How the Racial Digital Divide for Black Students Impacts Online Education

How the Racial Digital Divide for Black Students Impacts Online Education
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How the Racial Digital Divide for Black Students Impacts Online Education
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a paradigm shift in people’s livelihoods and lives, and one of the far-reaching impacts entails upending K-12 education as well as universities and colleges (Hall et al., 2020; Ong, 2020). School and state districts abandoned the traditional physical classroom to curb the virus spread. They shifted to virtual learning, which depends on information technology (IT) tools, including computers and the internet, to link learners to educational resources and instructors. The swift and unprecedented reconfigurations transformed the role of IT in education, occasioning a paradigm shift that had adverse implications for racial minority students. According to Ong (2020), the paradigm shift created a digital divide (systematic inequalities in technology access) among Black, Asian, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White students. Therefore, this study seeks to examine the problem of the racial digital divide for African American students that negatively impacts their online learning. The U.S. Census Bureau’s (2020) survey reiterated the racial digital for black students and potentially impacted their ability to participate in online learning. Out of the 9.6 million Black American households that participated in the survey, only 61.6% had technology that could allow children to engage in online learning reliably. For non-Hispanic W...