our company's job is to give back to you all and to make money for
ourselves," he told the two dozen kids in the Playing 2 Win Community
Technology Center, surrounded by donated Macs and PCs.
Dash—who is married to Deborah, with three kids named Dash Jr., Dennis,
and Devyn—decided in 1994 to become a technology messiah for minorities
while still working at Digital Music Express, owned by cable giant
TCI. He
says the company refused to target minority customers because many had
problems meeting their payments. So he quit to go after (and help
create)
the minority tech market himself. "If I don't take a leadership role,
how
can I expect anyone else to do it?" he said.
In TCI's defense, Dash said corporate ignorance is much larger than the
company he worked for: It's systemic. "It's not fair to say [TCI is] a
bigoted corporation. The situation I was in was typical of the American
state of mind from the corporate perspective," he said, adding that
minority markets were and still are underfunded. Dash, a South
Hackensack,
New Jersey, native, said his calling was to "evangelize" directly to
places like East Harlem. And he wants to educate corporate America
while
he's at it.
Minority communities should be offended at the corporate notion that
they're only into music and sports, he told the HarlemLive crew, a
group
of inner-city tech evangelists in their own right. "People tell me you
can't bring the Internet to the inner city," he said, bouncing before
the
kids in a Steve Jobs–esque black turtleneck. "I swear to God, white
folks
think y'all only want to buy sneakers, beepers, and cell phones. But I
believe in you."
But Dash admitted separately that the corporate view of the African
American market—one that spent $1 billion on consumer products last
year—is partly true. That is, it's hard to convince minority kids that
geekdom is cool. "That's a problem, not a stereotype," he said. But
it's
fixable, he added, if the kids see their current heroes getting wired.
He pointed to rappers like Puff Daddy (www.puffdaddy.com), and the now
fabulously rich Fubu (www.fubu.com) clothing marketers, as good tech
influences. They're making money selling stuff inner-city kids want—and
they have an Internet presence. He asked the kids if they'd listen to
someone like Marvin D in concert at a site like DefJam.com. And would
they
pay a dollar, even $5, for the chance?
"Yeah, why not," a voice from the crowd said. "You pay $25 to see a
stupid
wrestling match."
"What about you, sweetheart?" he asked Ebony Meyers, one of the
handful of
girls in the crowd. She chose Dru Hill. "What if you could chat online
with Dru Hill? Would that interest you?" She nodded.
But Dash didn't stop at selling the kids Internet products. He
challenged
them to become entrepreneurs. "You all can be the ones creating the
content," he said. Emphasizing that they could get rich themselves if
they
follow the technology road, he explained that just 5 percent of Bill
Gates's fortune amounts to $4 million a month. (Moans of approval.)
"Now you can make money yourselves instead of working for other
people,"
he added, explaining that people buy Internet stock "like buying a
pair of
sneakers."
"They're not told at a young age that they could get rich," Dash said
later. Now, the stereotypes for minority success stories are sports and
entertainment figures, he said, whereas before that, making money "was
about drug dealing and other dubious things. We need different kinds of
role models."
Rahsaan Harris, the associate director of HarlemLive, applauded Dash's
strategy, which uses images of current sports and music heroes to open
high-tech doors. "A lot of kids in the inner city don't have access [to
either computers or good role models], or choices for college," he
said.
"HarlemLive is about exposing them to everything. There's an
interactive
way to do that. They need exchange, and not just on the digital level."
You wouldn't know minority kids think tech is for losers from
visiting the
HarlemLive studio. As soon as Dash's speech ended, the staff crowded
into
the world's smallest newsroom, around 10 donated computers to work on
their Web magazine.
Kerly Suffren, 18, reporter and senior editor, agrees with Dash about
technology's potential for teens. "It's important, I'll tell you that
much. I wasn't always a computer freak; I wasn't initiated until I
joined
HarlemLive. I stayed away. But computers have changed the way I
think," he
said.
Tech becomes cool for these kids, or any kids, when you encourage
them to
go crazy creatively and do their own thing, Harris said. "Show them the
relevance; they'll be on them for hours. That's the real deal."
From 1997 to 1998, the gap between the number of white and black
households with Internet access grew by 53 percent, according to a
report
this year by the Department of Commerce. But, according to Forrester
Research, African Americans are the fastest-growing group online for
1999,
with a 42 percent growth rate. Dash told the HarlemLive kids they can
be
the ones to close the digital divide. Thus, the crux of his sermon:
Don't
sit around and wait for the high-tech crumbs. Instead of just bemoaning
the "digital divide," go grab a piece of the pie.
The CEO bristles at the digital-divide apologists who say minorities
will
catch up naturally with tech some day. "People do acclimate. But I
don't
think minorities should have to 'catch up.' If we have to catch up,
we've
been left behind. There's no excuse for that." The catch-up-some-day
mentality assumes that minorities are "not part of the
infrastructure, not
part of building the digital age," he said. "There's a fallacy in
thinking
there. The cold, hard reality is that corporate America, the general
market, and a lot of politicians see minorities only as consumers,
not as
contributors."
The change must come from within, Dash added. He said his own mentor,
Cecil Hollingsworth, who cofounded Essence magazine, spurred him to
own,
rather than rent, a piece of economic real estate. "He was like a
godfather to me," he said.
Dash introduced his own protégé, director of marketing Jared Leake, who
grew up in Harlem, went to Dalton and Harvard, and now is back
living—and
selling technology—in Harlem. Dash, who was just named the Technology
Committee chairman of School District 5 (Harlem), offered his personal
e-mail address to the kids for mentoring and business advice.
At District 5, Dash is approaching corporate partners (Compaq,
AltaVista
to date) to help Harlem create model broadband, PC- and network-ready
schools, rather than become another district with haphazard Internet
access. As a result, he predicts that companies will soon come
knocking in
Harlem to "cherrypick these kids" for their work forces. He reminded
the
kids that he started out with a mere $500 and a dream: "If you have the
determination and the will, the money will follow. I'm a living,
breathing
example. Puff, Master P, and Fubu—we all started from nothing and made
something."
But what about the competition he's fostering? "That would be a
problem I
would welcome any day—that this industry becomes saturated with young,
great people of color," he said.
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