Hes an engineer with idm. He graduated from the university of western cape in portland. , chiropractic and trained psychotherapist. Hes an Award Winning author. Hes the recipient of this African American literature and other awards for his foes. His testimony. Jeff radio tv programs across the nation. You can connect to speak about his latest book. Please join me in welcoming clyde. [applause] think i can tell you how special it is to be afraid. Meet living over 20 years ago, i was in washington, i was a volunteer. I was working with a group that was involved. I had just come from by the empty talk to Chiropractic College indepth he did something to do around computers because i have been doing that for sub pump when i wasnt studying chiropractic. I was able to get computer time but exchanging one were to help them develop this. Anybody whos bold enough to know what that is, brace yourself. Thats how i got involved. I his job he is late at night, i would go there at 1 00 a. M. By julian and bring my friends say theres an invisible lady. Some of you think know what that was like. Where is she cap next [inaudible question] i didnt get to visit her when i was there yesterday but you can visit her again and i may have to stop by before i leave tomorrow just to say hello because she was such an important part of me being involved. I want to thank you for being the opportunity to share with you thoughts and ideas about latest book. Im going to talk about that book also interspersed back with reading from the book. Then we will have an opportunity for questions and answers as well. If nobody said this already, if you have a telephone you want to put it on vibrate or silent, that would probably be a good idea. I found this so surprising to learn more about book. You thank you write about, you know what youre writing about, you publish it you talk about what is your approach. What i found what i will check again, some of the things i found that check that with you but also sensitizing things learned after the book has been published. Think about the subject matter the time. I thought a great place to start would be excerpt the book. Contrasting fathers first day at work with my first day at work started with my first day at ibm. Lets see if we can do that. Help ms. Over at barr, the other way of trying i wrote in slate side to side, profiting into manhattan. When it does beneath the greater, everything outside went dark. A reflection of myself in the window. Afro, pork chop sideburns, red pinstripes. Fire engine red trenchcoat with his collar turned up. Have they called started from the assembly streets. Humming for some, of the scene the night before. My subtest of black youre about to engage in the with injustice before me. I entered one of the triggers squeezed into the financial district and took an elevator up to a higher floor. New york biking office. Grass handbook deposit from catching another of myself in the door pain. I shook my head. Im sure what to make of this. Im ready to push through the glass doors, uncertain of what they believe of me on the other side of that threshold. On that day in 1971, i was young and black, defiant and angry informed that under the certain not to be like my father. Yet, there i stood about to report to work at ibm where he works. Twentyfive years. Thats how i start the book. I wonder, some of the select back when when you cant date without photograph and i can tell you, its not my dad, its me. Anybody guess what you might be . First, i am wearing the bottoms. You might not see them. I had sideburns. In fact is malcolm x. That should be updated as well. Ill just say it was 1968. Did somebody take back . Thank you baby cleaned up with that but work that i went to ibm for extra credit, that magazine named mojo, you know what that magazine was connected to . It was that magazine of the bsc. 1968. As for the important historically for a couple of reasons. One, 1968, that may, that spring was the strength of the columbia students. The black Student Council and rate them and the hispanic student that columbia, the lord really very involved in. Trying to get more than just the education from columbia, trying to get to the university. A lot of what happened, you take any student demonstration whether its college or high school, i even look at whats going on in terms of Climate Change back can do a direct line between what took place in 1968 and whats taking place right now. That was the important place. I think young people, i was among the is it possible. I think young people that the difference was. All up. Physical science here, hello c4 company no space, both of the 60s the groundwork. His picture bible history this you will seek this much daylight. Between half the mothers. My saying, i was part of black interest. Ask me, when i started the book. What about my dad . What about 25 years before. What was it like for him . It was the late 1940s. World war ii america. Anything was possible. Jackie robinson formed a big League Ground versus board. Education through the courts. Where were the possibility of premises, which was then the center. City College Classroom at the edge in accounting professor invited one of her students to dinner. He arrived at her apartment, dressed to the nines. Want to compound of ibm stepped from the shadows. They offered my father a job. The start chapter in the history of modern date computers. Its a story i heard growing up of watson. Used to call me old man. Mr. Watson, i name my dad used for him. The story i heard most was my dad showing up to dinner, watson setting out from a back room and sang in no Uncertain Terms, im the only damn person in this company that could offer you a job. My thought when i started work on this that what i was doing was writing Jackie Robinson story about the early days of computers where my dad would have been Jackie Robinson. Now my dad doing something similar. Im kind of in the rope of the general manager of the dodgers. He hired Jackie Robinson to play for one of those teams and in 1947, the senior my father started working a couple of months later. He got to step up to the plate. This is the story i started out thinking i was correct. In and of itself, a great start. I hope by the end of tonight, you will see one of the things you learn as an author is to follow the story in front of you and sometimes the place you get to is not necessarily the place you thought you were starting from and going to. So that is that drink but i am kind of telling the story. Lets look a bit more about what that looks like. There is watson. Watson was the founder of ibm. Came from a background working at the ncr, somewhat about very rough and tumble businessman. He was part of what he called the knockout game. We dont take our conversation competition, we knock them out. Thats important to remember because we got one. This is also. Computer age. One of the things you see here is this picture of my dad. This is another thing i just learned after it was published. What you think is significant about this picture other than the fact that theres a black sky and a few women . Anybody see anything unique . What i will tell you is pis habit. By that i mean, if you look at the direction that everyone is staring, they are staring directly at the camera and look who is staring away or has their eyes hidden. All white guys are staring directly at the camera today, i feel. My father and two women are staring off in the distance. One has sunglasses on. As if to say, im not sure i belong. Im test i didnt realize we were captured that captures that time really well. In some ways it captures the time we stuck with us in terms of being able to look at a sense of entitlement and privilege maybe. I think thats really important thing. It became an important part of what i was writing about in the book in terms of technology and grace and privilege. Those of you who cant read the book, you can read more. I didnt realize this until it was published. This is part of the times my dad fit into the company. I should say really, in all honesty, using that term, my dad went to work in ibm in 1947. He was hired in 46. He started work in january 27. There was no such thing as software. I be imposed people who had engineers. He worked on the technology that was ultimately getting rise to software but when he started work, therefore punchcards and machines. So much, so many of us are used to technology, take a step back down memory what technology was like back in my dads date and the technology i grew up knowing. Do you have a cell phone you can put your hand on out of your pocket . Doctrine on but get a sense of how much it weighs. A couple of anxious . Northsouth pump is a programmable computer. Theres no doubt. Somewhere between eight and 512 gigabytes of storage on the computer. Lets say for ounces. I will show you a picture of this first ever programmable computer. Ibm 407, first ever promotion available computer. Massproduced by ibm. There were other Programmable Computers before about. This was the first lightweight cell phone. This box weight three times. When you put all of the equipment around that it needed, you could get a computer from pathways between ten and 12 tons. Thats a lot of weight to carry in your purse or pocket. What are some of the pieces of this . On your part left, in the middle is a converted typewriter used as a printer. Right here at this door, was this. I found this on ebay. This is what was used to program the earliest computers. This was from an ibm 407. Weekly program these, we have tax court. Kind of thinking telephone operator and we plug one into a home here in 112 all and there and back. You end up with this network of brightly colored cords that control how the circuits inside that machine spoke to each oth other. Then they produced results. Fascinating. What you end up with is something that looks like this. Thats somebody actually working on it. This is what the board would look like. We call the process basket weaving. People who programmed Computers Called it for obvious reasons. When i was five, my sister was three or four, i got put bring pump these sports, play them on the table, had a basketful of these cords and had this as the instructions for how to program machine. But this internet and this into back. I dont believe fact, he probably has to do a lot of stuff. There i was five years old programming computers. I walked into my room and i had never been in her room anybody who has been a digital native as long as i have. I started 1956, i was five years old. Long time in computers. The other thinkers believe important, my dad was hired in the 40s, early 50s was when computers were really starting to be used quite extensively. There was also a whole social environment going on outside of ibm. I was really important to my dad as well. Lets get a sense of what was going on outside of ibm. In 1963, i scanned a small black and White Television screen and my grandparents living room with glimpses of my parents. I am happy to be with you today and what welcome down as history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Eleven years old, millions of black faces when in front of the memorial, Martin Luther king juniors work. I have a dream that my four little children will one day in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Never saw my parents on television i think but that did not arrest my pride knowing they marched for something really big. For something really important, they were marching for me. Upon leaving me behind with my grandparents. I knew the horrors of jim crow even as a child. We took a Greyhound Bus south to visit my mothers family in virginia. In maryland, we were forced to change to colors only. My father us onto the waiting bus he said little about ride from maryland to newport. I had become so used to my father splenic promises of a Digital Future that stunned me to see him impotent by the chakras of that past. They were taking place outside of ibm. The two collided in no Uncertain Terms for my dad. They collided because thats the first. He was faced with many challenges just to keep his job. I talk about some close in the book. One of the stories he pulled off his have he had recently been hired. This sent on a business meeting that turned out to be a meeting with a prostitute. If he was caught on come, with a prostitute, he would be forced to lose his job. He was over some software diagram. I heard so many times he would look up and say, a black guy has to work twice as hard as a white guy in order to succeed and keep his job. So that certainly infiltrated his consciousness and the outside world in that respect infiltrated his consciousness. I think the other thing i talked about in the book is how not only did he have this sense of the racism his account are working at ibm but unfortunately he also turned some of that racism in on himself. I grew up with a father who didnt like the fact that he was black because he felt the color of his skin held him back the color of his skin made him less worthy less intelligent in which i found so surprising. This is my dad really of smart guy championship chess player on the ibm chess team for many years played four instruments operatic baritone and on and on and yet he is internalized, thats the word we use, hes internalized racism to such an extent he sees himself as not as worthy and not as capable. You can imagine uranium im a young man whose thinking, wow, i want to learn as much as i can about my history and who i am as a person in historical terms and terms of africanamerican history so i spent my afternoons at the Schaumburg Library in new york reading about these wonderful figures in africanamerican history that i never got in school and by the time i get home there was my dad lamenting the fact that he was black. It was really one of the first really strong instances of this kind of clash both of generations but also of cultures that happen between my dad and me, because my dad buying into this whole idea me feeling, you can do anything it doesnt matter what color your skin is. This also was a point in writing this book when my editor at harpercollins started to ask me some questions about what was it like then. I remember this experience that we had. As you are writing a memoir in particular very often you dont think about things until you start to write them. I remember how my dad also changed once he came back from the march on washington and i saw that change and very practical ways that surprised me. Heres a little snippet of what this was like when we went into the maryland house which several summers before we had to change buses there. After returning from the marks, this march on washington, Something Else outside of my father had shifted. Our family went back to virginia the next summer but this time we drove. On the return trip home we stopped at the maryland house where a few summers before we were forced to change buses. We sat at the lunch counter this time reading our menus when behind the counter a waitress walked over to inform us we dont serve colored people here. My sister walked over to me my father abstanley, now is the time for us to take a stand. She held her hand out in front of us, stay where you are, she said to claudia and me. When we did not rise the waitress returned. She said, i thought i told you we dont serve your kind. The entire restaurant had grown silent. The manager must have felt the stairs as well and perhaps cause to ponder the wisdom of alienating his wife patron many of whom stopped when heading north on their way home. By the time he reached us the managers determination dissolved into an insincere therapy southern smile. Hi folks, well having after we made our selections from the menu the waitress stormed off stop we sat and waited well behind us the buzz of conversation slowly returned. When the waitress finally appeared with our order she slapped down the plates on the counter dont know what you folks expect to accomplish she hissed. Kind of the collision of what was going on inside and outside of ibm for my dad. At about the same time, my editor asked me, what was going on in the world and how was your dad doing with this. The first thing i discovered is that ibm was deeply involved with the eugenics movement. For those of you who dont know what eugenics is, eugenics is that pseudoscience of race which attempts to find a pure stock often a nordic ideal of a pure stock and anyone who doesnt fit that people of color, jews, need to get rid of them. Back in the 20s eugenics was quite a popular thing. Alexander graham bell was president of the eugenics record association. The founder of planned parenthood was deeply involved in eugenics, in fact, in her words her work was Womens Health and Reproductive Health as calling the weeds. Those are her words. Of humanity because in those days Family Planning was all about promoting this idea of eugenics. Just a couple things, that figure is Madison Grant, Madison Grant wrote a book i think published 1920 somewhere the book called the passing of the great race. I wish i could say that that book sits in history someplace and we can go back to look at it as a particular historic epic but i cant and i cant because this book is still popular today. This book is popular with white extremists, white nationalists because it talks about the concerns that are still expressed to this day of somehow the population changing so that your typical idea of what this european nordic idea of humanity is going to shift in the United States. Madison grant. The next figure, do i have the next figure . There it is. Thats Charles Davenport. Charles davenport was head of the Eugenics Records Office. It was out of the cold springs Harvard Laboratory in new york. Set up by the carnegie institute. I wish i could say they were out of the news but as early as last january some of you might remember that the really horrible incident that happened with james d watson. Watson and crick the dna folks where watson was spewing all this really racially negative hateful stuff in some ways reflecting this whole idea of eugenics. Guess what laboratory he worked for . Cold Spring Harbor laboratory out of new york who took the step of actually stripping him of some of his awards but there is a history here. That is something that i wanted to communicate in this book is that some of the issues we deal with today have roots so long ago that weve often forgotten them. 1928 and these are just some of the ideas i was thinking of as i wrote this but 1928 Eugenics Records Office under Charles Davenport gets a grant to do a study entitled the jamaica study. The jamaica study was meant to identify mixed race individuals on the island of jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control. The problem with the jamaica study is that there was so much data that davenport couldnt figure out how he was going to store sort tabulate and print the data out in order to see who it was they wanted to target for these various means of population control. Early 20s 1922 now theres a Young Company that a man named Thomas Watson is given the name ibm and watson says to davenport. I dontknow how to do this. We got the agreement that will allow you to store the information, collected, tabulated. Ibm one of the first largest projects abm want to work on is the jamaica study. In reading this it was quite shocking to me. But what was to come was even more shocking. One of the things we know we see in technology all the time particularly in computers and software is something works in one area you dont just drop it. Dont just shelf it. Really if its working where you figure out where else he can use it. 1928 the jamaica study five years later 1933 watson takes what they learned what the jamaica study to berlin. In the third right in nazi germany. Wow. I will think of the time that i have with you i could adequately describe for you the extent to which ibm was involved in the third right in the holocaust. I will try at least let me see if i can read something from the book to give you a sense of the depth and the breadth of that involvement. Ibm machines identified in counters just traced back to ancestry for generations, marked them for transport to concentration camps, managed that the railroads that transported them there kept track of which jews were killed and which remained alive. Identified which jews possessed what skills and help the nazis allocate them for slave labor. Were being worked to death. Kept records of the torture and execution of jews in all concentration camps and scheduled the bombing runs. It was almost hard to believe this. I didnt do the primary research. Fortunately i believe it know that if the word fortunately is right. Some light has shined on this history because so many of us dont know this history. There are excellent source materials for this which i use for my book but to recognize that this is how Technology Got started i have to tell you, in writing and reading and studying this portion of the book there are times i was dry heaving and crying and i literally can go forward to lead about read about what this company had been engaged in in the early days of high technology. It was quite stunning. Every concentration camp had a room called for those of you who are german means labor fulfillment. Its just another word for forced labor. Some of you have probably remember seeing the films of concentration camp prisoners really got tattooed numbers the part you want told is that many of the numbers work connected to punchcards which had the number i dont remember the actual column i think it was 22 column 22. I say that in the book. There was even a column for those punchcards which said if you are a prisoner how you would be exterminated, gas chambers, ovens, firing squad, you name it. Those punchcards were made by ibm and ibm made sure that only their equipment would read the punchcards they made. The other part thats really important that recognizes that this was not equipment sold to nazi germany. Ibm never sold equipment in those days. When i went to work they never sold agreement. They leased it so they can maintain control over it. Ibm maintained control over all of that equipment as well as producing the punchcards and nazi germany but billions and billions of punchcards in order to maintain all the information on german citizens. This is starting to come of this is turning into this really strange story. Nothing that happened behind that gate made anyone free. In any real sense of the word. Those are the ovens. Ive been there. I walked through the camp. It is abunfortunately this is how people were treated and there are the punchcards made by this company that i went to work for that my dad was hired in 1947 by ibm. Companies that were involved in making money from the nazis, from they could not get the money back unless they pass through agencies involved in reparation. If you made money by nazi germany you got paid back to something to the people whose lives he devastated. Ibm didnt want to pay back any money. President of ibm a founder of ibm was really skilled manipulator of public opinion. He knew if he could divert attention here he might rot not realize what was going on here. To the extent, for example that watson had actually funded a group of army sorters that were former employees. This was almost hurtful to read about this to understand the depth at which this was going on. Edwin black written a book and wonderful book that talks about this. Divert attention one way so other people dont see whats going on another part of your business. What i was about to say, if youre successful with eugenics and successful with the holocaust you dont stop there. Its now postworld war ii, early 1950s you look around the world and you say, we are pretty good at identifying populations and separating out populations and figuring out who belongs and who doesnt belong and who gets control and who doesnt get control. While there was no book written about this, it was at this point, my guess, i bet ibm was involved. When i found out the depth at which they were involved ibm created the passbook system which is used to identify who is black, color, agent and white and therefore, who was allowed certain privileges of citizenship and who wasnt. By this time the late 50s early 60s watson has passed the old man but a new Thomas Watson junior his son is in control of the company. The oldtime punchcards has passed and now he got more modern technology that affords databases and storage and lots of other means good collect and store large Information Center population. Most of that research i went to Court Records filed by south africans against the United States trying to recoup some of what was lost. They were unsuccessful but the Court Records provided a wealth of documentation of what it actually happened. Let me just put up a couple images here from a apartheid. I wish i couldve said it would stop there but it didnt i started to get a sense of i see what is going on. That whats going on with technology has this history which is which is not always on the rights human side of civil rights. Just three days ago i was reading a piece, about google and what google was doing facial Recognition Technology what was actually going into him homeless shelters and identifying specifically africanamerican men and taking videos of africanamerican men to train its video analytics facial Recognition Software. By the time i submitted my book to the publisher, someone told me, you got to read this article in the intercept. Thank god for the intercept. This article was all about how ibm post 9 11 had used footage of new yorkers on notes to those individuals given to it by the new York City Police department in order to be able to discriminate based on race. Using video analytics or facial Recognition Software. I found it really very poignant and ironic that the facial Recognition Software called watson facial Recognition Software. The important point here, i think this is what i came to in the book. It is for us to understand that the technology we pull out and use so quickly has a history and not only does it have a history, it has a trajectory that unless we are as citizens engaged in understanding how that technology is going to be used, we cant be sure that that technology is going to be used in ways that support the kind of society that we really want. Technology demands of Us Engagement and how the technology is constructed, how the technology is released and how the technology was used. Three weeks ago boston, a jewish peace group called never again action from all across memorial in boston to amazons headquarters in cambridge and while they were there in front of amazons headquarters and i saw this on television i thought, these are young people who really get it. The young women who spoke to the group talked about ibms agreement said we are in front of amazon because we want the company to know this is a history of technology we seen it before we dont want this used on our borders. In order to decide who belongs in this country and doesnt belong in this country. That then became what this book was about for me. Not just a simple feelgood story about my dad and Thomas Watson and Jackie Robinson but more of a cautionary tale about the importance of us as citizens really engaging in the technology that we are using. I could give you just one of the examples. Microsoft released a product, they released a chat box, its a software that acts like a person gets on twitter interacts with people you can interact with the chat box as is as if it was a person and use this chat box is supposed to learn from people and interacts with. The chat box was called ta why released in 2016. Within 24 hours being released this is what he would say. He would ask it, the holocaust it happened and he would say its never happened, i hate jews. It would ask it he would say women should go to hell. You would ask it about black lives matter, one of the people responsible early on in black lives matter would say, like the rain mckesson should be hanged. I couldnt believe this. I give the source and the book for that. Its not like something we are making up. This is what can happen with technology thats not controlled. I will give you one more example so you will see that this really is something that we as a Society Needs to address. A couple years ago a wellmeaning company decided they wanted to release a videogame that would help people understand the atlantic slave trade. I think its a great idea. I would like people to better understand 60 Million People were killed or died in the Middle Passage which is the passage from africa to the new world. They decided to call the game slave tetris. And heres the way the game looks. It was like a ladder walking off the plank into the whole of the slave ship and then moving them back and forth in order to tightly packed them. I dont even think i have the words to really communicate the company said we are trying to do something worthwhile. I think what it came to is something i heard my dad say, garbage in, garbage out. Racism in, racism out. We really need to not just hold Tech Companies feet to the fire but understand the algorithms you produce in your software are only going to be as welcoming and inclusive as the people who write hours unless we are able to reach the people who work in high tech with a history of the industry with an understanding of the kind of products we want to produce we will keep getting all sorts of other weird stuff coming out that really harms people more than help people. Part of what i really tried to do and i hope i was able to at least make a little bit in the book was to say, here are some of the things you can do. We do need to train people in high tech in the history of how tech has been used away from the right side of human rights. We need to help Companies Realize that before you release a product you probably want to focus group thats pretty darn diverse so people can give you some feedback and say slave tetris you gotta be crazy you cant release a product like that stop those of us in the activist community we need to make sure we are really working on things like Digital Literacy. In the book i suggest people to go to the big search engine, not google because google changes and tightened in the same search term that dylann roof typed in before he executed nine people in south carolina. I did that in writing the book. The search page i got up was not that different from what dylann roof got up. It was a motivating factor for him doing what he did. On the first entry on the first page i got up was actually alex jones info warrior. There is no rational universe in terms of really somebody to have a discourse on race and Race Relations in the United States. We need to help young people and particularly, understand that just because something appears high up on a search result page doesnt make it were true. Because those results can be manipulated, those results can be paid for and these are some of the other things. This kind of teaching of Digital Literacy that we need to be about. My dad was very involved in creating the technology which underlies the backbone for cell phones and the internet and all the modern technology that we have and take for granted. He and the men of his generation and some women as well too i think believe that what they were creating would help democratize society. Would make it more colorblind. Would allow us to have algorithms making decisions, which would be neutral. Unfortunately, thats not the reality that we have. I was talking to a woman recently his father was also same generation and she said, my dad and i walking down the street toward the end of his life and saw these people walking down looking at these things in their hands and he said, whats that . She said, i told him, it cell phones and i explained what a cell phone was and networks behind this and he shook his head and said we created a monster. I think its up to all of us to recognize we also can control that monster. My dad struggled with that. I want to read almost at the end here, lets see if i can find this last section that i want to read about to you. I was really curious to know a little bit about the mindset of the engineers that created some of these things. That worked with ibm to develop stuff that was used in the holocaust. Facial Recognition Technology and the article in the intercept actually interviewed a former ibm employee. Its like this is very relevant tory rest understand whats going on in the minds of folks like this. Rick kelson former ibm researcher working on facial recognition during these years when ibm was involved with facial recognition in new york is provided a window into the minds of those behinds ibms racial classification technology. Going as far back as eugenics. We were certainly worried about where the heck with this was going, he said, to the intercept. There was a couple of us talking about this. If you get better it could really be an issue. Facial Recognition Technology did get better. It did become an issue. Only as outside researchers, theres a woman at mit, aba guinean american computer scientist, shes trying to hold Technology Companies accountable. I know that watson and his ibm did not create my fathers wound of color but working with at ibm with his long history of technology in the service of racial purity and oppression appears to have never allowed my fathers wound to heal. My fathers belief in the importance of skin color and determining ones definitely only grew stronger over the years with his employment and in some ways ibms dark history however unconscious seems to have gotten under my fathers skin. Thank you all so much for allowing me to share some of that history with you. I think about the dark sides of this technology that we need to know about so just like the group never again action says we dont allow it to happen again. On that note, im wondering if there are any questions and we have our friends here from cspan who are going to have a microphone for you if you do have questions. I would be more than happy to answer any of those questions and we probably can also shut off the power point presentation at this point. Anybody have any questions . Have you done a ted talk yet . I have not done a ted talk. Ive certainly written to the ted people to see if theyd be interested in a talk like this and maybe that will happen thank you. Do you think our government was involved in knowing that all this was going on . Thats a really great question. I dont think our government is involved, i know it. I talk about this in the book. The internet and technology to develop the internet was a really important part and the first project funded by a Government Agency called garber drophead headquarters in an mit building called tech square 545 main street in cambridge. In the same building word darfur mit ibm and the cia. My dad, i asked this question in my book my dad occasionally would say ive got to go away and i cant tell you where im going and i cant tell much about what im doing and sworn to secrecy. I later found out i found a copy of a letter written by someone at tech square thinking ibm for my dad service that he went to work on a secretive project called cp 67. That project was one of the projects that came out of doctor funding in the development of the technology for cp 67. It was the full name actually was the technology that became pretty much the foundation for the modernday internet. I know the government was involved because it was the government providing the funds for the research in order to create the technology which now ted Companies Like google Apple Microsoft are using without what was done there in cambridge none of what we are seeing here, cell phones wouldnt be available. Twitter wouldnt be around. None of that would be around. It is real clear understanding and cia was there because they all understood they wanted to get in front of the technology because it would be very useful for intelligence and thats how intelligence would be gathered in the future. I dont know if my dad ever worked for the cia but i know this, i went to ibm eventually i got a job working on cp 67 cms. I thought it was just interesting that i was doing the same work that my dad had been doing. Until and i think 1974 i was approached by the cia and asked if i wanted to work for them. He said no but it made me question if my dad had also said no. Thanks. Can you wait until the microphone is there . Great. How old were you when you realized you were a part of the social experiment . I did not realize, the question was how old was i when i realized i was part of the social experiment perhaps at ibm. I did not realize that throughout my career with ibm. I worked at ibm from 1971 to 77. I didnt have any understanding of this history until i wrote the book. Really it was only when i tried to answer my editors question, who was watching and who was ibm that i uncovered any of this information. I think thats one of the reasons why most people have no clue that this is the history of technology. In the book i was also able to trace the idea of a relationship between technology and race and hatred back much further then even eugenics. I go back from the book to the 1500s and you can see this pattern developing and technology so its kind of a little bit of a leader to say i hope you read about it in the book because its even more there think for all of us to suggest and understand. Thank you for your question. Anyone else back at the time when you are working at ibm with your background being previously with the panthers did you still feel the happiness of you being a black man in an organization like that in a Corporation Like that . Absolutely. With my background, and i can say, lets see, this was a couple years after i had been more deeply involved with the panthers so i was going to work but still felt, i think the word you used heaviness is a great word. I walked into ibm dressed as i described in the book with the specific purpose of them understanding i was going to be different. What i didnt tell you in that reading, i do say in the book, and i laugh a little bit romantic of it. Here i am, my big throw in the zoot suit sitting on my desk and another black fellow in the office who comes over to me and says, do you know what you are doing . What he didnt realize is that i had just come out of my Managers Office and my manager had given me a silver pen and pencil set that you give to secondgeneration ibmers. Heres the thing about this guy, he sitting there and he said, white shirt, you want to be different, buttondown collar. He pulls up his pants leg and says, i didnt say this in the book or in the reading, i had on platform patent leather shoes. Black shoes, you want to be different. The ones with the little holes in it. He pulls it up further and says, dark socks, conservative. Then he looks at my hair and said, he had a crew cut and kinda ran his hand through his crew cut and said, that hair, i dont know what to tell you. Dont you understand, you are working at ibm. Part of my way, and i think maybe it mightve been a little nacve but it was my way of dealing with the heaviness was also establishing my difference. Over time, until some of the stories and the book, talk about what my clash with ibm was like and how we experience racism in a similar way. In the way my dad did commit great question i appreciate the opportunity to answer that. You are talking about your father in this book. Im thinking about how he influenced your life and your views of the world. And you also talk about how he is how he has internalized racism and based on the person i am seeing i think other people influence you as well. Yes i wonder if you can tell us about who those people are and how they influenced you. A beautiful question, thank you so much for asking it. Yes there were other people. Obviously they had deep influences in my life. Im going to tell you one person. This persons name was vincent hardy. I dont know if any of you know that name. You should. Some of you are probably heard Martin Luther king jr. s Riverside Drive speech, the speech in which he comes out against the vietnam war. That in many of kings other speeches were written by my mentor and friend and teacher vincent hardy. Vincent was really somebody who was very close to me. Really helped me understand he was in imminent black historian. He was a teacher of people like Henry Louis Gates gates at harvard. I had the wonderful opportunity to be a student of his when i took some time off from Wesley University to go down to the king center at atlanta. Because we took over some buildings at wesley and actually ended up getting money out of the university to help set up that first part of the Martin Luther king center which was an Educational Center called institute for the black world. Vincent was there. Another wonderful person there, very formative in my character. It was lee ron bennett, eminent historian, wrote before the mayflower the shaping of black america was an editor for every magazine back in the days when anybody really was publishing some of this wonderful information. I feel very blessed that i had people like that helping with my character and also i was living in new york so i had the opportunity and im looking over at my friends ross and lynn because Community Church at the Unitarian Church where i grew up. The people often in the congregation abi had the opportunity at 12 and 13 years old to go up to this and say would you autograph about two years before pete passed totally out of the book. I got a chance to speak with him for 45 minutes and to thank him for helping for my character and helping me understand how you could be passionate as an artist and equally passionate about social justice. I really look back and feel very blessed with the individuals who have touched me and influence my life. Thank you for that question. I actually have two questions if i could sneak them both in. Please. As the president you do have that. One is im reflecting on what you knew in 1972 about ibm and what you know today. If you knew then what you know now, would you have gone to work at ibm intending to make a difference . Thats one question. The other is more for those of us involved in teaching Digital Literacy. What is your advice and what do you think are the most important messages that we should convey. Wow, great question. When you try the first one. If i knew today if i knew in 72 what i knew today would have gone to work for ibm. I think the question is probably yes. I would have, for a couple reasons, my dad always said to me, learn about computers because if you learn how to control computers, you wont be at such a disadvantage when computers are trying to control you. It was great advice. Thats why i went to ibm. I knew i wasnt going to work with ibm forever and ever and ever. My dad did for his entire career but i thought, this is a really Good Technology it turned out to be really important was the way i got to aas a volunteer. You help me throughout all my schooling. As a way to always feel i had a job and when i needed to fall back on it, thankfully ive been able to essentially roll out of bed and do software. I think i might have modified a little bit of how i worked at ibm. One of the things i learned once i completed the book was my dad actually had a little more subtle way of dealing with the racism he encountered, not just the internal racism but the outright racism he saw at the company i just give you a short piece of what he did i thought was so important for me to find. The bottom of his dresser drawers he underneath a stack of playboy magazines, okay, it couldnt have been a secret because my mom folded all of his laundry, put it in the bottom drawer. She must have known, i dont know, anyway. Yes i did some ab underneath them there was a great envelope with ibms logo. It took me a while to realize what was in the envelope. When i finally did i realize my dad had bootleg copies of the ibm Entrance Exams with questions and answers. Every so often i guess i knew before was there i knew that strange people would come to our house, mostly young africanamerican men and my dad would just tell my sister and i to get lost and i would hear them go through pull out that door and he would have this envelope and they would sit down at the table and they would have hushed conversations about abi didnt know what was going on, then all the sudden at dinner couple months later he would say you wont believe what happened today. Remember that cabot came over to visit us ibm just hired him. I did not realize that my dad was running his own underground Railroad Operation at ibm. I think, i hope, that i would have been slick enough to do Something Like that. In keeping with the book, which is about my relationship with my dad. Im gonna do a spoiler alert and tell you about the story. So now i graduated from college its time to take the ibm and streaks exam. The first plate type place i had to is that dresser drawer. Guess what is no longer there . When i go to my dad i said what . What examination questions . You dont need it and exam questions you are smart enough to take it. I was smart enough to take it. One of the things that talk about you will see in the book is this conflict father and son, always that tension there. My dad was always trying to see if he was better than me if it was better than him. I didnt do as well as he did on the ibm Entrance Exam and i heard about it for the rest of his life. Its a funny way of simply saying, i hope i could have been as aware as he was about some of the more subtle ways to counter what he countered. Second part of your question, really great, really speaks to the abmission. It couldnt be more important to teach young people to be digitally literate because really that means to teach them how to live in our current democracy. If people are digitally literate and what happened in 2016 would never happen. Heres what i mean about what happened. In 2016 the ira, i was just reading about this again today because more research has come through. Ira the Internet Research association in russia targeted africanamericans and in particular in particular targeted young africanamerican. I talked about this in the book. They targeted them through technology. They targeted them to facebook, they targeted them to twitter. With memes which were all about dont vote. I talked about and i quoted in the book, young men, particularly some of the black lives matter activists and i talk about hawk newsom. Who specifically said he was repeating the memes. The themes, the ideas, put into the discourse by the russian Internet Research association and he then abdown to a meeting we heard allotted 2016 a lot of against witches i. E. To loading. So right there for me is the reason why you have to teach Digital Literacy. You have to know that just because you read it as news as a twitter account or news on facebook, it doesnt necessarily mean its true. You have to be smart enough to penetrate the headlines and asked the questions to go deeper into that to ask, is this meaningful or not . I have to say, for me, anybody anytime anywhere who says dont vote, you are suspect. You are suspect. Particularly as an africanamerican when i know the history have many, mostly women, who died for the opportunity to go to a pole and vote, nobody in the world is going to tell me not to vote. I dont care. But that kind of consciousness is what we need instilled in our young people. I think its important, Digital Literacy doesnt just mean teaching a person how to read a screen. Its really, what is the information behind that screen that you need to know about . One within information generated from but whats the history that exists . Thats really important. Which is why Digital Literacy encompasses such a wide range. Thats what i think is really important. To be more specific, bringing in people who understand history and helping students, lets take a thought or idea, lets type it in on a search engine. What results to beget . Is not interesting, look who comes up first. Who are they . Whats the history behind them. Its Critical Thinking you start to develop in that way which we need more of. I can tell you as a former College Teacher we really need more of that. The technology can be a wonderful platform to help develop the Critical Thinking behind Digital Literacy. The short answer to a long question, i do say more about that in the book, i actually give 10 or 12 different specific strategies for Digital Literacy that might be of importance. Im more than happy to have more conversation about that. Thank you. Anyone else . You guys have Great Questions i really appreciate this. I just had a question about your fathers internalized racism. I was just wondering if that shifted with the 60s, the panthers movement, ballack is beautiful and the whole movement, did it shift his perception of how he viewed dominic viewed himself and how he viewed the black community connect. Thats a great question. The short answer is no. What happened, and did the movement outside shift my dads view of himself as a black man . My dad really bought into murray and jenkins and all the bell curve stuff and all that craziness about africanamericans and people of color and intelligence. You would find him reading this stuff not having the literacy to understand that much of that research had been debunked because it fed into a narrative that he had about himself. My dad was born in 1919 which means he was born right at the ascendancy of the eugenics movement. Eugenics is everywhere. The belief that you were not competent because of color was everywhere. And unfortunately he never grew out of that. We had many fights about that. My sister. I say this in the book so i dont mind saying it now. My sister has children of different colors and make dad would selectively whisper messages about their intelligence. To each of them. It was really traumatic. What i really wanted to present in the book is this contrast. He sees contrasts everywhere. In the contrast within my dad and himself. The book is about how do you reconcile if you even can all of these contrasts . Thank you for that question i really appreciate it. This is cool. This is a cool discussion. Anyone else. We will probably make this last question. I was wondering if you had any advised abhow can we as individuals who dont believe in these biases essentially, how do we overcome or work toward a different future . That is the question. Thats not just a good question that is the question in front of us. I think there are number of ways to do this. Talk about some of these in the book. As activists, there are a couple organizations that are doing algorithmic vetting. They are looking at some of the algorithms and software and products and saying, this actually passes the smell test of being more inclusive and not as biased. Aligning yourself with those organizations and helping to work with them and helping them do their work, thats just one of the things that we can do. I think the other thing we can do is like never again action. If we need to we can sit down with microsoft or amazon and its one of the wonderful things about this book as its given me the opportunity to do some of these things at the time of folks and say, if you really want to fill a vision of not creating a biased world through the algorithms that you write. Heres what you need to do we need to bring in somebody who can tell you about the history of how this technology has been used because maybe if youve got a developer writing code and understand the history, he or she will think twice before they decide to create a game like slave tetris because they dont understand history. Whoever wrote slave texas had no clue about the atlanta slave trade and what really happened but had they, they wouldve never created a game like that. Theres a lot of other games they couldve created. Education just like we were saying before, not just with the technology but with the history behind the technology i think is also really really important and i would say the best thing you can do is if you have Young Children or if you know of Young Children, help them be more digitally literate when i sit down at the screen, point to whats going on and if you know something more than what they see on that screen, say it. Talk to them about it. Thats what will make the change when the young people who go on to become developers and write the code have this level of understanding of what they are faced with and a responsibility of creating an algorithm when they understand that, i think things might be different. Those are just some ideas. I say a little bit more in the book im more than happy to talk with you about that any further. Thank you all so much. This has been great. [applause] im going to be outside with annie blooms book signing copies of books, anybody who would like this. I want to thank afor this opportunity to share some of these thoughts and ideas with you. This is really been a very special opportunity for me. Thank you. [applause]