Transcripts For CSPAN2 Clyde Ford Think Black 20240713

My name is rosalie and im here to introduce our guest, clyde ford. He is a former Systems Engineer with ibm. He graduated from the university of western states in portland as a doctor of chiropractic and is a trained psychotherapist area is also the awardwinning author of 12 works of fiction and nonfiction area clyde is the recipient of this or on the other Person Injured right award in africanamerican literature as well as numerous other awards for his books. Hes been a guest on the oprah show and npr and radio and tv programs across the nation. Clyde is here tonight to speak about his latest book, think black. Which was just released shortlisted for the 2019 goddard book prize in social justice. Would you please join me in welcoming to the kendall planetarium at the Oregon Museum of science and industry clyde ford. Thank you leslie and thank you for being here. I cant tell you how special it is to be here at odyssey again. I was talking with president nancy and just reliving my First Experience over 40 years ago when i honestly was up at Washington Park and i was a volunteer and i was working with a group that actually was involved in software. I had come from ibm go to Chiropractic College and i needed something to do around computers because ive been doing that for so long when i wasnt studying chiropractic and i was able to get computer time by exchanging my work to help them develop the pascal compiler anybody whos old enough to know what the pascal compiler is kind of dates yourself but thats how i got involved with ansi and i love the place red areas have a file at night i go up there and one or two in the morning and agreed some of my friends and say theres a visible lady there and we can punch buttons see all the lights and some of you may know or remember what that was like. Where is she now vicki . Great, so 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 to the visible lady because she was such an important part of me being in full with ansi and i want to thank you for being here and just the opportunity to share with you some often ideas about my think black. I want to you both talk about the book and also interspersed with some reading from the book and then toward the end we will have an opportunity for questions and answers as well and if nobody has said this already, if you have a cell phone and you want to put it on vibrate or silent, that probably a really good idea. So i just have found this so surprising. To learn more about my book after its been published. You know, often as an author you think you write a book, you know what youre writing about. You publish and you thought about what it is youve written area and what i found in what im going to share with you tonight is some of the things that ive learned obviously in writing the book and ill certainly be able to share those with you also some of the surprising things i learned after the books and published. And i thought that was just really interesting and it says a loti think about the subject matter and the times i was writing about. I bought a really great place to start would be really where i start the book which is contrasting my fathers first day at work with my first day at work and starting with my first day of work ibm with his first day at work at ibm. So lets if we see if we can do that. I held fast to an overhead bar at the elevator train i wrote in swayed from side to side, rocketing into manhattan from the bronx. When it does beneath the harlem river everything outside the car went dark red and i caught a reflection of myself in a window. It ballooned afro, pork chop sideburns. A blue suit suit with red pinstripes area a fire engine red turtleneck and a trenchcoat with his collar turned up. I halfhour later, i started from the subway through the light rainhanging over wall streets. Humming the theme song from the film shaft. Which i had seen the night before. I fancied myself as the movies black hero, about to engage in battle with the white hoods of injustice arrayed before me. I entered one of the skyscrapers, squeezed into the financial district and took an elevator to a higher floor. There stenciled in blue, the sign on the glass doors read ibm. And beneath it in white, new York Financial office. I grasped the door handle paused. Catching another glimpse of myself in the glass door pain. I shook my head unsure of what to make of this decision. Unready to push through those glass doors, uncertain of what state awaited me on the other side of that threshold. On that all day in 1971, i was young. And a black, defiant and angry. 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 thats how i start the book. And i wonder, i gave some of this way but i wonder if you can date when the photo is and i can tell you its not of mydad , its me area many people ask and its also not 1971 area can anybody guess what year that photo might be less and theres actuallysome hints there. [inaudible] its not. First of all im wearing bellbottoms. That data. Ive got pork chop sideburns, that makes it and that is now complex and that should date it as well too. I will keep you in suspense and ill just say it was 1968. Thats when that photograph was taken twoyears before i entered ibm but did somebody say that . There you go. And i looked pretty similar to that, maybe a little bit cleaned up with that suit suit on buti looked similar to that when i went to work for ibm. Anybody for extra credit . That magazine has named mojo. Anybody know what that magazine was connected to . It was the magazine of the bsc, the black Students Council at columbia in 1968. Thats important historically for a couple of reasons area one of the reasons is so important is 1968, that may, that spring was the spring of the columbia student uprising and that was the spring which saw both the sts group with mark rudd, the black Student Council with people like sam anderson and ray brown and also the hispanic students at columbia. A young lords like luciano, really very involved in trying to get more than just the education columbia but trying to get a university to make a difference in terms of social change and social justice and a lot of what happened in that years, you take any student demonstration whether its college or high school, i even look at whats going on now in terms of climate change, i can draw select line between what took place in 1968 and whats taking place right now so that was a really important place because i think young people and i was certainly among them, i wasnt in columbia at the time, i was in high school in new york city but i think young people the idea that we could make a difference if we raise our voices and organize in the right way. And i have to make a little bit of a call out here because theres a couple holes sitting in the audience here along with me were young in those days i havent seen lynn 50 years and we were very involved in some of the real activism back in the 60s that i think laid the groundwork of what took place. I think those pictures also is revelatory because its a classic picture of a radical young black man in the 60s. So if i look at this, and of course those pictures from the black panthers, youll see theres not that much daylight between how i looked and how those Young Brothers and the black panthers looked as well read i certainly dont mind saying i was part of the black panthers and part of the intellectual wing of the panthers in those days. So thats me when i started the book. Thats me when istepped into ibm, started to work at ibm. What about my dad . What about 25 years before, what was that likefor him . It was the late 1940s. Postworld war ii america. Anything was possible. Duke ellingtons some jazz, Jackie Robinson along a big lead. Brown versus board. Of education formed through the courts. Nowhere was the possibilities and promises more deeply than in harlem. Which was then black americas Gravitational Center area in a city College Classroom at the edge of harlem, and accounting professor invited one of her students to dinner. Black pi arrived at her slinky apartment dressed to the nines. And watson, founder of ibm stepped from the shadows. Watson offered my father a job and Branch Rickey Jackie Robinson moment ensued. The start of an unknown chapter in the history of modernday computers. Its a story i heard a lot growing up. Of watson, we use to call him the old man or mister watson. I heard a lot of names my dad used for him but the story i heard most was my dad showing up for dinner. Watson kind of stepping out from the back room saying to my dad in no uncertainterms , im the only dam in this company that could offer you a job. Click. This is the story i really started out thinking i was writing. In and of itself, a great story, and i hope by the end of tonight, you will see that one of the things you learn as an author is to follow the story thats 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. And so thats the journey, but im kind of telling the story. I dont want to give you the story ahead of time. Lets just look a little bit more about what that time was like. Theres watson. Thats thomas j. Watson, the founder of ibm, came from a background working at ncr, somewhat of a very rough and tumble businessman. He was part of ncrs, what they called the knockout gang. In fact, he led the knockout gang, and the knockout gang was we dont take out our competition. We knock them out. [laughter] so this is a really tough businessman, and thats important to remember as we go on a little bit further. This was also at the very dawn of the computer age. So one of the things that you see here is this picture of my dad, and this is another thing that i just learned after the back was published. So im going to ask you in this picture, and i hope yeah, you can still see it. What might you think is really significant about this picture, other than the fact that theres just one black guy and two women in the picture, anybody see anything unique in this picture . What i will tell you is the ayes have it. And by that i mean, if you looked at the direction of everyone who is staring, look at what is staring directly at the camera look who is staring directly at the camera. Look at whose eyes are away. All the white guys in the picture are staring at the picture, as if they are saying im belong. And the others are not looking at the camera, as if they say im not sure i belong. This captures the time really well and in some ways captures the time we have with us, in terms of being able to look at a sense of entitlement and privilege maybe . Certainly that became an important part of what i was writing about in the book in terms of technology and race and privilege and those of you who will be able to read the book can read more, but i just found it so fascinating that it was in this picture. I didnt realize it was until it was actually published. This is part of the time that my dad stepped into the company. Again, first africanamerican software engineer. I should say really in all honestly just even using that term is a little bit my dad went to work for ibm in 1947. He was hired in 46 and started working in january of 47. Software hadnt been invented. They called people who had his job Systems Engineers. They still do. Yes, he worked on the technology that would ultimately give rise to software. But when he started work, there were punch cards and there were punch card machines, and you will see in a minute some of the other things that were involved as well too. This is really the dawn of the digital age. The other thing i wanted to do with this book because so many of us are so used to technology thats so accessible and so easy to use is kind of take a step back down memory lane of what technology was like back in my dads day and the technology that i grew up knowing. So do you have a cell phone that you can at least put your hand on and maybe even pull 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. You know, what do you think . A couple ounces maybe . Maybe a half a pound . Maybe, but more like maybe 4, 5, 6 ounces. So your cell phone is a programmable computer. There is absolutely no doubt about it. Youve got somewhere between eight and, i dont know, 512 giga bites of story in that computer. Okay . In that, lets say 4 ounces that youre weighing. Im going to show you a picture of the first ever programmable computer. Its an ibm 407. Its the first ever commercially available programmable computer. By that meaning it was mass produced and leased by ibm to lots of people. There were other Programmable Computers before that, but they were all oneoffs. This was the first like your cell phone, you know, mass produced. This box alone, that 407 weighed three tons. When you put all of these ancillary equipment around it that it needed, the sorters and the tabulators and the printers, you could get a computer room in and of itself that weighs somewhere between 10 and 12 tons. Thats a lot of weight to carry around in your purse or pocket. Let me tell you. So what are some of the pieces of this 407 . On the left, on your far left, thats where cards were put into this machine, cards were read. Right in the middle is a converted typewriter that was used as a printer, and right here, at this door, inside that door was this, believe it or not, i found this on ebay. Wow. And this is what was used to program the earliest computer, to program an ibm 407. This board is actually from an ibm 407. My dad used to bring these home. The way we programmed these i use the word program because thats what we did. We had patch cords, kind of like a telephone operator in the old days and wed plug one into a hole here, and one in there and there and there, and so you would end up with this network on here of brightlycolored patch cords that controlled how the circuits inside of that machine spoke to each other, read cards, added, because it didnt hardly do subtraction. Only the early ones added. What you would end up with is something that looked like this. Thats the board. Thats somebody who is actually working on it, and this is what the boards would look like. We actually called the process basket weaving. When i was 5, my sister was 3, 4, my dad would bring home these boards, lay them on the table, had a basket full of these patch cords and had this as lets see, there you go, had that as the instructions for how to program that machine. And he would say to us, okay, i want you to plug this into this and plug this into that, and, you know, wed i guess do our best because he always told us the next day what you guys did was great. It worked fine. Everything was just great. It just worked as i thought it would. I dont believe that. He probably had to do a lot of stuff himself, but at least there i was at 5 years old, programming computers, and i have to say i walk in a room, and i know you heard the term digital native digital native thrown out a lot. I have never been in a room where somebody had been a digital native as long as i had. A long time in computers. This is what was going on inside of hightech, but my dad was hired, you know, late 40s, early 50s, was when these computers were really starting to be used, quite extensively, but there was also a whole social environment that was going on outside of ibm, and that was also really really important to my dad as well too. So lets kind of get a sense of what was going on outside of ibm. So on august 28, 1963, i scanned the small black and White Television screen in my grandparents living room, for glimpses of my parents. A baritone boomed. Im 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 the millions of faces lining the grassy mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial while i allowed Martin Luther king jr. s words to sere 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 did not arrest my pride at knowing 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, wed taken a Greyhound Bus south to visit my mothers family in virginia. At the masondixon line in maryland, we were forced to change to a bus marked colors only, that waited behind the maryland house, now a popular rest stop, on i95. My father ushered claudia and me on to the waiting bus, though he said little on the ride. Id become so used to my father extolling the promises of a Digital Future that it stunned me to see him rendered impotent by the shackles of a draconian past. So, you know, this was the world that was taking place outside of ibm. And the two collided in no Uncertain Terms for my dad. It collided inside of ibm because as the first black software engineer, i mean, he was faced with many challenges just to keep his job. And i talk about some of those in the book. For example, one of the stories that he told often was how when he had cently been hired, he was sent on a business meeting that turned he recently was hired, he was on a business meeting that turned into a meeting with a prostitute, with the idea if he was caught on film with a prostitu prostitute, he would be forced to leave his job. He was passed over for promotions. He trained the people who would later become his supervisors. He didnt have the opportunities to have machine time in order to really further his education. Im heard over and over from him growing up, when you might have expected your dad to be there to, you know, throw a ball with you or go out and play with you, and there he was working, you know, over some software diagram or something, i heard so many times that 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. And so that certainly infiltrated his consciousness and the outside world in that respect infiltrated his consciousness. I think the other thing that i talk about in the book is how not only did he have this sense of the racism he encountered working at ibm, but unfortunately, he also turned some of 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, really a smart guy, championship chess player on the ibm chess team for many years, plays four instruments, operatic baritone, on and on, and yet hes internalized, and thats the word we use, internalized racism to such an extent that he sees himself as not as worthy and not as capable. So you can imagine here i am, you know, im a young man who is thinking wow, i want to learn as much as i can about my history and who i am as a person, in historical terms, in terms of africanamerican history, so i would spend my afternoons at the library in new york reading about these wonderful figures in africanamerican history that i never got in school, and by the time id get home, there was my dad lamenting the fact that he was black. And that was really one of the first really strong instances of this kind of clash both of generations, but also of cultures that happened between my dad and me because my dad, again, feeling and buying into this whole idea that if youre black, youre less capable and me feeling no way. 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 Harper Collins oh, started to ask me some questions also about what was it like then, and i remember this experience that we had, and its funny as youre writing a memoir, in particular, very often you dont think about things until you start to write them, and so i remember how my dad also changed once he came back from the march on washington, and i saw that change in very practical ways that surprised me. Heres just 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 march, and this is the march on washington, something inside of 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 a few summers before, we had been 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. She turned to walk away. My mother looked across to my sister and me and my father, and she whispered, stanley, nows 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. I thought i told you we dont serve your kind. My father surprisingly snapped, and were 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 doors, a determined look on his reddened face. The waitress trailed behind him, smirking. I twisted around on my stool. The entire restaurant had grown silent, observing the events that were unfolding. Dont look at other people, my mother scolded. Turn around. Just look at your menu. But the manager must have felt the stares as well 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 dissolved into an insincere therapy 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 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. So again, kind of the collision of what was going on both inside and outside of ibm for my dad. And about the same time, my editor asked me, you know, what was going on in the world, and how was your dad dealing with this, she also asked me this really important question, that was to change the nature of this book, from just what i thought was initially this kind of feelgood story, about a Jackie Robinson moment in computers to something much larger. She asked me, and, you know, obvious question, why did ibm hire him in the first place . Why did Thomas Watson hire dad to go to work for him in 1947 . Why hire a black guy . I said to her, i dont know the answer, but i guarantee by the time i finish this manuscript to you, i will have that answer for you. That exploration opened up a window into technology, into the company i worked with, the company my dad worked with that was in two words very shocking, if not very horrifying, another two words, because the first thing i discovered that ibm was deeply involved in a movement. For those of you who dont know what that is, it is the pseudoscience of race which attempts to find a pure stock, and its often kind of a nordic ideal of a pure stock and anyone who doesnt fit that certainly people of color, jews, those who are infirmed, those who are infirmed mentally or physically, need to get rid of them. Back in the 20s, it was quite a popular thing. Alexander graham bell was president of that association. Many people dont know that the founder of planned parenthood was deeply involved in that. In fact, in her words, her work was Womens Health and reproductive as [inaudible] the weeds of humanity, because in those days Family Planning was all about promoting this idea. Just a couple things here, that figure is madison grant. Madison grant wrote a book in i think it was published if not 1920, somewhere just around that, wrote a book called the passing of the great race, and i wish i could say that that book sits in history someplace, and we can go back to look at it as a particular historical epic, but i cant, but i cant because this book is still popular today. It 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 your typical idea of whatever this nordic european idea of humanity is is going to shift here in the United States. So madison grant. Thats Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Records Office. It was out of a laboratory in new york. The Laboratory Set up by the carnegie institute. Again, i wish i could say they were out of the news, but as early as last january, some of you might remember that really kind of horrible incident that happened with james d. Watson, the dna folks, where watson was spewing all of this kind of really racially negative hateful stuff, in some ways, reflecting this whole idea of eugenics. Guess what laboratory watson worked for . The laboratory out of new york, who yes, took the step of actually stripping him of some of his awards, but theres a history here, and, you know, thats something that i wanted to communicate in this book, that some of the issues we deal with today have roots so long ago that weve often forgotten them. 1928, these are just some of the ideas that i was thinking of as i wrote this section of the book, but 1928, Eugenics Records Office under Charles Davenport gets a grant to do a study entitled the jamaica study. It was meant to identify mixed raced individuals on the island of jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control. The problem with the jamaica study was that there was so much data that davenport couldnt figure out how he was going to store, sort, tabulate, and print that data out in order to see who it was that 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 know how to do this. We have got the equipment that will allow you to store the information, collect it, sort it, tabulate it, so one of the first large projects ibm went to work on was the jamaica study. Wow. I mean, in leading this, it was quite shocking to me. 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, if 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, five years later, in 1933, watson takes what they learned, with the jamaica study to berlin, in nazi germany. Again, wow. I dont think in the time that i have with you, i could adequately describe for you the extent to which ibm was involved 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 and counted jews, traced back their ancestry through generations, marked them for transport to concentrate camps, managed the railroads that transported them, kept track of which jews were killed and which remained alive, identified which jews possessed what skills and helped nazis allocate them for slave labor, monitor the health and fitness for jews for barbaric medical experiments or being worked to death, kept records of the torture and execution of jews in all concentration camps, kept track of the soldiers and planned german tank movement against the allies and scheduled bombing runs. Again, it was almost hard to believe this. I didnt do the primary research here. Fortunately, theres i dont even know if the word fortunately is right. I think it is fortunately that light is shined on this history because so many of us dont know this history, so there are some excellent source materials for this which i used 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 where i was dry heaving and crying and i literally couldnt go forward to read about what this company i had worked for, my dad had worked for had been engaged in in the early days of high technology. It was quite stunning. Every concentration camp had a room for labor fulfillment. Another word for forced labor. Some of you probably remember seeing the films of, you know, concentration camp prisoners, where they have got tattooed numbers. The part you werent told is that many of those numbers were connected directly to a deck of punch cards which had those numbers in them. I dont remember the actual column. I think it was 22, column 22, i do say that in the book, there was even a column, for example, on those punch cards which said if youre a prisoner, how you were going to be exterminated, gas chambers, ovens, a firing squad, you name it. Now, those punch cards were made by ibm and they made sure only their equipment would read those punch cards that they made. The other part that is really important that recognizes this was not equipment sold to nazi germany. Ibm never sold equipment in those days. In fact, when i went to work, they still never sold equipment. They only leased it. They leased it so they could maintain control over it. They maintained control over all that equipment as well as producing the punch cards, and nazi germany bought billions and billions of punch cards, in order to maintain all this information on german citizens. This is starting to just this is turning into this really strange story. Work makes you free, of course thats incredible misnomer because nothing behind that gate made anyone free in any real sense of the word. Those are the ovens. I have been there. I walked through the camp. It is a riveting experience, only equivalent to and i tell this story in the book, the experience of me walking through slave castles in west africa. Unfortunately, this is how people were treated, and there are the punch cards, made by this company that i went to work for, that my dad went to work for, that we used. Now, if you do something successful, with the technology, you dont just stop. You dont just stop. So yes, my dad was hired in 1947 by ibm, and the question is, why . Well, at the end of the war, companies that were involved in making money from the nazis, from the, you know, from nazi, germany, italy, the axis powers during the war, they could not get that money back unless they passed through agencies involved in reparations. And the whole idea was, you know, if you made money, during nazi germany, you got to pay back something to the people whose lives you devastated. Only ibm didnt want to pay back any money. And watson, president of ibm, founder of ibm was really skilled manipulator of public opinion. Some of you probably recognize what im next about to say. He knew that if he could divert attention here, you may not realize what was going on here. So why not hire two blacks and a handful of jews. Wow, thats a pretty dramatic thing to do, in the late 40s, right, middle 40s, right after the war, people may not focus so much on how you were trying to get back the millions and millions of dollars that you made during the war. To the extent, for example, that watson had actually funded a group of army soldiers, that were his former employees, called the ibm men. Thats what they were known as, affectionately, i suppose in the army, and when a concentration camp was liberated, everybody went for the prisoners, but the ibm folks went for the machines to crate them up and make sure they got back to headquarters. This was a really oh, gosh, it was almost hurtful to read about this, to understand the depth at which this was going on, and i did ask edwin black, who has written a book called ibm, the holocaust, a wonderful book that talks about this. Edwin and i were talking. He said to me, why do you think ibm hired your dad . Im going to tell you what i think. I think they hired him because of this diversion thing, and he said to me, i think youre right. And youre absolutely right. Then he began to tell me a little bit about what they had done in hiring jews as well too, kind of divert people from doing this. I talk about in the book, other instances in watsons history where he did this as well, divert public attention in one way so everybody doesnt see whats going on in another part of your business. What i was about to say, if youre successful with eugenics, and if youre successful with the holocaust, you dont stop there. It is now postworld war ii. Early 1950s. You look around the world, and you say, hey, were 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, so a logical place to turn is south africa. And while there was no book written about this, it was just at this point my guess. I bet you ibm was involved here. When i found out the depth at which they were involved, ibm created the passbook system which was used to identify who was black, who was colored, who was asian and who was white and therefore who was allowed certain privileges of citizenship and who wasnt. By this time, the late 50s and early 60s, watson has passed, the old man, but a new Thomas Watson jr. , his son is in control of the company. The old time punch cards are passed. Now we have more modern Computer Technology that affords databases and data storage and other means to collect and store large amounts of information on a population. Most of that research, i should say 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 actually happened. Let me put up a couple images here from apartheid apart ti apa apartheid. I wish i could say it stopped there. Whats going on with technology, technology has this history which is not always on the right side of human rights and civil rights. And so just three days ago, i was reading a piece maybe some of you read about it google and what google was doing with facial Recognition Technology, where it was actually going into homeless shelters and identifying specifically africanamerican men and taking videos of africanamerican men in order to train its video analytics facial recognize software. By the time i had submitted my book to the publisher, someone told me, hey, youve got to read this article in a newsletter. This article was all about how ibm post 9 11 had used footage of new yorkers unbeknownst 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 that facial Recognition Software is called watson facial Recognition Software. The important point here and i think this is what i came to in the book 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 are 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 in how the technology is constructed, how the technology is released, and how the technology is used. Three weeks ago, three weeks ago, boston, a jewish peace group called never again action marched from the Holocaust Memorial in boston to amazons Head Quarters in cambridge. While they were there the front of amazons headquarters, i saw this on television i thought wow these are young people that really get it, the young woman who spoke to the group talked about ibms involvement in the holocaust and said were here in front of amazon because we want the company to know this is the history of technology and its use. We have seen this before. We dont want this used on our borders in order to decide who belongs in this country and who doesnt belong in this country. So that then became what this book was about for me, not just a simple feelgood story about my dad and Thomas Watson, Jackie Robinson, but a more of a cautionary tale about the importance of us as citizens really engaging in the technology that were using. I just give you just one other example, and i cite many in the book. Microsoft released a product it wasnt released a product. They released a chatbod, a piece of software that acts like a person, gets on twitter, interacts with people, you can interact with the chatbot as though it is a person. It was called tay, released in 2016. Within 24 hours of being released, this is what tay would say. You would ask it did the holocaust happen . And tay would say holocaust never happened. I hate jews. You would ask it about women, and tay would say women should go to hell. You would ask it about lets say black lives matter, mckesson who was one of the people early on in black lives matter, tay would say like mckesson should be hanged. I couldnt believe this. Again, this is out there. You can see this. I documented it in the book. I give the source for that. Its not like something that were making up here. This is what can happen with technology thats not controlled. Just give you one more example so you will see this really is something that we as a society need to address. A couple of years ago, a wellmeaning company decided they wanted to release a video game that would help people understand the atlantic slave trade. I think thats a great idea. I would like people to better understand that 60 Million People were killed or died in the middle passage, which is that passage from africa to the new world. They decided to call the game slave tetris. And heres the way the game looked. You had the hull of the slave ship. You played the game by walking slaves up a ladder, walking them off of a plank, into the hull of the slave ship and then moving them back and forth in order to tightly pack them. I dont even think i have the words to really communicate in what world do you think that that is going to represent something positive . And yet the company said well, were really trying to to something worthwhile. Were really trying to do something worthwhile, and i think what i came to, 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 produce in your software are only going to be as lets say welcoming and inclusive as the people who write those algorithms, and unless were able to reach the people who work in hightech, with the history of their industry, with an understanding of the kind of products we want to produce, were going to keep getting slave tetris and all sorts of other kind of weird stuff coming out that really harms people more than helps people. Part of what i really tried to do and i hope i was able to at least make a little dent in the book was to say here are some of the things that you can do. We do need to train people in hightech in the history of how tech is being used, not always on the right side of human rights. We need to help Companies Realize before you release a product, you probably want a focus group thats pretty darn diverse so that people can give you some feedback and say slave tetris, you got to be crazy. You cant release a product like that. Those of us in the activist community, we need to make sure that were really working on things like Digital Literacy. In the book i suggest to people, for example, to go to the bing search engine, not google, and type in the same search terms 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 and 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 wars. Theres no rational universe that alex jones qualifies for in terms of really being 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. Those results can be paid for. And these are some of the other things, you know, 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 of the women as well too, i think believed that what they were creating would help democratize society, would make it more color blind, 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 whose father was also of the same generation, worked for ibm as my dad did, and she said you know my dad and i were talking down the street towards the end of his life, and he followed people walking down with things in their hands. He said to me whats that . I told him those are cell phones. I explained what cell phones were and the networks behind it, and he shook his head and he said we created a monster. I think it is up to all of us to recognize that we also 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 of the engineers that created some of these things, you know, worked with ibm to develop stuff that was used in the holocaust and facial Recognition Technology and the article in the intercept actually interviewed a former ibm employee. So i thought this was very revelatory for us to understand whats going on the minds of folks like this. A former ibm researcher working on facial recognition during these years when ibm was involved with facial recognition provided a window into the minds of those behind ibm racial classification technology, going as far back as eugenics. We certainly were worried about where the heck this was going he said to the intercept. There were a couple of us, always talking about this, you know, this could really be an issue if this gets better. Well facial Recognition Technology did get better. It did become an issue. Only as outside researchers, a woman at m. I. T. Computer scientist, shes really trying to hold Technology Companies accountable. Now, i know that watson and his ibm did not create my fathers wound of color, but working at ibm with its 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 of his employment. 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, to talk a little bit about my father and my relationship with him, about these early years in computers and ibm, and i think about the dark sides of this technology that we need to know about so just like that group never again action says, we dont allow it to happen again. So 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 any questions. And i will 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 . [inaudible]. Have you done a ted talk yet . Have i done a ted talk . I have not done a ted talk. Ive certainly written to the ted people to see if they would be interested in a talk like this. Who knows, 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 that our government was involved. I know it. And i know it for this simple reason, and i talk about this in the book. The internet and the technology to develop the internet was a really really important part, and it was actually the first project funded by a government agency, Defense Advanced Research project agency. Darpa had headquarters on 545 main street cambridge, in that same building were darpa, mit, ibm, General Electric and the cia. My dad would occasionally, and i kind of asked this question in my book, did my work for cia . My dad occasionally would say i have to go away, and i cant tell you where im going and i cant tell you much about what im doing and im sworn to secrecy. I did later find out and i found a copy of a letter written by someone, thanking for my dads service, that he worked on a secretive project called cp 67. That project was one of the projects that came out of darpa funding and the development of technology for cp 67 cms that was the full name actually was the technology that became pretty much the foundation for the modern day internet, so 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 Tech Companies like google, apple, microsoft, are using. Without what was done there in cambridge, none of what were seeing, your cell phones wouldnt be available. You know, twitter wouldnt be around. None of that would be around, so, yes, there is real clear understanding and cia was there because they also understood that they wanted 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 ever worked 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, until in 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 realized you were part of the social experiment . You know, i did not realize the question was how old was i when i realized i was part of a social experiment perhaps at ibm . I worked for ibm from 71 to 77. I didnt have any understanding of this history until i wrote the book. It was only when i tried to answer my editors question, who was watson and who was ibm that i uncovered any of this information, and 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 this idea of the relationship between technology and race and hatred back much further than even eugenics. I mean i go back in the book to the 1500s, and you can see this pattern developing in technology. So its kind of a little bit of a leader to say i hope you read about it in the book because theres even more there i think for all of us to suggest and understand. Thank you for your question. At the time when you were working with ibm, with your background with you being previously with the panthers, did you still feel the heaviness of you being a black man, in an organization like that in a Corporation Like that . Absolutely. You know, with my background, and i should say, lets see yes, so this was a couple of years after i had been more deeply involved with the panthers, and so i was going to work, but still felt and i think the word you used heaviness is a great word. I walked into ibm dressed as i described in the book, with a specific purpose of them understanding i was going to be different. But what i didnt tell you in that reading i do say in the book, and i laugh a little bit when i think so here i am, sitting at my desk, and theres another black fellow in the office, who comes over to me and says do you know what youre doing . [laughter] now, 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 Second Generation ibmers. Heres this guy, hes sitting there and he said, you know, white shirt, you want to be different . Button down collar. [laughter] and then he pulls up his pants leg and he says because i didnt say this in the book or in the reading, i had on platform patton leather shoes, black shoes . You want to be different . Something with the little holes in them or something. Then he pulls it up further and says dark socks. He had a crew cut in his hair and ran his hair through that crew cut. He said all that hair, i dont know what to tell you. Dont you understand . Youre working at ibm. He didnt understand i knew exactly what i was doing working at ibm, and yes, part of my way, and i think maybe it might have been a little naive, but it was my way of dealing with that heaviness was also establishing my difference, and over time, and again, i tell some of these stories in the book, you know, i talk about what my clash with ibm was like and how i experienced racism in a similar way, but dealt with it in a different way, from my dad, in the way my dad did. Great question. I appreciated the opportunity to answer that. Yeah . You were talking about your father in this book. Yeah. 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, based on the person that im seeing, im thinking that other people influenced you as well. Yes. I wonder if you can tell us who those people are and how they influenced you. Again, a beautiful question. Thank you very much for asking it. Yes, there were other people obviously that had deep influences in my life. Im going to tell you one person. This persons name was vincent harding. I dont know if any of you know that name. You should. Some of you probably heard Martin Luther king jr. s Riverside Drive speech, the speech in which he comes out against vietnam war. That and many of other kings other speeches were written by my mentor, friend, teacher vincent harding. Vincent was really somebody who was very very close to me, really helped me understand he was an imminent black historian. He was a teacher of people like henry lewis gates, up at harvard. I had the wonderful opportunity to be a student of his when i took some time off from Wesleyan University to go down to the king center in atlanta, and i helped because we took over some buildings at wesleyan, actually ended up getting money out of the university to help set 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 an eminent historian, wrote before the may flower, the shaping of black america, was an editor for a magazine back in the days when that magazine was publishing some wonderful information. I feel very blessed that i 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 at my friends ross and lynn because, you know, at community church, the church where i group, one of the other people who was often in the congregation was somebody like pete seeger, so i had the opportunity at 12, 13 years old to go up to this really tall guy and say mr. Seeger, would you sign would you autograph my church program, and he did. And about two years before pete passed, i got a chance to speak with him for 45 minute and so thank him for helping form my character and helping me understand how you can be passionate as an artist and equally passionate about social justice. So i really look back and feel very blessed with the individuals who have touched me and informed me and influenced my life. Thank you for that question. I actually have two questions, if i can sneak them both in. Please. You have that opportunity. [laughter] 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. Uhhuh. What is your advice . What do you think are the most important messages that we should convey . Yeah. Wow, Great Questions. Let me try the first one, which is if i knew today what if i knew in 72 that i knew today would i have gone to work for ibm . I think the question is probably yes, and i would have for a couple reasons. You know, one of the things my dad always said to me, learn about computers because if you learn how to control computers, you wont be at such disadvantage when computers are trying to control you. [laughter] it was great advice, and thats why i went to ibm. I knew i wasnt going to work with ibm for forever and ever and ever amen, but my dad did throughout his entire career. I thought this is Good Technology that whatever i do it is going to be really important. It turned out to be really important. Its the way i got as a volunteer. It helped me throughout my schooling. Thankfully i have been able to sent essentially roll out of bed and do software because of my experience there. I think i would have 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 in dealing with the racism he encountered, not just the internalized racism, but the outside racism. Heres a short piece. One of his dresser drawers in the bottom, underneath a stack of playboy magazines Organization Play boy magazines organization kay, it couldnt have been a secret because my mom folded his laundry, and yes, i did thumb through the play boys, but underneath them there was a gray envelope, ibms logo on it, dog eared, circular tabs, the string you tie around, the two tabs and you do a figure eight, and it took me a while to realize what was in that envelope. When i finally did, i realize my dad had bootleg copies of the ibm entrance exams with questions and answers. Every so often, that i knew before i knew what was there, i knew that strange people would come to our house, mostly young africanamerican men and my dad would tell my sister and i to get lost, and i would hear him pull out that drawer and he would have this envelope and they would sit down at the table, and they would have hush conversations, you know, i didnt really know what was going on. Then all of a sudden at dinner, a couple months later, my dad would say you wont believe that happened today. Remember that guy 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, and i think i hope that i would have been slick enough to do Something Like that. clyde , what examination question. What do you mean, you dont need questions printed years hard enough to take it. I was smart enough to take it. One of the things that are talk about is this conflict of the father and son and there is always that tension there. My dad was always trying to see if he was better than me or if i was better than him. He didnt do as well on the exam. And i heard about it for the rest of his life. [laughter]. s is a funny way of civilly saying that i hope i could have been as aware as he was about some of the more subtle ways to counter what he countered. The second part of your question, really great. I know it speaks to your mission and it does to my mission as well. It could not be more important to teach young people to be literate because really, that means to teach them how to live in our current democracy. If people are digitally literate than what happened in 2016 was or it wouldve never happened. Heres what, i mean. 20162016 the ira, the internet,e russia, the target, African Americans in particular targeted young africanamericans. Talk about this in the book. And they targeted them through technology. They targeted them through facebook, through trent twitter, with means which were all about, dont vote. And i quoted the book in a talk about young men particularly some of the black lives matter activists. Talk about a newsletter his positive specifically said, he was repeating the names and the themes in the ideas, to the by the Russian Internet research association. He suggested down to mean that we heard a lot in 2016, a lot of this was i aint moaning. So right there, for me, is the reason why you have to teach Digital Literacy. Yet another just because you need it or read it as news on a twitter account, or if facebook, it does not necessarily mean it is true. You have to be smart enough to fit paraphrase. Ask the questions pretty good deeper into that and ask this is this meaningfulness. I have to say for me, anybody anytime anywhere, this is do not vote, you are to vote. Particularly when i know the history of mostly women, who have died for the opportunity to do go to a poll and vote. Nobody in the world will tell me not to vote. But that kind of consciousness is what we need to instill in our young children. Many of them do not have a history of knowing about the mississippi freedom act. All that went on then. So i think it is important that Digital Literacy doesnt just mean teaching a person how to read a screen. Its really, what is the information be hind that screen that you need to know about. One where the information where was it generated from but what is the existing history. If thats why Digital Literacy encompasses such a wide range. That is what i think is really important. Be more specific, they understand the history and helping students, lets take a idea and lets type it in on the search engine. What results do you get printed look who comes up first. Now who are they, what is the history behind them. It is Critical Thinking that you then start to develop. We need more of that. And i can tell you is a former college teacher, we need more of that in our population and that is the way you do it. Is a great platform. It 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. Ten 12 different specific strategies for Digital Literacy that might be important and i would be more than happy to have a conversation about that. Thank you. Anyone else. You guys have Great Questions and i really appreciate it. Reporter i was just wondering if that shift with your father was in the 60s or black is Beautiful Movement and didnt shift his profession heavy views himself and the black community. Clyde did the movements outside shift my dads abuse as a black man. My dad really bought ten to murray and jenkins and all of the bell curve stuff. And all that craziness about africanamericans and people of color and intelligence. Youd find him reading this stuff. And again not having even the literacy there to understand that much of that research had been debunked. Because and fed into a narrative that he had about himself. Dad was born in 1919 which means he was born right at the head gen x movement and was everywhere. I believe that you were not competent because color was everywhere and unfortunately, he never grew out of that and we had many fights about that. I say this in the book. My sister has children of different color. And my dad would selectively whisper messages about their intelligence to each of them. It was really dramatic. And so again, but i really wanted to present in the book, is this contrast and you see it everywhere. Between ibm is a Great Company and the contrast with other companies and the contrast with my dad himself. How do you reconcile this if you even can. So again, thank you for that question. I really appreciate it. This is cool. Cool discussion thank you. Anyone else. Guest i was wondering if you have any advice on bias and they use everything from the criminal Justice System and how long people are paroled for an probationary measures versus and the idea the facial recognition out of our control because its in the hands of other governmental agencies. In countries. How can we as individuals who do not believe in these biases, eventually, how do we overcome orchards a different future. Clyde that is the question. I think there are a number of boys to do this. And i talk about this in the book, as activists, first of all there are a couple of organizations that are doing algorithmic embedding so theyre looking at some of the algorithms, some of the products and saying, this actually passes the smell test of being more inclusive and on his bias. Aligning yourself with those organizations and having to work with them and help them do their work. It is just one of the things that we can do. I think the anything that we can do is just like action. If you need to, we can say and sit down with the microsoft or with an amazon and is a wonderful thing about this focus given me the opportunity to do some of these things. To sit down with both of them and say, if you really want to fulfill a vision of not creating a biased world, through the algorithms that you write, heres what you need to do. Bring is a buddy 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 understand that history, he or she will think twice before they decide to create a game like site taxes because they dont understand the history. I guarantee you ever rough that had no clue. No real clue about the atlantic slave trade. They wouldve never created a game like that had they. There are loads of other games he couldve created. Education, just like what we were saying before, not with Just Technology but the history behind the technology i think is also really important. I would say the best thing that you can do is if you have young children, or if you know if young children, help them be more digitally literate. 2 what is going on and if you know something more than what they see on that screen, say it. Talk to them about it. Thats where it is going to make a real change. When the young people who go on to become and the developers and to write the codes, they have this level of understanding of what they are faced with. And the responsibility of creating an algorithm. When they understand that, i think things might be different. So those are just some ideas. I say low bit more in the book. I am more than happy to talk with you further about that. Thank you all so much. This is been great. [applause]. I will be outside with annies book signing copies of books with anybody who would like this. And again i want to thank this opportunity to share these thousand ideas with you. This is really been a very special opportunity for me. Thank you. [applause]. I will see you outside. Statement Senate Majority leader Mitch Mcconnell give a talk today and Commerce Transportation Committee member also talked about the pandemic. Kyle is no been four days since Paycheck Protection Program ran out of money. Republicans have been trying to secure more funding. Mitch mcconnell a week and a half now, this our democratic colleagues are prolonging during discussions with the administrations of the senate regretfully will not be able to pass more funding for americans paychecks. Today. However, since this is so urgent, unless that the senate meet again tomorrow in a new session that was previously scheduled in the democratic leader has agreed to my