Halt And Catch Fire: Blacks, Latinos Can’t Be Geeks

Halt And Catch Fire: Blacks, Latinos Can’t Be Geeks Halt And Catch Fire: Blacks Can’t Be Geeks

Halt And Catch Fire on AMC has terrible ratngs. One reason why few watch is the absence of anything that looks like Tech Culture in the 1980s from a black point of view. In other words, there are no African Americans in the tech World in Halt And Catch Fire.

Now, I have found evidence that this was deliberate. A casting call sheet ran for Atlanta actors asked for African American booth babes, but “Geeks” had to be white or Asian or South Asian (why that is, is weird).

The fact is there were many black Geeks in Texas, then. My Texas Arlington roommate Keith Johnson was one. An electrical engineering major who took computer programming classes as well, he worked for Bell Labs after college.

The same was true for his friend Lewis Rodgriguez, who is Latino, and also worked for Bell Labs and was a Double E.

And my major was City Planning, but I took Fortran 77.

Black and Latino Geeks were alive and well in Texas, but for Halt And Catch Fire, blacks can’t be geeks. That’s as racist as it gets. http://ift.tt/1owvjOP