by Libero Della Piana

About the author: Libero Della Piana is the editor of RaceFile, a bimonthly journal on race relations published by the Applied Research Center in Oakland, California.

Imagine it’s the year 2005, only a few years into the future. Juana is a new public school graduate, a young woman of color, whose community and others like it have been either bypassed by, or run over on, the Information Superhighway. Her older sister graduated from high school and got a job processing orders for the phone company, but Juana can’t do that: the new communications company has replaced clerks with automated voice mail processing. A couple of years ago, Juana might have been able to work part-time for her uncle who had a storefront which rented videos. But when the new...