The Sandnigger Programmer from Mississippi

My story.

I’ll never forget the day. After 10 years at my high end private school, where I never really fit in, I had now started my 11th grade year at a brand new school where I actually felt that I had a few real friends.

It had been about 2 weeks since school started. I was walking out of bible class when everything went completely blank. I woke up on the ground, blood streaming from my mouth, nose and eyes, and I could not see anything. From what I was told, Josh (that was really his name), the kid who sat behind me and frequently called me a camel jockey and a sand nigger**,** finally had enough of me and assaulted me as I was walking out of class, blind siding me in my temple and knocking me unconscious.

From witness accounts, he then jumped on top of me bashing my face in for another 30 seconds before a teacher finally pulled him off of me.

I spent almost a week in the hospital, almost lost sight in one of my eyes, had a broken nose, and still suffer from ptsd.

Once Josh found out that I was half Palestinian (My mother is white, my dad is Palestinian, and my weird name prompted a class discussion the first day at school), he did not like me, and he made it known to me in the only ways he could articulate.

I don’t blame him. No one comes into life with that sort of hatred or thinking, it is taught and passed down generation to generation, and I have no doubt that this thinking was taught to him by the people who influenced him at a young age.

I am half Palestinian.

Most of the people I talk to do not really even suspect that I’m not 100% white until they learn my name. Living in Mississippi, this has opened my eyes to how a lot of people here act when they think they are around other white people as well as assumptions that are made based on what they have obviously gotten away with in the past.

Many times these people assume that I love the bible, that nigger is a word that can be thrown around without worry, shame, or embarrassment, and that I am a Republican. Once they find out that I am a Palestinian, all of those assumptions are of course thrown out of the window.

Because I live in the city, I can see this type of thinking slowly dying out, and most of the people I see are decent, rational, and open minded. On the other hand, if you go just a few miles outside of most large cities, especially in the Southeast and Midwestern United States this type of thinking is still alive and well.

When I see what is going on right now in our country, I see a lot of Joshs.

Here is the problem: Many Americans are brought up being told that they are the best and smartest and strongest people in the world simply because of their citizenship, setting them up for failure. Over the past 50 or so years many people have failed to teach their children, either because of ignorance or bias, about the reality of the world. This reality is that there are a countless number of equally smart or smarter and harder working people out there in other countries than many of the people here in our homeland.

Being born in the United States is the equivalent of winning the immigration jackpot. People wait dozens of years to get into the country and become US citizens. We are also living in the safest and most prosperous time in the history of the world. Inheriting this wealth of luck, safety, and opportunity and squandering it away would be viewed by many as obscene, so when an immigrant comes to this country and overcomes not only the language barrier but also the social and myriad of other barriers to become successful, it only makes sense that the insecurity of the average American very often emerges and lashes out when they themselves have yet to do the same.

While the average American’s immigrant ancestors worked their tail off and appreciated all of the opportunities that the United States had to offer when they first came to this country, somewhere along the line that positive attitude and decent work ethic was deleted and what was uploaded was a virus of pessimism, willful ignorance, unconscious laziness, entitlement, and a fear of reasoning among other negative characteristics.

In the past, Americans could finish school (possibly only high school) and settle into a semi-comfortable job and wage simply based on the fact that they were white and lived in America.

In the reality of a digital world, we are now competing with the entire globe. While there are countless opportunities out there for those willing to do what it takes; if you don’t hustle, work hard, and educate yourself beyond what you learn in your sub-par American school, you will not make it in today’s economy.

People in African or South American slums who grew up with nothing now have access to all of the knowledge in the world, and can take Stanford, MIT, and Harvard classes for free as well as an uncountable number of Moocs and free online educational materials that is growing exponentially.

This means that while you still have many many privileges of being an American citizen, you no longer have the silver spoon of easy high paying work placed in your hand on demand. If someone who used to make $1000 / year can learn what you know, they can charge $5000 / year and dramatically improve their quality of life, making you and your $70,000 / year salary no longer sustainable.

It is easy for people to blame their failure or shortcoming on immigrants, black people, or people different from them instead of taking responsibility and coming to terms with what they need to do to change their situation. In fact it makes the pain more manageable. When a politician comes on TV and says:

“Hey, it’s not your fault, it’s these people’s fault! Also, if you elect me, I will make sure we make the government’s top priority fixing your situation!”

To someone who is in a bad situation and wants out, this actually probably sounds really great..

What they are not being told is that the automation that took their job away is increasing rapidly, and there is no going back. The factory that fired 30,000 workers when they closed and moved away will now only need 500 workers if and when they decide to return, and those workers will have to be highly skilled. Truck, Taxi, Bus, and other transportation drivers will be the next wave of jobs being removed as the autonomous driving revolution makes it bad business to keep human drivers that create 9x more wrecks than their digital counterparts.

The great news is that there are also countless opportunities for out of work people to replace these lost jobs for those who seek them and do what is necessary to educate themselves. What’s even better is that in many cases the replacements are better than the jobs being lost. There are millions of unfilled technical jobs in the United States and the number is projected to increase, and with the increase in demand of course comes an increase in average wage.

No matter how hard you want it, the old world is not coming back. Instead of wishing that the the 20th century economy would come back, how about embracing the 21st century economy and all of the opportunities it has to offer?

Tech is no longer an industry. Tech is the industry behind all industries. Tech is intertwined with every business in the world. Tech is now what agriculture was 200 years ago.

I fell into this trap myself, the trap of thinking I was special.

I worked most of my life in my family’s business, taking home a nice salary, calling the shots with hardly any experience or merit, and never being wrong about anything. I was spoiled.

I learned about real life when I packed my family up and moved to California to begin my career as a programmer at the age of 29 with no college degree and a misunderstanding of how talented I really was.

For the first time in my life I had a boss and I was a nobody. When I got fired I felt like a complete failure. I had brought my family all the way to California only to fail and not have anything to show for it.

Luckily I worked with a badass recruiter who immediately placed me with another company, though it took years to really come to terms with what it meant to not be special without merit and to be out in the real world.

In California I worked with some of the world’s best programmers at a now shuttered startup called EGood. These people introduced me to the world of conferences, meetups, and what hard work and intelligence truly looked like. I was stupid, these people were smart and successful. I wanted to be like them.

To become like them, I spent the next few years of my life doing what they did. No more watching new TV shows. Almost no more sports. Long nights reading code that I did not understand. Hundreds, no thousands of failures. Wanting to quit an uncountable number of times. Spending countless nights and weekends coding and debugging shit that I had no business working on.

Finally I started seeing the light and feeling like I was not the worst, simply close to it. I finished my 150th book in 3 years. Now on to a good job, then a better job, then a solid software engineering job offer from a top 5 tech company in Silicon Valley, then a book deal, and my own podcast (with the podcast company whose podcast, that I still listen to, helped me become a programmer, having listened to over 150 or so episodes of JavaScript Jabber).

I’ve also had the opportunity to travel the world, speak at conferences, and get paid to do what I love, as well as start my own company and go out own my own. I’m not done. I’m only beginning.

I made it. I consider myself successful.

I worked my ass off over the last few years and have not complained until this post.

Hard work, grit, determination, patience, consistency, kindness, compassion, helping others. These are some of the qualities it takes to be successful.

If you buy in to the fact that you are a special snowflake because the news, your pastor, your parents, or your friends tell you that you are, then life in the real world will either hand you a rude awakening or you will wake up 20 years from now chanting along with some obscure racist populist political candidate trying to subtly bring back the good old days when black people and women were not considered equal.

If you are supportive of the most recent immigration ban I would like you to think hard about what I have written and reconsider the root motivation of your support.

If you are insisting terrorism and safety as your reason, and you truly want to decrease deaths in the US, then I would be interested in your articulation of the fact that over the past 60 years crime has plummeted and pales in comparison to deaths by automobile and health related issues.

In particular I would like to hear your thoughts about this graph that has been going around for the past few days showing some of the true data regarding recent deaths from terrorism:

Note: This data is from 2005–2014, Check out https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/what-threat-united-states-today/ for more up to date info.

It is also worth noting that the 9/11 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia/UAE/Egypt/Lebanon, all the countries not in the recent MuslimBan. Also, zero were actually refugees.

If you have really been paying attention, you probably already understand that facts like these do not matter so much to an indoctrinated mind molded by ideology and dogma from an early age. The only way to bring about a more logical populace it is to introduce reasoning into the minds of the youngest generations.

Are there terrorists in the world that want to kill us? Yes. Is this the way to handle it? No. It is a complex issue whose roots date back thousands of years.

The only thing we know for sure is that creating enemies by killing our neighbors families through unnecessary war, funding their destruction in any underhanded way, or personally profiting from their suffering is not good for our country or the future generations of our children.

If you are of the reading class, I would recommend checking out a few books that I have enjoyed over the past year about these and similar topics:

1. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
2. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
3. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
4. Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
5. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

If you enjoyed this article, please like and share it. Thanks for reading.

Check out From The Blues to Rock and Roll — Mississippi’s Growing Tech Industry for my thoughts on how to improve the tech industry in Mississippi.