Digital Equity Is Community Power

Background

Black Mississippi is already participating in the digital world. People are running businesses, organizing communities, creating music and art, learning artificial intelligence, producing content, maintaining relationships and finding new uses for technology every day. Digital inequity should never be confused with a lack of intelligence, imagination, ambition or curiosity. The Digital Equity Advancement Project begins from that understanding because a conversation focused entirely on what Black communities lack will never fully explain what becomes possible when access, knowledge and opportunity finally meet.

The infrastructure beneath that activity remains profoundly unequal.

Mississippi's broadband subscription rate of any type is approximately 80 percent. Its fixed home broadband adoption rate falls to 55.1 percent, compared with 64.9 percent in neighboring states, 71.2 percent across other southern states and 73.5 percent across the rest of the country. Mississippi State University Extension, using American Community Survey data, identifies Mississippi as having the lowest adoption rate among the states for both overall broadband and fixed broadband.

The gap between those numbers matters. A household can technically be connected while relying primarily on cellular service or a smartphone. That may be enough to check email or watch a video. It is not equivalent to a stable home connection and a capable computer when someone is completing schoolwork, managing a business, producing media, writing a grant, taking an online course or navigating government systems.

Affordability deepens the problem. At the enrollment freeze for the federal Affordable Connectivity Program in 2024, 244,280 Mississippi households were participating, approximately one in every five households in the state. The program provided qualifying households with a monthly broadband benefit before federal funding expired. Infrastructure that reaches a neighborhood but remains financially out of reach inside the home does not constitute meaningful access.

The racial and economic geography is equally important. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies defines the Black Rural South as 152 rural counties across ten southern states with populations that are at least 35 percent Black. Its analysis found that 38 percent of Black residents in those counties lacked home internet access, compared with 23 percent of white residents in the same region. It also found that households earning less than $35,000 represented 60.8 percent of Black households in the Black Rural South, compared with 28.6 percent of households nationally.

Broadband did not create that inequality. It arrived on top of it.

Mississippi's technological infrastructure is being built across communities already shaped by generations of decisions about housing, education, credit, transportation, property, public investment, private capital and political representation. The effects of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, segregation, discriminatory lending, white flight and unequal wealth accumulation did not disappear when broadband arrived. They became part of the terrain on which the next infrastructure system would be built.

This is the new frontier, old geography problem.

New capital is moving through Mississippi. Fiber networks are expanding. Federal broadband dollars are being deployed. Hyper-scale data centers are arriving. Artificial intelligence is creating entirely new categories of economic activity. Yet much of this investment is being layered over geographic and economic patterns shaped long before anyone used the words broadband, algorithm or data center.

Jackson offers one useful example

C Spire introduced residential gigabit fiber in Jackson more than a decade ago and divided the city into 15 areas it called "fiberhoods." Its rollout relied on demonstrated resident demand. By June 2015, seven Jackson fiberhoods had qualified: Audubon Park-Little Europe-Indian Streets, Sheffield-Sherwood Forest-Massena, Highlands East-Meadowbrook Highlands-Fontaine, Country Club, Belhaven Northeast, Eastover and Fondren East. C Spire reported that several thousand residents had demonstrated interest by placing $10 refundable deposits and providing credit-card information.

The technology was significant. So was the method used to determine where it arrived first.

What does demonstrated market demand mean in a city where purchasing power is not evenly distributed?

Demand is not simply desire. A neighborhood's ability to demonstrate it can be influenced by household income, homeownership, access to credit, the ability to absorb another monthly expense and the strength of neighborhood institutions and networks. A market can apply the same standard across an unequal landscape and still reward communities that began with greater economic capacity.

Public policy has its own versions of thresholds, definitions and boundaries. Legislatures decide what qualifies, what counts, where a line falls and which communities end up on either side. Neutral language does not guarantee neutral consequences.

Mississippi's post-2020 congressional redistricting offers one example. U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and the Mississippi NAACP supported alternatives that would have placed all of Hinds County inside the majority-Black 2nd Congressional District. The enacted plan instead maintained heavily Republican and whiter portions of Northeast Jackson in District 3 with Ridgeland and Madison.

The Legislature enacted the congressional map after the House approved it 75-44 and the Senate approved it 33-18. Every African American member of the Mississippi Legislature, in both chambers, voted against the plan.

That opposition belongs in the record. Legislators were deciding how communities would be grouped for political representation in a state where race, party and political power have long been intertwined. The vote does not tell us every individual motive. It does establish that Black lawmakers collectively rejected the resulting political geography.

It also illustrates something broader. Legislatures routinely vote on the meanings of words themselves. They determine definitions, eligibility requirements, thresholds and boundaries that decide who receives protection, representation or investment. Sometimes this is the ordinary work of governing. History also gives Black communities ample reason to recognize that malicious or politically self-serving intent does not always announce itself plainly. Language can be cleaned up while the consequences remain unequal.

Markets can function similarly. The absence of explicit racial language in a demand threshold does not erase the racial and economic history of the market on which that threshold operates.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project does not argue that congressional boundaries and broadband deployment were coordinated or created by the same decision-makers. The point is structural. Different institutions can operate under different rules and repeatedly interact with the same underlying geography of wealth, property, race and political power.

Position of the Digital Equity Advancement Project

Infrastructure is the foundation, not the finish line

The Digital Equity Advancement Project holds that physical broadband deployment is essential but insufficient.

Broadband policy has traditionally focused heavily on the infrastructure layer: how many locations are served, which technology reaches them and how much money is required to complete deployment. Those questions matter. A community cannot participate in a digital economy without physical infrastructure.

But infrastructure does not automatically create capability.

A fiber line does not teach someone how to protect their data. A broadband connection does not make a small business fluent in artificial intelligence. A device does not teach someone how to distinguish reliable information from misinformation. A data center does not automatically produce local ownership, local technical expertise or meaningful community benefit.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project therefore understands digital equity through three connected layers: Access, Skills and Community Power.

Access means affordable, reliable and future-ready infrastructure and devices.

Skills mean practical digital competency, artificial-intelligence literacy, cybersecurity awareness and the ability to use technology independently and critically.

Community Power means the knowledge, leadership and collective capacity to use those skills to build businesses, strengthen organizations, participate in public decisions and shape the systems affecting the community.

Infrastructure opens the door. Capability determines what happens after people walk through it.

Future-ready infrastructure matters

Not every connection offers the same long-term value.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project supports fiber-to-the-home as the preferred standard for major public broadband investments where deployment is technically and economically feasible. Fiber provides substantially greater long-term capacity and is better positioned to support the increasing upload, download and reliability requirements of emerging technologies.

Fixed wireless access, including services marketed as 5G home internet, can play a useful role in connecting difficult-to-reach areas and providing alternatives where wired infrastructure is not immediately available. It should not become an excuse for creating a lower infrastructure standard for communities that have already waited longest for reliable broadband.

Wireless capacity can vary with network congestion, distance from infrastructure, signal conditions and provider network management. A household technically classified as served should not automatically be treated as having received infrastructure equivalent to a direct fiber connection.

This distinction becomes especially important when public funding is involved. The Digital Equity Advancement Project opposes policies that meet deployment targets by giving historically underserved communities the least expensive technology available while communities with greater market power receive infrastructure with greater capacity and longevity.

Closing the digital divide should not mean building a new version of it.

Public broadband investments should therefore prioritize symmetrical, scalable fiber infrastructure wherever feasible and require clear public disclosure when fixed wireless or other alternatives are selected instead.

Historic inequality must be considered when infrastructure decisions are made

The Digital Equity Advancement Project rejects the assumption that treating unequal communities identically will automatically produce equitable outcomes.

Where decades of public and private decisions have produced major differences in wealth, homeownership, credit access, institutional capacity and public infrastructure, policies based primarily on current market demand can reproduce those disparities. The absence of explicit racial language does not remove racial history from the equation.

This is not an argument against private investment. Companies make decisions based on profitability, demand, cost and risk. The public interest is larger than the business case for serving the most profitable customer first, and that is precisely why public policy and public investment exist.

Public broadband investment should give meaningful priority to communities that markets have historically served late, poorly or not at all. Affordability must be considered alongside physical deployment, and investments should favor infrastructure capable of carrying communities into the technologies ahead rather than merely satisfying yesterday's definition of access.

Mississippi has a rare opportunity to do exactly that.

The state's total federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment allocation is approximately $1.2 billion. Mississippi's federally approved final proposal identifies more than $508 million in preliminary deployment awards to reach approximately 93,000 unserved households, with participating providers adding another $321 million in private investment.

The $508 million is a deployment component of the larger $1.2 billion allocation, not the total federal investment available to Mississippi.

That distinction matters because hundreds of millions of dollars remain at the center of an unresolved public-policy question. The Children's Defense Fund-Southern Regional Office and the Mississippi Broadband Equity Coalition have called for a public accounting of the full allocation, clarity about how federal rule changes affected eligibility, a timeline for remaining funds and continued emphasis on fiber and long-term affordability.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project supports those demands and takes an additional position: Mississippi should establish a standing community-led broadband oversight body with meaningful representation from Black, rural, low-income and historically underserved communities.

Such a body should have access to deployment data, award information, technology selections, construction timelines, affordability commitments and information about any reallocation of federal funds. Its purpose should not be ceremonial consultation after decisions are made. Community representatives should have enough information and standing to scrutinize where public broadband investment is going, which technologies are being purchased and whether deployment is reaching communities that have historically waited longest.

Communities must have a voice before technological decisions are final

Digital equity means participating in decisions about technology, not merely consuming technology after somebody else has made those decisions.

This becomes increasingly important as Mississippi competes for data centers and other large technology infrastructure projects. Economic development can bring investment, employment and tax revenue. Those benefits do not cancel legitimate questions about energy, water, land use, public incentives, environmental impacts, infrastructure costs, permanent employment, local contracting and who actually shares in the wealth created.

Mississippi's artificial-intelligence boom makes those questions immediate.

In January 2026, the state announced that xAI would invest more than $20 billion in a Southaven data center, an investment the state described as the largest economic-development project in Mississippi history. The Mississippi Development Authority approved the project for the state's Data Center Incentive, while Southaven and DeSoto County supported it through fee-in-lieu agreements. State officials said the project would create hundreds of permanent jobs in DeSoto County.

At a February 2026 hearing concerning an application for 41 permanent natural-gas turbines connected to xAI operations in Southaven, residents and advocates overwhelmingly opposed the proposed permit. The state permit board approved it the following month. Civil-rights and environmental organizations have also challenged the permitting of other turbines supporting xAI operations.

That conflict exposes the difference between hosting technological infrastructure and having power over technological development.

A community can provide land, electricity and public incentives for infrastructure worth tens of billions of dollars while having limited influence over how the project is designed, what environmental costs it creates or how much long-term wealth remains locally.

That is extraction.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project rejects a model of technological development in which Black and economically disadvantaged communities provide the land, labor, electricity, public subsidies or environmental tolerance necessary for technological advancement while the resulting wealth, ownership and decision-making power accumulate somewhere else.

Jackson offers another model.

After months of public debate over data-center development, the Jackson City Council approved a citywide moratorium on July 14, 2026, becoming the first Mississippi city to enact such a pause while local officials considered regulations for future projects.

That intervention matters because community self-determination is part of digital equity.

A community should not have to become technologically fluent only after infrastructure is operating, incentives have been committed and major decisions are difficult to reverse. Residents deserve understandable information early enough to ask what is being built, what resources it requires, what public support is involved, how many permanent jobs are expected, whether local businesses can compete for contracts, what protections exist and what measurable benefits will remain in the community.

Community input should occur while the future is still negotiable.

Artificial intelligence must expand community capacity, not deepen a new affordability and knowledge gap

Artificial intelligence is making the definition of digital inclusion more urgent.

The emerging divide will not simply separate households with broadband from households without it. It will distinguish workers who understand automation from workers who experience only its consequences, businesses able to integrate new tools from those unable to afford them, students with access to capable devices and advanced systems from those without, and communities able to evaluate technological development from communities expected to accept decisions they were never equipped to interrogate.

Mississippi enters that transition carrying an educational-access gap. All4Ed's analysis of 2018 American Community Survey data found that nearly 42 percent of Mississippi families with children lacked high-speed home internet, the highest state percentage in that analysis. The age of the underlying data should remain explicit: this is a 2018 baseline, not a 2026 estimate.

The contrast remains instructive.

Mississippi is now hosting technological infrastructure measured in tens of billions of dollars while substantial portions of its population have historically struggled to secure the basic connectivity needed to participate fully in digital education and work.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project therefore holds that artificial-intelligence literacy must become part of modern digital literacy. That means learning how to use artificial-intelligence systems, but it also means understanding their limitations, privacy implications, data practices, algorithmic harms and the circumstances in which these systems should be questioned rather than trusted.

Affordability matters here too.

The next technology gap may not look like a household with internet versus a household without it. It may look like one household with high-capacity fiber, a modern computer, paid artificial-intelligence subscriptions, cloud storage and advanced training while another household technically has internet but cannot afford the tools increasingly expected in school and work.

That is still a digital divide.

Mississippi should not be satisfied with hosting the machines that power artificial intelligence. Black and economically disadvantaged communities should participate in the businesses, careers, contracting opportunities, knowledge, creativity and ownership surrounding them.

Black Joy, creativity and ownership are measures of digital equity

Digital access should not have to be justified by promising that every Black person will use every megabit to become a more productive worker.

Work matters. Education matters. Entrepreneurship and economic mobility matter deeply. They are not the entirety of human life.

Technology also means talking to family, making music, gaming, storytelling, preserving community history, creating art, entertaining one another, learning something simply because curiosity got the best of us and occasionally making something with no profitable purpose at all.

Those are legitimate outcomes of digital inclusion.

Black communities have repeatedly taken technologies and platforms and used them in ways their designers did not anticipate. That creativity has shaped American culture and generated enormous economic value, often far beyond the communities where the innovation began.

An equitable technological future should create room for more of that.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project rejects a definition of digital equity that measures success primarily by how efficiently Black communities can participate as workers or consumers inside systems somebody else owns.

This is part of what distinguishes community capability from simple connectivity.

The goal is not access to technology for technology's sake.

The goal is the freedom and power to decide what we do with it.

Conclusion

The Digital Equity Advancement Project takes the position that Mississippi's digital divide cannot be closed through broadband deployment alone.

Mississippi needs reliable, future-ready infrastructure, and the level of investment now underway creates legitimate reason for hope. But connectivity must be accompanied by affordability, capable devices, practical digital education, artificial-intelligence literacy, local leadership, transparent public decision-making, equitable access to advanced infrastructure and meaningful community participation in technological development.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project proposes a broader test for every major digital-equity investment:

Does this increase a community's access, skills and power?

If infrastructure arrives but residents cannot afford it, the work is incomplete. If a community receives fixed wireless service while more affluent communities receive future-ready fiber simply because it is cheaper to meet the requirement that way, the work is incomplete. If devices are distributed but people are not equipped to use emerging technology confidently, the work is incomplete. If a community hosts billions of dollars in computational infrastructure but has little ownership in the resulting economy and little influence over decisions affecting its future, the work is incomplete.

The Digital Equity Advancement Project calls for broadband investment that prioritizes long-term fiber infrastructure, clear differentiation between fiber and fixed-wireless deployment, sustained affordability, transparent accounting of Mississippi's full federal broadband allocation and a standing community-led oversight structure capable of examining where public investment goes and who ultimately benefits.

There is reason for Black Hope precisely because none of these systems is immovable.

Infrastructure can be extended. Knowledge can spread. Public policy can change. Communities can organize. New leaders can emerge. Someone who learns today can teach somebody tomorrow, and information that once belonged to a small circle of experts can become something a neighborhood knows how to use.

That is the movement from Access, to Skills, to Community Power.

Black and economically disadvantaged communities deserve more than eventual access to a technological future designed somewhere else. We should be able to understand it, participate in it, question it, enjoy it, create with it, benefit economically from it and help determine how it develops around us.

Appendix A: Author

Tyson Jackson is the founder of the Digital Equity Advancement Project, a program of the Black With No Chaser Institute. Jackson came of age in Mississippi as a student at Tougaloo College and spent roughly twenty years living in Jackson and surrounding communities. His family's Mississippi roots extend through North Panola and Tunica.

Jackson is an organizer whose work has centered on building community capacity, developing leadership and helping people understand and act on the systems shaping their lives. He founded the Digital Equity Advancement Project to help close the digital divide in Black and economically disadvantaged communities by connecting practical digital skills to local leadership, technological fluency and community power.

Appendix B: References

1. All4Ed. Homework Gap. Analysis based on 2018 American Community Survey data. Source for Mississippi's nearly 42 percent high-speed-home-internet figure and analysis of smartphone-only limitations for students.
2. American Library Association, Young Adult Library Services Association. Guidelines for Position Papers and Issue Briefs. Structural guidance used in preparing this position paper.
3. BroadbandNow Research. Internet Access in Mississippi: Stats and Figures, and Best and Worst States for Broadband in 2026. State-level availability, affordability and performance measures.
4. C Spire. Jackson Becomes First Mississippi City to Qualify Seven Areas for C Spire's 1 Gbps Fiber to the Home Internet Technology Initiative. June 9, 2015. Source for Jackson's fiberhood rollout and pre-registration mechanism.
5. Children's Defense Fund-Southern Regional Office. Rural Mississippians Stand to Lose Again in Efforts to Gain Access to Quality, Affordable Broadband Internet. April 20, 2026. Source for questions surrounding the balance of Mississippi's original $1.2 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment allocation and calls for transparency, fiber and affordability.
6. Federal Communications Commission. 2024 Section 706 Report and FCC Increases Broadband Speed Benchmark. Source for the current 100/20 Mbps broadband benchmark.
7. Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Dominique Harrison. Affordability and Availability: Expanding Broadband in the Black Rural South. October 2021. Source for the Black Rural South definition, racial home-internet disparity and household-income data.
8. Mississippi Free Press. Reporting on Mississippi's post-2020 congressional redistricting and Northeast Jackson.
9. Mississippi State University Extension Service. Exploring Broadband Adoption in Mississippi. Source for statewide broadband adoption and regional comparisons using American Community Survey estimates.
10. Mississippi Today. Reporting on Mississippi congressional redistricting, legislative votes and the collective opposition of African American legislators to the enacted congressional map.
11. Mississippi Today. Reporting on the xAI Southaven permitting process, public opposition, environmental litigation and related community concerns.
12. Mississippi Today. Jackson Passes State's First Data Center Moratorium. July 14, 2026.
13. Office of Governor Tate Reeves and Office of Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi. BEAD Final Proposal Approved. February 2026. Source for preliminary deployment awards, households targeted and participating-provider investment.
14. Office of Governor Tate Reeves and Mississippi Development Authority. Tech Leader xAI Investing More Than $20 Billion in Southaven. January 2026.
15. Universal Service Administrative Company and archived White House Mississippi Affordable Connectivity Program Fact Sheet. Sources for Mississippi's Affordable Connectivity Program enrollment.
16. Digital Equity Advancement Project. Where Digital Skills Become Community Power. Public organizational website. Source for the Digital Equity Advancement Project's Access, Skills and Community Power model, program descriptions and organizational vision.

Suggested citation: Jackson, Tyson. Digital Equity Is Community Power: A Position Paper on Mississippi's Digital Future. Digital Equity Advancement Project, a program of the Black With No Chaser Institute. August 2026.