My name is Leslie Leslie kavasch im here to introduce our guest, cyde ford, a former assistant engineer with ibm. He graduated from the university of western states in portland as a doctor of chiropractic and the era pissed. Hes also the awardwinning author of 12 works of fiction and nonfiction. Clyde is the recipient of the richard ray award, in africanamerican literature. He has been a guest on the oprah show, in pr, radio and tv programs across the nation. Clyde is here to speak about his latest book, think black a memoir of sacrifice, which was just released, shortlisted for the book prize in social justice. Please join me in welcoming to the kendall planetarium at the Oregon Museum of science and industry, cyde ford. [applause] thank you all for being here, i cant tell you how special it is to be here. I was just reliving my First Experience over 40 years ago up at Washington Park and i was a volunteer. I was working with a group, i had come from ibm to go to chiropractic college. I needed something to do around computers because i have been doing that for so long when i wasnt studying chiropractic. I was able to exchange my work to help them develop the pascal compiler. Anyone who knows enough to know what that is kind of dates himself but that is how i got involved. I loved the place. I have a key late at night and when there at 1 00 or 2 00 in the morning and bring my friends and say there is a visible lady there and we can punch buttons and see the lights. Some of you remember what that was like. Where is she now . I didnt get to visit her when i was there. I may have to stop by before i leave just to say hello to the visible lady because she was such an important part of me being involved. Just the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas about my latest book, think black a memoir of sacrifice. I want to talk about the book and interspersed that with some readings from the book and toward the end we will have an opportunity for questions and answers and if nobody said this, if you have a cell phone and want to put it on vibrate or silence, that would be a really good idea. I found this so surprising, to learn more about the book after it has been published. You know what you are writing about, publish it and talk about what it is you have written. What i found, some of the things i have learned obviously in writing the book and i will share those with you but also the surprising things i learned after the book was published which is really interesting and says a lot about the subject matter and the time i was writing about. I thought really great place to start would be where i start the book which is contrasting my fathers first day at work and starting with my work at ibm. Lets see if we can do that . I held fast to an overhead bar is the elevated train i wrote in weight from side to side, rocketing from the bronx, everything outside the car went dark. He caught a reflection of myself in the window. About afro, pork talk sideburns, a blue suit suit with pinstripes, fire engine red turtleneck. I strutted from the subway in the light rain hanging over wall street humming the theme song. I fancy myself as the movies black hero about to engage in battle with injustice, i entered one of the skyscrapers, and took an elevator up to a higher floor. On the glass doors a sign read ibm. Underneath it in the White Financial office i grasped the door handle but paused catching a glimpse of myself in the glass door pain, i shook my head, unsure of what to make of this decision. I am ready to push through those glass doors, uncertain what fate awaited me on the other side of that threshold. On that day in 1971, i was young and black, defiant and angry, and more than ever, determined not to be like my father yet there i stood, about to report to work at ibm where he worked for 25 years. So that is how i start the book. And i wonder, i kind of gave some of this away but i wonder if you can date when that photograph is and i can tell you it is not my dad, it is me, many people ask, and it is not 1971. Can anybody guess what year that photo might be . There is an answer there. Now, it is not. Lets do a couple things. Im wearing bellbottoms. You may not see that because it is a little washed out. I have some sideburns, that dates it, and that is malcolm x and that should date it as well too. I wont keep you in suspense. It was 1968. Three years before i entered ibm. Did somebody see that . I looked pretty similar to that, maybe a little cleaned up with that suit suit on, when i went to work for ibm. Anybody, for extra credit, that magazine is named mojo. Anybody know what that magazine was connected to . It was the magazine of the black Student Council at Columbia University in 1968. That is important historically for a couple reasons. One of the reasons it was so important was 1968, that may, that spring was the spring of the columbia student uprising, which saw the sps group with mark rudd, the black Student Council with ray brown and the hispanic students at columbia, the young lords with philippe luciano, very involved in trying to get more than just the education from columbia, trying to make a difference in terms of social justice too. And a lot of what happened, take any student demonstration whether it is college or high school. I look at what is going on in terms of climate change, and i can draw a direct line between what took place in 1968 and what is taking place now. I think young people, i was among them. I wasnt in columbia at the time, at Stuyvesant High School in new york city, young people got the idea that we could make a difference if we raise our voices and organized the right way. I have to make a call out as there are folks sitting in the audience along with me, i havent seen lynn in 50 years and we were very involved in some of the real activism, what laid the groundwork of what took place. This picture is revelatory because it is a classic picture of the radical young black man in the 60s. If i look at this, you will see there is not much daylight between how i look and how those Young Brothers in the black panthers look too. I dont mind say i was part of the black panthers in those days. That is me when i started the book, that is me when i stepped into ibm and started to work at ibm. What about my dad . What about 25 years before . What was that like for him . It was the late 1940s, post world war ii america. Anything was possible, Duke Ellington swung jazz, Jackie Robinson swung the bigleague bat, brown versus board of education swung through the courts. Nowhere were the possibilities and promises felt more deeply than in harlem which was then black americas gravitational center. In a city College Classroom at the edge of harlem and accounting professor invited one of her students to dinner. That black pi arrived at a swanky bar dress to the 9s and Thomas Watson, founder of ibm stepped from the shadows. Watson offered my father a job and Jackie Robinson moment ensued, the start of an unknown chapter in the history of modernday computers. It is a story i heard a lot growing up of watson needs to claim the old man or mister watson, heard a lot of names my dad used for him. The story i heard most was my dad showing up to dinner, watson stepping out from the back room and saying to my dad in no Uncertain Terms i am the only person in this company that could offer you a job. I thought when i started work on this book that what i was doing was writing kind of a Jackie Robinson story about the early days of computers where my dad would have been obviously Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball but my dad is doing something similar with computers and High Technology and Thomas Watson senior in the role of the general manager, in 1945 to play for one of the farm pieces for the brooklyn dodgers and in 1947 the same year my father started working a couple months later actually stepped up to the plate for his first swing at bat. This is the story i started out thinking i was writing. In and of itself a great story and i hope you will see that one of the things you learn as an author is to follow the story that is 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. That is the journey but im telling the story. I want to tell you the story ahead of time so lets look a little more about what that time was like. That is Thomas Watson, the founder of ibm, came from a background working at ncr, somewhat of a rough and tumble businessman. He was part of the knockout game, he led the knockout game and the knockout game was we dont take out our competition so this is a tough businessman and that is important to remember as we go on a little bit further. This was also at the very don of the computer age. One of the things you see here is a picture of my dad and this is another thing i just learned after the book was published. I will ask in this picture and you can still see it. What might you think is significant about this picture other than the fact it is one black guy and two women in the picture. Do you see anything unique in this picture . What i will tell you is the eyes have it and by that i mean if you look at the direction everyone is staring, staring directly at the camera and staring away, or have their eyes hidden. All of the white guys in this picture are staring directly at the camera. And my father and two women staring into the distance, one of the women has sunglasses on. And i am not sure i belong. I didnt realize we were capturing that but in many ways this captures that time really well and in some ways captures the time we still have with us in terms of being able to look at a sense of entitlement and privilege and i think that is a really important thing, certainly it became an important part of what i was writing about in the book in terms of technology and race and privilege. Those who will be able to read the book can read more but i found it so fascinating that it was in this picture. I didnt realize it until it was published. This is part of the time my dad stepped into the company, first africanamerican Software Engineer and i should say just using that term is a little bit and anachronistic because my dad went to work for ibm in 1947 and retired in 46, late 46, started work in january 1947. There was no such thing as software. Software hadnt been invented. Ibm called people systems engineers, he worked on the technology that would ultimately give rise to software but when he started work there were punchcards and you will see some of the other things that were involved too. This was the don of the digital age. So many of us are so used to technology that is so accessible and so easy to use, take a step back down memory lane, what technology was like in my dads day and the technology i grew up knowing. Do you have a cell phone you can put your hand on and put out of your pocket. I dont want you to turn it on but i want you to get a sense of how much it weighs. What do you think . A couple ounces maybe . May be half a pound maybe, maybe, more likely for 5 or 6 ounces. Your cell phone is a programmable computer, there is absolutely no doubt about it. You have somewhere between 8, and 512 gb in that computer. In that maybe four ounces. I will show you a picture of the first ever programmable computer. It is an ibm 407, the firstever commercially available programmable computer, meaning it was massproduced and least by ibm to lots of people. There were a lot of Programmable Computers before that but they were all 1offs. This was the first like your cell phone, massproduced. This box alone wade three tons. When you put all the ancillary equipment around that it needed, tabulators and printers you could get a computer room in and of itself between 10, and 12 tons. That is a lot of weight to carry around in your purse or pocket. Let me tell you. What are some of the pieces of this 407. On your far left, that is where cars were put into this machine. Right in the middle is a converted typewriter used as a printer and right here, inside that door was of this. Be leave it or not i found this on ebay and this was what was used to program the earliest computers. It was from an ibm 407. The way we program these, we have patch cords kind of like a telephone operator in the old days, we plug one into a hole here and when into a hole here and when there and there and there so you end up with this network of brightly colored patch cords that control how the circuit inside that machine spoke to each other, red cards added, we do subtraction, all they did was add and produce results. That is pretty fascinating. What you end up with is something that looked like this. That is the board. That is somebody who is working on it, this is what the board would look like. We called the process basket weaving. When i say we, call that basket weaving, my dad would bring home these boards, lay them on the table, had a basket full of patch cords and had this, that, instructions for how to program that machine. And we would do our best, he told us what you did was great, it worked fine, everything was great and it worked as i thought it would. He would have to do a lot of stuff and there i was at 5 years old programming computers. I have to say, you hear the term digital native, no one has been a digital native longer than i have. I started in 1956, i was 5 years old, long time in computer. The one thing that was really important going on inside high tech my dad was hired, late 40s, early 50s, computers were really starting to be used quite extensively but there was also a whole social environment outside ibm that was really really important to my dad as well. Lets get a sense of what was going on outside of their. Lets see. On august 28, 1963, i scanned a small black and White Television screen in my grandparents living room, for glances of my parents. In a listless baritone boom i am happy to be with you today and what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. 11 years old i searched through millions of black faces lining up in front of the Lincoln Memorial when i about Martin Luther king jr. s words to see her me deeply. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I never saw my parents on television that day but that does not arrest they marched for something really big. For something really important. They were marching for me, they said, upon leaving me behind with my grandparents. I knew the horrors of jim crow even as a child. A few summers before the march on washington we had taken a Greyhound Bus south to visit my mothers family in virginia. At the masondixon line in maryland we were forced to change that waited behind the maryland house, now a popular rest stop on i95. My father assured claudia and me on to the waiting bus though he said little on the ride from maryland to newport news. I had become so used to my father asked calling the promises of the Digital Future that it stunned me to see him rendered impotent by the shackles of a draconian past. This was the world that was taking place outside ibm. The two collided in no Uncertain Terms in spite of idm because as the first black Software Engineer he was faced with many challenges just to keep his job. I thought about those in the book, one of the stories he told was how he had recently been hired, he was sent on a business meeting that turned out to be with a meeting to the prostitute, the idea was if he was caught on kiln he would be forced to lease his job. He was passed over for promotions, that he would become his supervisors. To have machine time, to further his education, i heard over and over from him growing up, when you might have expected your dad to be there. To go out and play with you, and 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. That certainly infiltrated his consciousness, and the outside world in that respect infiltrated his consciousness. The other thing i talked about in the book is how not only did he have a sense of the racism he encountered working at ibm but unfortunately he turned that racism in on himself so 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, even, which i found so surprising. My dad was really a smart guy, championship chess player on the championship testing for many years, play four instruments, operatic baritone on and on, yet he has internalized, we use the word internalized racism to such an extent that he sees himself as not as worthy, not as capable so you can imagine here i am, i am a young man thinking i want to learn as much as i can about my history and who i am as a person in historical terms, africanamerican history, spent afternoons in the chambray library, wonderful figures in African American history and by the time i get home there is my dad lamenting the fact that he was black and that was one of the first really strong instances of this kind of clash both of generations but also cultures between my dad and me because he had feeling and buying into this whole idea that if you are black you are less capable and me feeling no way doesnt matter what what color your skin is. When my editor at harpercollins, started to ask me questions about what it was like and i remember this experience. If you are writing a memoir in particular, very often you dont think about things until you start to write them. So i remember how my dad also changed once he came back from the march on washington. I saw that change in very practical ways that surprised me and heres a snippet of what this was like when we went into the maryland house several summers before. After returning from the march on washington, something inside my father had shifted a little. Our family went back to virginia that next summer but this time we drove. On the return trip home we stopped at the maryland house where two summers before to change buses. Behind the counter, to inform us we dont serve, she turns to walk away. Looking across to my sister and me and my father, whispered stanley, now is the time for us to take a stand. Stay where you are, she said. When we did not rise, the waitress returned. She snarled i thought i told you we dont serve your kind. My father, surprisingly, snapped. We are not leaving until you do. Our waitress disappeared into the kitchen. I looked up. Moments later a man in a white shirt and tie, presumably a manager pushed through the kitchen door, a determined look on his reddened face, the waitress trailed behind him, smirking. I twisted around on my stool. The entire restaurant had grown silence, observing the events. Dont look at other people my mother scolded, turnaround. But the manager must have felt the stairs and perhaps paused to ponder the wisdom of alienating his white patrons many of whom stopped here when heading north on their way home. By the time he reached us the managers determination had resulted in insincere southern smile. Hi, folks, what yall having, he asked. After we made our selections from the menu the waitress stormed off. We sat and waited while behind us the buzz of conversation slowly returned. When she appeared with your she slapped down the plate from the counter, dont know what you folks expect to accomplish, she just. Kind of the collision of what was going on inside and outside of ibm for my dad. At the same time my editor asked me what was going on in the world, how is your dad dealing with this, she also asked me this really important question that was to change the nature of this book from just, a feelgood story, Jackie Robinson moment in computers, something much larger. She asked me, why did idm hire him in the first place . Why did Thomas Watson in 1946 higher dad to go to work in 1947 for ibm . Why hire a black guy, i dont really know the answer but i guarantee by the time i deliver the finished manuscript i will have that answer for you. Window into technology, into the company i worked with, that was in two words very shocking if not very horrifying. Because the first thing i discovered was idm was involved in the eugenics movement. Those who dont know what eugenics is, the pseudoscience of race which attempts to find a pure stock, often a nordic ideal of pure stock. Anyone who doesnt fit that, certainly people of color, jews, those who are in firm mentally or physically 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. Many people dont know margarets anger, founder of planned parenthood was deeply involved in eugenics, her work in her words, her work was Womens Health and Reproductive Health as colin the week, those were her words, of humanity. Because in those days Family Planning was all about promoting the idea of eugenics. A couple things here. That figure is madison grant. Madison grant wrote a book published in the 1920s, called the passing of the great risk. I wish i could say that books its in history someplace and we could look at it as a particular historical epic but i cant because this book is still popular today. This book is popular with white nationalists because it talks about the concerns that are still expressed to this day, somehow the population changing so that this nordic european idea of humanity is going to shift in the United States. Madison grant. Next figure. That is Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office, out of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in new york set up by the carnegie institute. I wish i could say we were out of the news, some of you might remember that horrible incident that happened with james d watson. Watson and crick, the dna folks, spewing all of this negative hateful stuff. In some ways reflecting this idea of eugenics. So actually stripping him of his awards but there is a history here, something i wanted to communicate in this book. Some of the issues we deal with today, we have often forgotten. 1928, these are just some of the ideas i was thinking of. 1928, Eugenics Record Office under Charles Davenport gets a grant to do a study entitled the jamaica study which was meant to identify mixed race individuals on the island of jamaica and other means of population control. The problem with the jamaica study was there was so much data that davenport couldnt figure out how to tabulate and print the data out in order to see who it was they want to target for these means of population control. Early 20s, 1922 now, the young company, a man named Thomas Watson, the name ibm, watson says to davenport i know how to do this. Weve got the equipment that will allow you to store the information, collect it, tabulate it. One of the first project they went to work on was the jamaica study. It was quite shocking to me. What was to come was even more shocking. One of the things we see in technology all the time particularly in computers and software, something works in one area you dont just drop it. You dont just shelve it. If it is working well you figure out where else you can use it. 1928 the jamaica study, 5 years later, 1933 watson takes what they learned, the jamaica study, to berlin and the third reich in nazi germany. I dont think in the time i have with you i could adequately describe the extent to which ibm was involved in the holocaust. I will read something from the book to give you a sense of the depth and the breadth of that involvement. Ibm machines identified and counted jews, traced back their ancestry for generations, marked them for transport to concentration camps, managed the railroads that transported them, kept track of which jews were killed and which remained alive, identified which jews possessed which skills and helps nazis allocate them for slave labor, monitor the health and fitness of jews for barbaric medical experiments or being worked to death, records of the torture and execution of jews in all concentration camps, kept track of german soldiers, german tank and troop movements against the allies and scheduled liftoff a bombing runs. It was almost hard to believe this. I didnt do the primary research here. I dont know the word fortunately is right. I think it is fortunately but some light is shined on this history because so many of us dont know this history so there are some excellent source materials for this that i use for my book but to recognize that this was 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 couldnt go forward to read about what this company i worked for had been engaged in in the early days of High Technology. It was quite stunning. Every concentration camp had a room, labor fulfillment, just another word for forced labor. Some of you remember seeing films of concentration camp prisoners with tattooed numbers, the part you werent told as many of those numbers were connected to punchcards that had those numbers in them. I dont remember the actual column. There was a column on those punchcards which said if you were a prisoner how you were going to be exterminated, gas chambers, ovens, firing squad, you name it. Those punchcards were made by ibm, only their equipment would read those punchcards that they made. This is not equipment sold to nazi germany. Ibm never sold equal and in those days. They only listed and they leased it so they could maintain control and ibm maintained control over all of that equipment and nazi germany bought billions and billions of punchcards to maintain this information. This is starting, this is turning into this really strange story. Work makes you free, that is an incredible misnomer because nothing that happens behind that gate made anyone free in any sense of the word. Those are the ovens. It is a riveting experience, when i tell the story in the book, the experience of walking to west africa. This is how people were treated. There are the punchcards made by a company i went to work for that were used. If you do something successful with technology you dont just stop. You dont just stop. My dad was hired in 1947 by ibm and the question is why. At the end of the war, companies that were involved in making money from the nazis, nazi germany, the axis powers going to war, they would not get that money back unless they pass through agencies involved in reparations. The whole idea was if you made money in nazi germany you had to pay back something to the people whose lives were devastated. Only ibm didnt want to pay back any money. Watson, president of ibm, was really skilled manipulator of public opinion. Some of you probably recognize what im about to say. He knew that if he could diverge attention here, might not realize what was going on. Why not hire a handful of jews . That is a pretty dramatic thing to do in the late 40s or middle 40s right after the war. People might not focus so much on how you are trying to get back the millions of dollars you made during the war to the extent that watson funded a group of Army Soldiers that were his former employees. That is what they were known as affectionately in the army when the concentration camp was liberated everybody went for the prisoners but the ibm folks went for the machines to make sure they got back to headquarters. This it was almost hurtful to read about this, to understand the depth at which this was going on. I did ask edwin black who wrote ibm and the holocaust, a wonderful book that is about this. He said to me why do you think ibm hired your dad . I will tell you what i think. I think they hired him because it was a diverse in. He said i think you are right. I think you are absolutely right and he told me about hiring jews to divert people from doing this. I talk in the book about other instances in watsons history where they did this to diver public attention one way. What i was about to say is if you are successful with eugenics and successful with the holocaust you dont stop there. It is post world war ii, early 1950s, look around the world and say we are pretty good at identifying populations and separating populations and figuring out who belongs and who doesnt belong and who gets control and who doesnt get control so a logical place to turn is south africa and while there was no book written about this, it was at this point, which ibm was involved, the depth they were involve ibm created the system that was used to identify who was black, who was asian and who was white and who was allowed certain privileges of citizenship and who wasnt. By this time in the late 50s and early 60s watson past the new man, Thomas Watson junior, his son was in control of the company. The oldtime punchcards i passed it now has more modern Computer Technology that affords databases and data storage and lots of other means to collect and store large amounts of information on a population and 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 record provided a wealth of documentation of what had actually happened. Let me put up a couple images here. I wished i could have said it stopped there but it didnt. And i started to get a sense of i see what is going on and i begin to write in the book that what is going on with technology, technology has this history which was not always on the right side of human rights and civil rights and so just three days ago i was reading a piece, about google and what google is doing with facial Recognition Technology, going into homeless shelters and identifying specifically africanamerican men, 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 internship, really love that magazine, that newsletter. This article is all about how ibm post 9 11 used footage of new yorkers unknown 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 poignant and ironic that that facial Recognition Software called facial Recognition Software. The important point and this is what i came to in the book is for us to understand that the technology we pulled out and use so quickly has a history, not only does it have a history but a trajectory that unless we as citizens are engaged in understanding how the technology will be used you cant be sure that technology is going to be used in ways that support the kind of society we really want. Technology demands of Us Engagement in how the technology is released and how the technology is used. Three weeks ago boston, a jewish peace group called never again action marched from the holocaust memorial, boston to amazons according cambridge and while they were there in front of amazons headquarters and i saw this on television and thought these are young people who really get it, the a woman who spoke to the group talked about ibm involvement in the holocaust and said we are here in front of amazon because we want the company to know this is the history of technology. We have seen this before. We dont want it used on our borders, to decide who belongs in this country and who doesnt belong in this country. That then became what this book was about, not just a simple feelgood story about my dad and Thomas Watson and Jackie Robinson, more of a cautionary tale about the importance of us as citizens, engaging in the technology we are using. Eyesight many in the book. A chat bot is a piece of software that acts like a person, gets on twitter and interact with people, you can interact with the chat bot as if it was a person and it is supposed to learn from the people. The chat bot was called hand was released in 2016. This is what haywood say. You would ask, did the holocaust happen and it would say i hate jews, you would ask about women and it would say women should go to hell. You would ask about black lives matter, one of the people early on in black lives matter and it would say should be hanged. I couldnt believe this. This is out there. It is not like something we are making up here. This is what can happen with technology that is not controlled. One more example until you see this is something we as a society need to address. A wellmeaning company decided to release a video game that would help people understand the atlantic slave trade. It is a good idea. I would like people to understand 60 Million People were killed or died in the Middle Passage from africa to the new world. They decided to call the game slave tetris. Here is the way the game looked. You had the hold of the slave ship, you played the game by walking slaves up a ladder, off of the plane into the hold of the slave ship and then moving them back and forth to tightly pack them. I dont think i have the words to really communicate in what world this will represent something positive. The company said we are trying to do something worthwhile. What i came to was something we used to say in programming, something i heard my dad say a lot. Garbage in, garbage out. Racism in, racism out. We really need to not just hold Tech Companies feet to the fire but help them understand the algorithms you producing your software are only going to be efforts say welcoming and inclusive as the people who write those algorithms and unless we are able to reach the people who work in hightech with a history of their industry and an understanding of the kind of product we want to produce we will keep getting slave tetris and all kinds of weird stuff that harms people more than helps people. So part of what i tried to do and i hope helps a little bit in the book, here are some of the things you can do. We do need to train people in hightech in the history of how tech has been used not always on the right side of human rights. We need to help Companies Realize that before you release a product you probably want a focus group that is pretty diverse so people can give you some feedback and say you got to be crazy, you cant release a product like that. Those of us in the activist Community Need to make sure we are working on things like Digital Literacy. In the book i suggest people go to the being Search Engine and type in the same Search Engines dillon roof typed in before he executed nine people in south carolina. I did that in writing the book and the search page i got up was not that different and was a motivating factor for him doing what he did. The first entry on the first page i got up was alex jones info wars. There is no rational universe alex jones qualifies for in terms of somebody to have a discourse on race and Race Relations in the United States. We need to help young people in particular and ourselves as well understand that just because something appears high up on a search result page doesnt make it more true because those results can be manipulated and paid for and these are some of the other things, this 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 and he and the men of his generation and some of the women as well too i think believed what they were creating would help democratize society, make it more colorblind. Would allow us to have algorithms making decisions which would be neutral. Unfortunately, that is not the reality that we have. I was talking to a woman whose father was same generation, my dad and i, all these people looking at these things in their hands and said to me what is that . She said so cell phones. I explained what a cell phone was and networks behind this. He shook his head and said we created a monster and i think it is up to all of us to recognize we can control that monster. My dad struggled with that and i want to read almost at the end here, see if i can find this last section that i want to read about to you. I was really curious to know about the mindset of the engineers that created, what was used in the holocaust. And interviewed a former ibm employee. What is going on in the minds of folks like this. And it is facial recognition during the years. And into the minds of those behind ibms racial Classification Technology as far back we were worried about where this was going. There were a couple of us talking about this. It gets better, this could be an issue. Facial Recognition Technology did get better. It did become an issue. Joy a guinean american Computer Scientist really tried to hold Technology Companies accountable. I know watson and his ibm did not create the wounds of color but working at ibm with its long history of technology in the service of racial purity and oppression appears to never have allowed my father to heal. My fathers believe in the skin color in determining ones destiny only grew stronger over the years of his employment. In some ways ibms dark history however unconscious seems, thank you all so much. For talking about my father and my relationship with him, about these early years in computers and ibm and i think about the dark side of this technology that we need to know about. Just like that group never again action says we dont allow it to happen again. On that note i am wondering if there are any questions. We have friends from cspan who will have a microphone for you if you have any questions and i will be more than happy to answer any of those questions. We can also shut off the power point presentation at this point. Anybody have any questions . Have you done a tent talk yet . I have not done a tent talk. I have written to the ted people to see if they would be interested in a talk like this. Maybe that will happen. Thank you. Do you think our government was involved in knowing that all this was going on . That is a really great question. I dont think our government was involved. I know it for the simple reason. The internet and technologies that develop the internet was a really important part, the first project funded by Government Agency called darpa, the Defense Advanced Research projects agency. Darpa had headquarters in an mit building called ted square. Im sworn to secrecy. I did later find out, i actually found a copy of a letter written by someone at dead square thinking, for my dad service, that he would work on it secretive project. That project with one of the projects they came out of darpa funding and the development of the Technology 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 funds for the research in order to create the technology which now Tech Companies like google, apple, microsoft for using without what was done in cambridge none of what were seeing, your cell phones would not be available. Twitter wouldnt be around. None of that would be around. So yes, there was a clear understanding, and cia was there because they understood the one to get out in front of that technology because it would be very useful for intelligence and that is how intelligence would be gathered in the future. I dont know if my dad is a work for the cia but i do know this. When 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, intel and i think it was 1974 i was approached by the cia and asked if i wanted to work for them. I said no, but it made me question if my dad had also said no. Thanks. Yes. Could you wait until the microphone is there . Great. How old were you when you realize youre 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 prescott i give. I did not realize that threat my career at ibm. I worked at ibm from 197177. I did that any understanding of this history until i wrote the book and really it was only when i tried to answer my editors question who was wanted and he was ibm that i uncovered any of this information. I think thats when the reasons why people have no clue that this is history of technology. In the book i was also able to trace this idea of the relationship between technology and race and hatred back much further than even eugenics. I go back in the book to the 1500s and you can see this pattern developing in technology. It kind of a little bit of a leader to say i hope you read about in the book because its even more there i think that all of us could digest and understand. Thank you for your question. Anyone else . Yes. At the time when you were working at ibm, with your background with you previous evening with the panthers, did you still feel the heaviness of being a black man in roxy like that, in a Corporation Like that . Absolutely. With my background, and i should say, lets see, this was a couple years after i had been more deeply involved with the panthers and so i was going to work that still felt, i think the word you used heaviness, its 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. But what it i didnt tell you n that reading, i do say in the book, and i laughed a little bit when i think, here again, my big throw and is zoot suit sitting at my desk and theres 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 just come out of my manager office to my manager had given me a silver pen and pencil set that you give to secondgeneration ibmers pickers the thing which i really know something about ibm and heres this guy and hes sitting there and he said you know, white shirt. You want to be different, buttondown collar. And then he pulls up his pants leg and he says, because i didnt say this in the poker and reading, i had on platform patent leather shoes. You know, black shoes, you want to be different, the ones with full holes or something. Then he pulls up for themselves, dark socks, conservative. Then he looks at my hair and he said, and he had a crew cut any kind of ran his hand through his crew cut and he said, god, all the hair, i dont know what to tell you. Dont you understand . You are working at ibm. Of course he didnt understand i knew exactly what i was doing at ibm, and yes, part of my weigt and maybe it mightve been a little naive when it with my weight in dealing with the heaviness is also establishing my difference. And over time and again i tell some of the stories in the book, i talk about what my clash with ibm was like and how i experienced racism in a similar way that dealt with it in a different way from my dad, the way my dad did. Thank you. Great question and i appreciated the opportunity to answer that. You were talking about your father in this book, and 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 that i am seeing, im thinking that other people influenced you as well. Yes. And i wonder if you can tell us about who those people are and how the influenced you . Again, a beautiful question. Thank you so much for asking it. Yes, there were other people. Obviously the deep influences in my life. Im going to tell you one person and this persons name was vincent harding. Im know if any of you know that name. You should pick some of you probably heard Martin Luther king, jr. Riverside drive speech, the speech in which it e comes up against the vietnam war. That and many of his other speeches were written by my mentor and friend and teacher, vincent harding. So vincent was really somebody who was very close to me, really helped me understand. He was an imminent lack a story. He was a teacher of people like Henry Louis Gates up at harvard. I had the wonderful opportunity to be a student of his when i i took some time off from Wesley University to go down to the king center at atlanta and i helped, because we took over some buildings at wesley and actually ended up getting money out of the university to upset up that first part of the Martin Luther king, jr. Center, which was an Educational Center called the institute for the black world. Vincent was there. Another wonderful person who was there very formative in my character was leroy bennett, wrote before the mayflower compact the shaping of black america, was an editor for ebony went ebony hat was publishing some of this wonderful information. I feel very blessed that had people like that helping with my character and also i was living in new york and so i had the opportunity and im looking over my friends ross and lynn, because the Community Church i grew up one of the other people who was often in the congregation with somebody like pete seeger. I had the opportunity at 12 and 13 years old to go up to this really tall guy and say would you sign, would you autograph my Church Program . And he did. And about two years before he 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, informed me and influenced my life. And thank you for that question. I actually have two questions if i can stick them both in. Please. As the president , you do have that opportunity. 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 intend to make a difference . Thats one question. And then the other is more for those of us involved in teaching Digital Literacy. What is your advice and what do you think of the most important messages that we should convey . Yes. Great questions. Let me try the first one, which is if i knew today if i knew in 722 what in your today, but i gone to work for ibm . I think the question is probably yes, and it would have for a couple of reasons. One of the things my dad always said to me, learn about computers. Because if you learn how to control computers, you wont get such a disadvantage when computers are trying to control you. It was great advice, and thats why i went to idea. I knew i wasnt going to work for ibm forever and ever and ever, amen. My dad did for his entire career. But i thought this is a really Good Technology to learn about whatever i will do, it would be really important. It turned out to be important. It helped me throughout all my schooling as a way to always feel i had a job, and when i need to fall back on it. Thankfully ive been able to essentially roll out of bed and to software because of my experience, i think i wouldve gone to work for ibm, 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 internalized racism but the outright racism he saw at the company. Ill give a short piece of what he did that i thought that was so important for me to find. The bottom of one of his dresser drawers, he, i do need a playboy magazines, okay, it could not have been a secret because my mom told at all of his laundry, put it in the bottom drawer so she must have known. I dont know. Anyway, and yes, i did thumb through some playboys. But underneath them there was this great envelope with ibms logo on it. One of those circular with the string you tie around thank you a figure eight. It took me a while to realize what was in that info. When i finally did i realized my dad it bootleg copies of the Entrance Exams with questions and answers. Every so often, this venue before i knew what what was up there, i knew that these strange people would come to our house, always, mostly young africanamerican men, and my dad would just tell my sister and i do get lost and i would hear them go, pull out the truth and he would have this envelope and it would sit at the table and they would have hushed conversations about it. I did know what was going on and all of a sudden at dinner a couple months later my dad would say, you wont believe what happened today. Remember that guys who came over to visit us . Ibm just hiding. I did not realize my dad was running his own underground Railroad Operation at ibm. I think, i hope, that i would even slick enough to do Something Like that. Now, in keeping with the book, which is about a relationship with my dad, i am going to do a bit of a spoiler alert and tell you the end of that story. So heres the dresser drawer with playboys and the ibm thing, and so now i graduated from college and my time to take the ibm Entrance Exam. The first place i had to is that dresser drawer. Guess whats no longer there. And when i get to my dad i said what, what examination questions . What do you mean . You dont need an exam, you dont need questions. Youre smart enough to take it. I was smart enough to take it. One of the things i talk about and you see in this is this conflict father and son, theres always that tension. My dad was always trying to see if he was better than me, if i 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. [laughing] 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. Now, second part of your question, really great, really speaks to the nation. It couldnt be more important to teach young people to be digitally literate because really that means to teach them now to live in our current democracy. If people are digitally literate, then what happened in 2016 would never happen. His what i mean by what happened. In 2016, i was shooting about this again today because more research is coming to. Irony, the Unit Research association and russia targeted africanamericans, and in particular targeted young africanamericans. I talk about this in the book. They target them through technology. They targeted them through facebook. They targeted them through twitter with the means which are all about dont vote. And and i talk about adequate ie book young men, particularly some of the black lives matter activists, i talk about hawk newson who specifically said he was repeating the memes, the themes come the ideas put into the discourse by the Russian Internet research association, and he then digested all of them down to us meme we heard a lot in 2016, a lot of us have against which was, i aint voting. So right there for me is a reason why you have to teach Digital Literacy. You have to know that just because you read it as news on a twitter account or a news on facebook, it doesnt necessarily mean its true. You have to be smart enough to penetrate the headlines come to ask the questions, to go deeper into that and ask is this meaningful or not . And i have to say for me, anybody anytime anywhere who says dont vote, you are suspect. You are suspect, take a as an africanamerican when i know the history of many, mostly women who died for the opportunity to go to a poll 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 to instill in our young people, many of whom dont have a history of knowing i will say but Fannie Lou Hamer in the freedom struggle and all that went on. I think its important, Digital Literacy doesnt just mean teaching a a person how to reaa screen. Its really what is the information behind that screen that you need to know about. One within information generated but what is the history . Digital literacy encompasses such a wide range. Thats what i think is really important. To be more specific, bring in people understand the history and helping students, lets take a pot or an idea. Lets type it in on a Search Engine. What results do we get . Isnt that interesting . Oco comes up first. Who are they . Whats the history guides and . 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 in our population, and thats the we do. Its a great platform. 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 in the book. I get i think tampa 12 different specific strategies for Digital Literacy that might be of importance. Id be more than happy to have more of a conversation about that. Thank you. Anyone else . You guys have great questions. I really appreciate this. Yes. I just had a question about your fathers internalized racism and i was wondering if that shifted with the 60s, the black panthers movement, like is beautiful and like this whole movement that happen. Did it shift his perception of how he viewed himself and have reviewed the black community . Thats a a great question. The short answer is no. What happened, and did, did the movements outside shift my dad spew himself as a black man . My dad really bought into murray and jenkins and all of the bell curve stuff and all of that craziness about africanamericans and people of color and intelligence. You would find him reading this stuff and say, they say dear. Again, not having the literacy to understand that much of that research have been debunked because it fit into a narrative that he had about himself. My dad was born in 1919 which means he was born right at the ascendancy of eugenics movement. Eugenics was everywhere, that 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, and i say this in the book so i dont might send it now. My sister has children of different colors, and my dad would selectively whisper messages about their intelligence to each of them. Really traumatic, and so again what i really wanted to present in the book is this contrast. You see this contrast edge wear, the contrast between ibm as a Great Company and ibm as a particular the contrast between the and my dad and the contrast with my dad and itself. The book is about how do you reconcile if you even can all of these contrasts . So again thank you for the question. I really appreciate it. Wow, god, this is cool. This is really a cool discussion, thank you. Anyone else . Yes, and we will probably make this the last question. So i was wondering if you have any advice on, we know that algorithms are totally biased and that their use for everything from the criminal Justice System and a long people are paroled for an probationary measures versus and the idea that facial recognition is out of our control because its in the hands of other governmental agencies, other governmental countries. How can we as individuals who dont believe in these biases essentially, how do we overcome our work towards a different future i guess . That is the question. Thats not just a good question. I think that is the question front of us. There are a number of ways to do this. I talk about some of these in the book. As activists come first of all there are a couple of organizations that are doing algorithmic vetting. So theyre looking at some of the algorithms some of the software, the products and saying this actually passes the smell test of being more inclusive and not as biased. So a aligning yourself with those organizations and helping to work with them and to help them do the work. Thats just one of the things that we can do. The other thing we can do just like never taking action. If we need to we can sit down with a microsoft or with an amazon. Its one of the wonderful things about this book is its given me the opportunity to do some of these things can to sit down with folks and say look, if you really want to fulfill a vision of not creating a biased world is algorithms that you write, heres what you need to do. You need to bring in somebody who can tell you about the history of how this technology has been used. Because maybe if you have a developer who is writing code and understands that history, he or she will think twice before they decide to create a game like slaves tetras because they dont understand that history. I get you whoever wrote slave texas had no clue, real clue about the atlantic slave trade and what really happened. Had they come they never would have created a game like that. Theres a lot of other games they could agree to. Education just like were saying before not just with technology but the history behind the technology, i think its also really, really, really important. Id 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 you sit down at the screen,. 2 whats going on. If you know something more than what they see on that screen, say it. Talk to them about it. That is what it will make a change, when the young people who go on to become the developers, go on to write the code, have this level of understanding of what they are faced with, and the response of creating an algorithm. When you understand that i think things might be different. So those are just some ideas. Again, i sit a little bit more in the book. More than happy to talk to you about that further. Thank you all so much. This has just been great. [applause] im going to be outside with books signing copies for anybody who would like this. And again i want to thank you for 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] i will see you outside. Booktv visited the Richard Nixon president ial library in yorba linda, california, republican senator tom cotton described his time in the old guard which provides Funeral Services at Arlington National cemetery. All those missions take a backseat to funerals. Ceremonies can be pushed later in the day. They can be rescheduled. Nations can be declined in the Capital Region if thats what it takes to make sure that as a family has a few schedule and Arlington National cemetery, the old guard is there on time and performing to perfection. Even on 9 11 that was the case. Imagine if you know youre in the cemetery on the morning of 9 11. It was a beautiful fall day, the sky was blue, and at 9 00 funerals began probably five, six funerals were being conducted at 9 a. M. That morning. At 9 37 a plane flew not from north to south or south to north out of Reagan National but from west to east and slammed into the western face of the pentagon. American Airlines Flight 77. That pentagon is maybe 100 yards, 200 yards from the southeastern corner of Arlington National cemetery. Imagine what it wouldve been like to be performed one of those funerals or laying to rest your father or your grandfather, and to hear that explosion and to see that smoke cloud rising up in the air but soldiers continued their mission until those funerals were over and then they started at 10 00 nation exactly a type and the 1f those funerals all day long. The rest of the old guard soldiers were not dedicated to funerals that they drop everything and they changed out of their ceremony blue uniforms and put under combat fatigues. Tom cotton is latest book is called sacred duty. To watch the rest of this talk visit booktv. Org and search for his name or the books title in the search box at