After Jesse Jackson announced that he would come to Silicon Valley as part of a crusade to combat the "digital divide" that caused black professionals to be shut out of high-tech jobs, T.J. Rodgers, outspoken CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, challenged Jackson to provide résumés of any of the qualified people who were being ignored. "With 115 open positions, we could use them. We hire 500 people per year and still never fully meet our needs—just like most other Silicon Valley companies," Rodgers wrote in the San Jose Mercury News.

Rodgers noted that in 1995, African-Americans accounted for only 1.2 percent of doctorates in engineering and computer science, while garnering 12 times more medical degrees and eight times as many education doctorates, a trend that he said had nothing to do with Silicon Valley. All this was too much for John Templeton, spokesman for one of the groups sponsoring Jackson's visit. "We can now officially describe Cypress Semiconductor as a white supremacist hate group," he announced in a press release.

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