American Creed

American Creed

Brandon Horton

America should have equal opportunity. It shouldn’t matter where you’re from, you should always have the same opportunity as everyone else across the country. In the film American Creed, Terrence Davenport, a project manager for Samasource, talks about the history of Dumas, Arkansas. Liela Jahan says, “Most of the black population there are descendants of slaves or more recently sharecroppers." Dumas is an old town, and the community there still picks cotton by hand. But the production of mechanized labor took over and made it hard for these people to work. The people of the community are stuck In Dumas. There is hardly any cell phone coverage, which makes it hard for the people to seek work and find a job. There is also no internet because most can’t afford it and for those that can afford it can’t find a network company willing to install it. The people in Dumas simply don’t have the money or the resources to move.

Not all people have the equal opportunity to seek work. This is a problem because these people are very capable of working. They are educated and good at what they do but can’t seek work, they also aren’t getting paid what they should be for the level of work they are doing. In the video Race and Digital Opportunity In the Delta Leila Janah states, “We’ve heard from some of our students down here in the Delta and what they continue to share is some of the challenges they faced finding work in the Delta region.” This isn’t their only struggle either, the people in Dumas for example can’t move anywhere because they were born in Dumas and don’t have the money to take their talents elsewhere. When if they took their talents and education elsewhere they could be successful Americans.

America is supposed to have equal opportunity. Unfortunately this is not the case, in some cases like the citizens of Dumas that don’t have the equal opportunity as others. They were born there and can’t get out. In the film American Creed Terrence Davenport says, “people were suffering because they didn’t have proper access to education, they didn’t have proper access to jobs." Terrance used to work for an organization called Sama Source. Sama Source is an organization that would help people with low income jobs and give them an opportunity. America is a free country which means many different things. Since America is free, you should have the equal opportunity as everyone else, but people don’t have equal opportunity.

Talented educated people are stuck living in a place where they are not able to take opportunities that will benefit them for their own good. They are not able to take their talents to better themselves because they are too poor to move away and take the opportunities. People in the Arkansas Delta region talked to Leila Janah about some of the struggles they had finding work. Leila talks about how she wants “…to create digital work for people who can’t seek work because of their location." Digital work could be a solution to this. Digital work would allow for people to work all over the Delta region and seek work that way. This would also make up for low-income people so they could work their way up to move out of where they are and take opportunities.