Transcripts For CSPAN2 Clyde Ford Think Black 20240713

Industry, americas Cable Television company, as a public and brought to you today i your television provider. Good evening. My name is leslie kavasch and im here to introduce our guest, clyde ford. Client is former assistant engineer with ibm. He graduated from university of Western State here in portland as a doctor of chiropractic, and he is a trained psychotherapist. He the awardwinning author of 12 works of fiction and nonfiction. Clive is recipient of the rate award, in African American literature as well as numerous other awards for his books. Hes been a guest on the oprah show, 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 book prize in social justice. Wed you please join me in welcoming to the planetarium at the Oregon Museum of science and industry clyde ford. [applause] thank you leslie and thank you all for being here. I cant tell you how special it is to beer again. I was just talking with the president , nancy, and just reliving my First Experience over 40 years ago when omsi was at Washington Park and i was apology. I was was working with the group at omsi that actually was involved i just come from ibm to go to Chiropractic College and he did something to do around computers because i i hd been doing that for so long when i was studying chiropractic, and i was able to get computer time by exchanging my work to help them develop so anybody who is old enough to know what that is, kind of dates yourself but thats a got involved omsi. I loved the place. I used to have a key. Late at night i would go up there at one, two in the morning and bring some my friends and say theres a visible lady there and we can kind of punch buttons and see all the lights, and some of you may know or remember what that was like. Where issue now, nikki . [inaudible] great. I didnt get to visit her when i was there here yesterday but you can visit her again and it may have to stop by before i leave tomorrow just to say hello because she was such an important part of me being involved with omsi. Again i want to thank you for being here and just the opportunity to share with you some thoughts and ideas about my latest book think black. Tonight what we want to do is im going to do both the talk about the book and also inner dispersant with some reading from the book and then towards the end will have an opportunity for questions and answers as well. And if nobody has said this over to come if you do have a cell phone and you want to put on vibrate or silence, that probably would be a really, really, really good idea. So i just have found is so surprising to learn more about my book after its been published. Often as in all the thing to write a book, you know what youre writing about, you publish it and you go and you talk about what it is you have written. And what i found out what im going to share with you tonight is some of the things that ive learned obviously in writing the book and i will be able to share this with you, it also some of the surprising things i learned after the book has been published. I thought that was just really interesting and it says a lot about the subject matter and the times i was writing about. I thought a really great place to start would be really were a start the book, which is contrasting my father first day at work with my first day at work and really starting with my first day of work at ibm with his first day at work at ibm. Lets see if we can do that. I held fast to an overhead bar as he elevated train i wrote in suede from side to side, rocketing into manhattan from the bronx. When it dove beneath the harlem river, everything outside the car went dark, and i caught a reflection of myself in the window. A ballooned afro, pork chop sideburns, a blue zoot suit with red pinstripes, a fire engine red turtleneck, and a trench coat its caller turned up. Half hour later i strutted from the subway to the light rain hanging over wall street, humming the theme song from the film shaft, which id seen the night before. I fancied myself as the movies black hero about to engage in battle with the white troops of injustice arrayed before me. I entered one of the skyscrapers squeezed into the financial district and took an elevator up to a higher floor. There, stenciled in blue, a site on the glass doors read ibm, and beneath it in white, new York Financial office. I grassed the door handle but paused, catching another glimpse of myself in the glass door pain. I shook my head, unsure of what to make of this decision, and ready to push through those glass doors, uncertain of what they awaited me on the other side of the threshold. On that fall day in 1971, i was young and black, the fight an angry, and more than ever determined not to be like my father. Yet there i stood about to report for work at ibm where he had worked for 25 years. So thats how i start the book. And i wonder, i kind of get some of this away, but it went to eat you can date when the photograph is . And and i can tell you its noty dad, its me. Many people ask. And its also not 1971. In anybody guess what your that photo might be . There are some hints there. [inaudible] no, its not. Lets do a couple things. First of all, im wearing bellbottoms. That data. I have pork chop sideburns. That dates it, and that is malcolm x, and that should date it kind of as well, too. I will keep you in suspense and ill just say it was 1968. Thats when the photograph was taken, three years before it entered ibm but did somebody say that . There you go. I looked very similar to that maybe a little bit cleaned up with that zoot suit on but i looked kind of similar to that one away to work at ibm. Anybody come for extra credit, that magazine is name mojo. Anybody know what that magazine was connected to . So it was the magazine of the bsc, the black Student Council at Columbia University in 1968. Thats really important historically for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons it was so important is that 1968, that may, that spring was the spring of the columbia student uprising and that was the spring which saw both the sds group with mark rudd, the black Student Council with people like sam madison and ray brown and also the hispanic students at columbia, the young lords with felipe a luciano really very involved in trying to get more than just the education from columbia but try to get a university to make a difference in terms of social change and social justice as well. A lot of what happened in those 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 and i control a direct line between what took place in 1968 and was taking place right now so that was a really, really important place. Because i think in people, i was among them, i wasnt in colombia at the time, i was in high school in new york city, but i think in people got the idea that we could make a difference if we raise our voices and organized in the right way. I have to make a little bit of call out here because theres a couple of folks sitting in the audience here who along with me were young in those days i havent seen land in 50 years and we were very involved in some of the real activism back in the 60s that a think the groundwork for much of what took place. This picture is revelatory because it is the classic picture of a radical young black man in the 60s, right . If i look at this and, of course, those pictures are from the black panthers, youll see theres not much daylight between how i looked and how those Young Brothers in the black panthers looked as well. I do my thing i was part of black panthers, part of the intellectual wing of the black panthers. So thats me when i started the book, thats me when i stepped into ibm, started work at ibm. What about my dad . What about 25 years before . What was that like for him . It was the late 1940s, postworld war ii america. Anything was possible. Duke ellington swung jazz Jackie Robinson swung a big league bat. Brown v. Board of education swung through the courts. Nowhere with 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, an accounting professor invited one of her student to dinner. That black tea i i arrived at r swanky apartment dressed to the nines. Thomas watson, founder of ibm, stepped from the shadows. Watson offered my father the job, in a Jackie Robinson moment it should. The start of an unknown chapter in the history of modernday computers. Now, its a story i heard a lot growing up of watson. We used to call the old man or mr. Watson. I heard a lot of names my dad used for him but the story i heard most was my dad showing up to dinner, watson, stepping out from a back room and saying to my dad, in no Uncertain Terms, im the only dem 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 Branch Rickey Jackie Robinson story about the early days of computers where my dad would have been obviously Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, and now my dad doing something similar in computers and high technology, and Thomas Watkins senior kind of in the role of Branch Rickey who was the general manager at the doctors who hired Jackie Robinson to actually 19,451st up with one of the 14 of the brooklyn dodgers and in 1947 actually the same year my father started working as a couple months later, actually have to step to the plate in ebbets field first swing a bat. So this is the story i really started out thinking i was writing. In an 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 euro, and sometimes the place you get to is not necessarily the place you thought you were starting from and going to peer and so thats the journey, and it kind of telling the story, i dont give the story at a time so lets just look over that more about what the time was like. So there is watson. Thomas j watson could watch a founder of ibm, came from a background working at ncr and somewhat of a very rough and tumble businessmen. He was part of ncr they called a knockout gang and let the knockout gang, at the knockout gang was without a car competition, we knock them out. So this 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, and so one of the things that you see here is this picture of my dad. And this is another thing i just learned after the book was published. Some would ask you in this picture, and i hope you can still see it. What might you think is really significant about this picture, other than the fact theres just one black guy and two two whenn the picture . Does anybody see anything unique in this picture . What i will tell you is the ayes have it. And by that i mean if you look at the direction that everyone is staring, look at who is staring directly at the camera, and look at who is staring away, or has their eyes hidden. All of the white guys in this picture are staring directly at the camera as if to say i belong. And my father and the two women are staring off in the distance. One of the witness sunglasses on as if to say, im not sure i belong. I didnt realize we were capturing that but in many ways this captures that time really, really, really well, and in some ways captures a time we stood with us in terms of being able to look at a sense of entitlement and privilege may be, and i think thats 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, and those of you who will be able to read the book can read more but i just found it so fascinating that was in this picture. And i didnt realize it until it was actually published. This is part of the time my dad stepped into the company, again, first African American software engineer. And i should say really in all honesty that even using that term is a little bit anachronistic because i dad would work for ibm in 1947. He was hired in 46 anything late 46 and started working in general 47. There was no such thing as software. Software had not been invented. Ibm called people to wet had hb systems engineers. They still do, and yet he worked on the technology that would ultimately give rise to software. But when he started work there were punchcards and or punchcard machines and you seen some of the other things involved, too. This is really the dawn of the digital age. The other thing i wanted to do with this book is because some of us, so many of us are so used to technology that is so accessible and easy to use his take a step back down memory lane of what technology was like back in my dad today and the technology that i grew up knowing. Do you have a cell phone you can at least put her hand on and maybe even pull out of your pocket . I dont want you to turn it on but i do want you to get a sense of how much it weighs. What do you think, a couple ounces baby . May be a half pound, maybe . Be, but more like four, five, six ounces. So your cell phone is a programmable computer. Theres absolutely no doubt about it. Youve got some in between eight and i dont know, 512 gb of gigabytes of storage in the computer, okay . In that, lets say four ounces and i will show a picture of the first ever programmable computer. Thats an ibm for hundred seven, the first ever commercially available programmable computer. I that many of those his mass d at least by ibm to lots of people. The of the Programmable Computers before that but all went off. This was the first like a cell phone, mass produced. This box alone, that 407 wade three times your when you put all of the ancillary equipment around it that it needs, disorders and tiger leaders and the printers, you get a computef that weighed somewhere between ten and 12 times. That is 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, far left, thats worked hard to put into this machine, cards were red. Right in the is a a converted typewriter that was used as a printer. And right here at the store, inside that door was at this. Believe it or not i found this on ebay, and this is what was used to program the earliest computers. This board is actually from an ibm 407 picked my dad used to bring his home and away we program these, and they used the word program because thats what we did, we would have patch cords, and like a telephone operator. The old days there we would blunt one into a whole third and one into a hole in one there and there and there and there, so you would end up with this network on here of brightly colored patch cords that controlled how the circuit inside of that machine spoke to each other, red cards, added, because it hardly did subtraction. I think the old ones just add a thin produce results. Pretty fascinating. What you would end up with is something that looked like this. Thats the board. Thats somebody whos actually working on it, and this is what the boards would look like. We actually called the process basketweaving. When i say we, people who programmed computer in the face called it basketweaving for obvious reasons. So when i was like five, my sister was three or four, 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 we 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 that and plug this into that, and i guess we do our best because it always told the next day god, would you guys did was great, everything was just great, and it just worked as a thought it would. I dont believe that. He probably had to do a lot of stuff himself but at least there i was at five use old program computers. I have to say, i walked in with a no, you hear the term digital native, i could throw out a lot but ive never been in a room where anybody has been a digital native lacunae. I started in 1956, i was five years old when my dad first did this. A long time in computers. The other thing that was really important, this is what was going on inside of hightech, but my dad was hired in the late 40s, early 50s was when these computers were really starting to be used quite extensively. But it was also a whole social environment that was going on outside of ibm. That was also really, really important to my dad as well. Lets kind of get a sense of what was going on outside of ibm. On august 28, 1963, i scan the small black and White Television screen in my grandparents living room for glimpses of my parents. A 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 the millions of black faces lining the grassy mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial while i love Martin Luther king, jr. s words to see me deeply. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where it 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, 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 to a bus marked collards only, that waited behind the maryland house now a popular rest stop on i95. My father ushered clottey envy onto the waiting bus, though he said little on the right from maryland to newport news. I had become so used to my father explaining the promises of the Digital Future that it stunned me to see him rendered impotent by the shackles of a dr. Cohen in past. So this was the world that was taking place outside of ibm. And the two collided in no Uncertain Terms or my dad. It collided inside idea because as the first black software engineer, he was faced with many challenges just to keep his job. And and i talk to someone else n the book. For example, one of the stories that he pulled off without when he had recently been hired, he was sent on a business meeting that turned out to be a meeting with a prostitute. The idea was that he he was caught on film with a 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 ms. Shaheen time in order to really further his education. And i heard over and over and over from him growing up, when you might have expected your dad to be there to throw a ball with you or go out and play with you and there he was working over some software diagram or something. I heard so many times can you 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 here and so that certainly infiltrated his consciousness and the outside world in that respect infiltrated his consciousness. I think the other thing that a talker in the book is how not only did have this sense of the races and he encountered working at ibm, but, unfortunately, he also turned some of that racism in on himself. And so i grew up with a father who didnt like the fact that he was black because he felt the color of his skin health and back. The color of his skin made in less worthy, less intelligent even which i found so surprising. This is my dad, really a smart guy, championship chess player on the ibm chess genes from in years. Played four instruments come on and on and on, and yet he has internalized and thats what we use, he has internalized racism to such an extent now he sees himself as not as worthy and not as capable. You can imagine here i am, im a young man whose thinking wow, i want to get as much as again about my history aqim as a person in historical terms come terms of africanamerican history and suspend my afternoons at the Schomburg Library in new york reading about this wonderful figures in African American history that a never taught in school. This also was a point in writing this book when my editor at harpercollins 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 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 and heres just a little snippet of what this was like when we went into the maryland house which some of you before, we had to change buses there. After returning from themarch and this is 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 a few summers before we had been forced to change buses. We sat at the lunch counter this time reading our menus went 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 now is the time for us to take a stand. She held her hand out in front ofus. Here we are she said to carty and me. When we did not rise the waitress returned. She snarled i thought i told you we dont serve your kind. My father surprisingly snapped and were not leaving untilyou 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 school stool and the entire restaurant had grown silence, observing the events that were unfolding. Dont look at other people my mother scolded, turn around and look at your menu but the manager must have felt the stairs as well and perhaps paused to ponder the wisdom of alienating his white patrons, many of whom stopped herewhen heading north on their way home. By the time he reached us, the managers determination had dissolved into an insincere, syrupy southern smile. Hifolks, what are you all having . He asked. After we made ourselection from the menu the waitress stormed off. We sat and waited while behind us the buzz of conversation slowly returned. When a waitress finally appeared without order she slapped down the plates on the counter. Dont know what you folks expect to accomplish here. 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 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 Branch Rickey, jan Jackie Robinson moment in computers to something larger. He asked me the obvious question, why didnt i hire him in the first place . Why did Thomas Watson in 1946 iron dad to go to workin 1947 or ibm . Why hire a black eye . I said i dont know that answer but by the time i deliver the finished manuscript 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 into words very shocking if not very horrifying. Another two words. Because the first thing i discovered is that ibm was deeply involved in the eugenics movement. For those of you that dont know what eugenics is, it is that pseudoscience of race which attempts to find a cure 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 in firm or mentally or physically, need to get rid of them. And back in the 20s eugenics was quite a popular thing. Alexander graham bell was president of the eugenics record association, many people dont know that margaret sanger, founder of planned parenthood was deeply involved in eugenics. In fact, saw her work in her words, her work was Womens Health and Reproductive Health as pulling the weeds, those were her words of humanity. The cause in those days, a Family Planning was all about promoting this idea of eugenics. So just a couple of things here, that is Madison Grant, Madison Grant wrote a book published about 1920s called the passing of the great race. And i wish i could say that netbook fits in history someplace and we can go back to look at it as a particular historical epic but i cant and i cant because this book is still popular today. This book is popular with white extremists, white nationalists as it talks about the concerns that are still expressed to this day of somehow the population changing so that your typical idea of whatever this nordic european idea of humanity is is going to shift here in the United States. So Madison Grant. The next figure, do i have a next figure was in mark there it is. Thats charles down and fort. Charles davenport was head of the Eugenics Records Office out of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in new york. Set up by the carnegie institute. Again, i wish i could say they were out of the news as early as last january some might remember that horrible incident thathappened with james d watson. Watson and trick, the dna folks where watson was spewing all this really racially negative he. You and in some ways reflecting this whole idea of eugenics, guess what laboratorywatson worked for . Cold Spring Harbor laboratory out of new york who took the step of actually stripping him of some of his awards but theres a history here. And its something i wanted to communicate in this book is that some of the issues we deal with today have roots so long ago that weve often forgot them. So 1928, these are just some of the ideas 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 area the jamaica study was meant to identify mixed race individuals on the island of jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control. The problem with the jamaica study 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 the various means of population control. Early 20s, 1922 now. Theres a Young Company that a man named Thomas Watson has given the name ibm and watson says to davenport, i know how to do this. Weve got the equipment that willallow you to store the information , collected, sorted, tabulate it so ibm, one of the first large projects ibm one went to work on was the jamaica study. I mean, in reading this it was quite shocking to me. What was to come was even more shocking. One of the things we know we see in technology all the time in computers andsoftware is something works in one area you dont just drop it. You dont justshelve it. It really is if its working well you figureout where else you can use it. 1928 , five years later 1933, watson takes what they learned with the jamaica study to berlin. And the third reich and 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 third right and 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 breadth of thatinvolvement. Ibm machines identified cues trace back their ancestry generations, mark them for transport toconcentration camps. Managed the railroads that transported them there. Kept track of which jews were killed and which remained alive. Identified which jews was asked what skills and help not to allocate them for slave labor. Monitor the health and fitness of jews for barbaric medical experiments or being worked to death, kept records to torture and execute jews and all concentration camps, kept track of german soldiers, plan german tanks and movements against the allies and scheduled luftwaffe bonnie raitt. Again, it was almost hard to believe it. I didnt do the primary researcher, fortunately there , i dont even know if the word fortunately is right. But the light is shined on this history because so many of us dont know this history but there are some excellent source materials for this which 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 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 called in german labor fulfillment. Just another word for forced labor. Some of you probably remember seeing the films of concentration campprisoners where they got numbers. The part you were told is many of those numbers were connected directly to a deck of punch cards which had those numbers in and i dont remember the actual column. I think it was column 22. I do say that in the book. There was even 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 and ibm made sure only their equipment would read those punchcards that they made and the other part thats important that recognizes this was not equipment sold to nazi germany. Ibm never sold equipment in those days. When i went to work they still never sold equipment. They leased it so they could maintain control over it and ibm maintain control over the equipment as well as producing the punchcards and nazi germany bought billions of punchcards to maintain all this information on german citizens so this is starting, this is turning into this really range story. Heres work makes you free, that of course is this incredible misnomer because Nothing Happened by that date made anyone free in any real sense of the word. Those are the islands back how, i have been there. Walked through the camp. It is a riveting experience only equivalent to when i told the story in the book the experience of me walking through slave in west africa. Fortunately this is how people were treated and there are the punchcards. Made by this company that i went to work for, that my dad went towork for that we use. If you do something successful with the technology, you dont just stop. You dont just 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 nazi germany and italy, the axis powers in the war, they could not get that money back unless they pass through agencies involved in reparations. The whole idea was to make money, nazi germany payback something to the people whose lives youdevastated. Ibm didnt want to pay back any money. And watson, president of ibm was really skilled manipulator of public opinion. And some of you probably recognize what im about to say. He knew that if he could devoteattention here. He might not realize what was going on here. So why not hire two blacks and a handful of jews . Thats a pretty dramatic thing to do. In the late 40s right after, middle 40s after the war. People might not focused so much on how you were trying to get back to millions and millions of dollars that you made during the war. To the extent for example watson had actually funded a group of Army Soldiers that were his formeremployees , probably ibm men, thats what they were known as affectionately i suppose inthe army. And when the concentration camp was liberated, everybody went for the prisoners but the ibm folks went behind the scenes to make sure they got back to headquarters. So this was a really, it was almost full to read about this, to understand the depths to which this was going on and i did ask edwin black, edwin black has written a book called ibm and the holocaust, a wonderful book that talks about this and he said why do you think ibm that, i think they hired him because of this divergent thing and he said to me, i think youre right. Youre absolutely right and he began to tell me about what they had done in hiring jews as well do , i talk about it in the book, other instances and watsons history where needed as well. Better public attention one way everybody wont see whats going on in another part of your business but what i was about to say is if youre successful, with eugenics and youre successful with the holocaust, you dont stop there. Its now postworldwar ii. Early 1950s. You look around the world and you say youre pretty good at identifying population and separating out populations and figuring out who belongs and who doesnt belong control and who doesnt get control of a logical place to turn is pretoria in south africa and while there was no book written about this, it was just at this point my guess that ibm was involved. When i found out the depths to which they were involved ibm created the passbook system which was used to identify who was black, who was colored, who was asian and was white and therefore who was allowed certain privileges ofcitizenship and who wasnt. By the time of these, and early 60s, watson has passed the old man but a new Thomas Watson junior, his son is in control of the company. The old kind punchcards are passed and now we got more modern Computer Technology affords databases and data storage and other means to collect and store large amounts of information on population and most of that research or i should say i went to Court Records, wildlife 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 that documentation of what had happened. So let me just put up a couple images from apartheid area now, i wish i could have said its stop there. But it didnt. And i started to get a sense of i see whats going on this is what ibm, i write about in the book that was going on with technology as technology has this history which is not always on theright side of human rights and civil rights. So just three days ago, i was reading a piece, maybe some of you read about google and what google was doing with facial recognition but was going into homeless areas, homeless filters and identifying the typically africanamerican men and taking videos of africanamerican men in order to train its video analytics facial Recognition Software. By the time i had submitted my book to a publisher, someone told me youve got to read this article in the intercept. Thank god for the intercept, really love that newsletter and this article was all about how ibm 9 11 and use footage of new yorkers unknowns 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 very poignant and i want 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 as citizens are engaged in understanding how that technology is going to be used we cant be sure 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 isreleased and how the technology is used. Threeweeks ago , boston. A jewish peace group called never again action marched from the Holocaust Memorial in boston to amazons headquarters in cambridge and while they were there in front of amazons headquarters and i saw this on television and i thought these are young people who 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 weve 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 this simple feelgood story about my dad and Thomas Watson, Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson a more of a cautionary tale about the importance of us as citizens really engaging in the technology that we are using. Ill just give you one other example and eyesight many in the book. Microsoft released aproduct, wasnt a product. They released a chatbot. You can interact with the chatbot as though it was a person and this chatbot is supposed to learn the people in interact with and it was called tay. Within 24 hours of being released this is what tay would say. You would ask it to the holocaust happened and tay would say the holocaust never happened, i hate jews. You would ask it about women and tay would say women should go to hell. You would ask him about black lives matter, one of the people early on in black lives matter, tay would say the ray mckesson should be hanged. I couldnt believe this and this is out there. You can see this. I document it in the bookand i give the source for that so its not like something that were making up. This is what can happen with technology that if its not controlled and ill give you one moreexample so you see that this is something 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 its 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 looks. You have a hold of the slave ship. You play the game by walking slaves of a ladder, walking them off the plank into the hold of a 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 were trying to do something worthwhile. And i think what i came to is something we used as a in programming. Something i heard my dad say a lot. Garbage in, garbage out. Racism in, racism out. We 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 unless we are able to reach the people who work in hightech, with the history of their industry, with an understanding of the kind of product we want to produce , were going to get slave tetris and all kinds of other weird stuff coming out that harms people more than help people so 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 that here are some of the things you can do. We do need to train people in hightech in the historyof how the tech has been used, not only on the right side of human rights. We need to help Companies Realize before you release a product you want a focus group thats diverse so that people can give you some feedback and say slave tetris, youve got to be crazy. You cant release a product like that and those of us in the activist Community Need to make sure we are working on things like Digital Literacy. In the book i suggest to people for example to go to the big search engines, not google and type in the same search terms that dylan 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 from what dylann roof got. The first page i got was alex jones infowars. Theres no rational universe in which he qualifies as somebody having discourse on race and Race Relations in the United States. We need to help young people in particular and ourselves understand just because something appearshigh up on a search results 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. 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 andtake for granted. He and the men of his generation some of the women as well i think believe that what they were creating would help to monetize society. Would make it more colorblind. Would allow us to have algorithms making decisions which would be neutral. Unfortunately thats not the reality that we have. I was talking to a woman recently whose father was also of the same generation and worked for ibm as my dad did and she said my dad and i were walking down the street towards the end of his life and we saw these people looking at these things in their hands and he said whats that . She said i told him, those are self on and i explained what a cell phone was the networks behind this and he shook his head and said we created a monster. And i think its up to all of us to recognize that we also can control thatmonster. My dad struggled with that. And i want to read almost at the end here. Lets see if i can find this last section that i want to read to you. I was really curious to know a little bit about the mindset of the engineers that created some of these things. That worked with ibm to develop stuff that was used in the holocaust and facial Recognition Technology and the article in the intercept actually interviewed a former ibm employee so i thought this is very revelatory for us tounderstand whats going on in the minds of folks like this. Rich kelson, a former ibm researcher working on facial recognition during these years when ibm was involved with facial recognition with new yorkers provided a window into the minds of those behind ibms racial classification technology. Going as far back as eugenics. We were certainly 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 if this gets better this could really be an issue. Well, facial Recognition Technology did get better. It did become an issue. Only as outside researchers, and theres a woman at mit, enjoy w a canadianamerican scientist is 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 with ibm with its long history of technology and 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 in determining ones destiny 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 area 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 side 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 have any questions and ill be more than happy to answer any of those questions and you probably can also off the Powerpoint Presentation at this. Anybody have any questions . Have you done a can talk yet . I have not done a 10 talk. Ive written to the 10 people to see if theyd beinterested in a talk like this and who knows , maybe that will happen. Thank you. You think our government was involved and knowing all this wasgoing on west and mark. Thats a great question. I dont think our government was involved, i know it and i know it for this reason and i talk about this in thebook. The internet and the technology to develop the internet was really important part and it was actually the first project funded by a Government Agency called darker, Defense Advanced Research projects agency. It had headquarters in an mit building called tech square, 545 main street in cambridge and in that same building were darpr, mit, ibm, General Electric and the cia. My dad would occasionally and i ask this question in my book and my dad worked for cia, he would say ive got to go away and i cant tell you where im going and i cant tell you what im doing and im sworn to secrecy. I later found out and i actually found a copy of a letter written by someone tech square thanking ibm for my dads service that he went to work on a secret project called cp 67. That project was one of the projects that came out of darpa funding and the development of the technology for cp 67 , that was the full name actually was the technology that became pretty much the foundation or the modernday 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 now Companies Like google, apple, microsoft are using. Without what was done in cambridge none of what were seeing, your cell phone wouldnt be available, twitter would be around so 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 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 i think it was in 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. Could you wait until the microphone is there . Great. How old were you when you realize you were part ofthis social experiment . I did not realize, the question was how old what was i when i realized i was part of a social experiment. I did not realize that throughout my career at ibm. I worked there from 1971 to 77. I didnt have any understanding of his history until i read the book and it was only when i tried to answer my editors question, who was watson and who was ibm that i uncovered this information and i think thats one of the reasons why most 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 go back in the book to the 1500s and you can see this pattern helping in technology so its kind of a little bit of a leader to say i hope you read about in the book because its more there i think for all of us to suggest and understand. Thank you for your question. Anyone else . At the time when you were working at ibm, with your background with you being previouslywith 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. With my background and i should say this is a couple years after i had been more deeply involved with the panthers though 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. What i didnt tell you in that reading i do say in the book. I laugh a little bit when i think of it. Here i am with my big afro and sitting at my desk. And theres another black fellow in the audience, in the office who comes over to me and says do you know what youre doing . What he didnt realize is that i had just come out of my Managers Office and my manager had given me a silver pen and pencil set that you give the secondgeneration ibm also hears this thing which i really know something about ibm and heres this guy sitting there and he said white shirt. If you want to be different, but down collar. And then he pulled up his pant leg and he said, because i didnt say this in the book or in the reading. I had on platform patent leather shoes. Black shoes, you want to be different, rose with little holes inthem or something and then he says dark socks. And he looks at my hair and he said, he had a crew cut and he kind of ran his hand through his crewcut and he said that hair, i dont know what to tell you. Dont you understand, youre working at ibm. What he didnt understand is i knew exactly what i was doing and yes, part of my way and i think maybe it might have been a little nacve but it was my way of dealing with that heaviness is with was also establishing my difference. And over time and i tell some of these stories in the book, i talk about what my clash with ibm was like and how i experienced racism in a similar way but dont with it in a different way from my dad. Thank you, great question and i appreciate 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 ofthe world. And he you you also talk about how he is, how he has internalized racism and based on a person that i am seeing and thinking that other people influenced you as well. I wonder if you can tell us about who those people are and howthey influenced you. Again, a beautiful question. Thank you for asking it. There were other people obviously have had deep influences in my life. Im going to tell you one person and this persons name was ensign harding. I dont know if any of you know that name. You should, some of you have probably heard Martin Luther kings Riverside Drive speech. The speech in which he comes out against the vietnam war. That and many of kings other speeches were written by my mentor and friend and teacher Vincent Harding so vincent was somebody who was very close to me. It really helped me understand. It was an eminent black historian and a teacher of people like Henry Louis Gates at harvard. I have a wonderful opportunity to be a student of his when i took time off from Wesleyan University to go to the king center at atlanta and i help because we took over some buildings at wesley and, ended up getting money out of the university to help set up the first part of the Martin Luther king jr. Center which was an Educational Center of the institute for the black world. Vincent was there and another wonderful person was there, very formative to my character was levon bennett, eminent historian. Wrote before the mayflower, the shaping of black america and was an editor for ebony magazine back in the days when avenue was publishing some of these wonderful information so i feel very blessed that i had people like that helping with my character. And also i was living in new york so i had the opportunity and im looking over at my friends lynn because the Unitarian Church where i grew up one of the other people who was often in the congregation was somebody like pc your. So i had the opportunity 12 and 13 years old to go up to this tall guy and say mister seeger, would you autograph my Church Program and he did. And about 2 years before p passed, totally out of the book, i got a chance to speak with him for 45 minutes and to thank him for helping form my character and helping me understand how you could 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, informed me and influenced my life and thank you for that question. I have two questions if i can sneak them both in. 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 and the other is more for those of us involved in teaching Digital Literacy. What is your advice and what do you think are the most important messages that we should convey . Great question so let me try the first one which is if i knew today, if i knew in 72 what i knewtoday when i have gone to work in ibm . The answer is probably yes and i would have for a couple reasons area one of the things my dad always said was learn about computers. The cause if you learn how to control computers, you wont be at such adisadvantage when computers are trying to control you. It was great advice and thats why i went to ibm. I knew i wasnt going to work or ibm forever and ever amen, my dad did for his career but i thought this is really Good Technology to learn about, whatever i do is going to be important. It turned out to be really important and it was the way i got to yossi as a volunteer and help me throughout all my schooling as a way to always feel i had a job and when i needed to fall back on it, thankfully ivebeen able to eventually roll out of bed and do softwarebecause of my experiences. I think i would have gone to work for ibm. To think i might have modified a 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 recent but the outright racism throughout the company and give you a short piece of what he did. I thought it was so important for me to find. The bottom of his dresser drawers, he underneath a stack of a boy magazines, okay. It couldnt have been a secret as my mom lived all his laundry. In the bottom drawer though she must have known, i dont know and yes, i did found through playboys but underneath them there was this great envelope with an ibm logo on it, dogeared, one of those with the strain you tie around those two and you do figure 8. And it took me a while to realize what was in that envelope and when i finally did i realized my dad had bootleg copies of the ibm Entrance Exams with questions and answers and every so often, this i knew before i knew it was there. I knew that these strange people would come to our house. Mostly young africanamerican men and my dad would tell my sister to get lost and i would hear him pull out that drawer and he had this envelope and theyd sit down at the table and theyd have cost conversations. I didnt know it was going on and all of a sudden dinner a couple months later my dad would say you wont believe what happened today. Rememberthat guy that came over to visit us . Ibm just hired him i did not realize dad was running his own underground Railroad Operation ibm and i think, i hope that i would have been slick enough to do Something Like that. Now, in keeping with the book which is about my relationship with my dad i am going to do a little bit of a spoiler alert and tell you the end of that story. So heres this dresser drawer with the playboys and ibm thing. Now i graduated from college and its my time to take the ibm Entrance Exam and the first place i had to is that dresser drawer. And guess whats no longer there . When i go to my dad i say what examination questions . What do you mean, you dont need questions, youre smart enough to take it. I wassmart enough to take it. The things i talk about youll see in the book is this conflict, father and son. Theres always attention. My dad wasalways trying to see if he was better than me , i didnt do as well as he did on the exam and i heard about it for the rest of his life. So its a funny way of saying i hope i could have been as aware as he was about some of the more subtle ways to encounter what he encountered. Second part of your question, really speaks to the mission, i know it speaks to your mission and its couldnt be more important to teach young people to be digitally literate is really, that means to teach them how to live in our current democracy. If people are digitally literate, what happened in 2016 would never happen. Heres what i mean by what happened. In 2016, i was reading about this again today because more research has come through. Ioa, the Internet Research association targeted africanamericans and in particular targeted young africanamericans. I talk about this in the book and they target them through technology. They targeted them through facebook. They targeted them through twitter with mediums which were all about dont vote. And i talk about and i quote in the book young men, particularly some of the black lives matter activists and i talk about newsom who specifically said he was repeating the means, the themes, the ideas put into the discourse by the russian Internet Research association and he then digested all of them down to a meme that we heard a lot in 2016 read a lot of us railed against which was i aint voting. So right there, for me is the reason why you have to teach Digital Literacy. You have to know that just because you read it as news on a twitter account or a news, on facebook , it doesnt necessarily mean its true. You have to besmart enough to penetrate the headlines, ask the questions. To go deeper into that to ask is this meeting or not . I have to say for me, anybody, anytime, anywhere who doesnt says doesnt vote is suspect. Particularly as an africanamerican when i know the history of many mostly women who died for the opportunity to go to a pole and vote, nobody in the world is going to tell me not to vote. I dont care but that kind of consciousness is what we need to instill in our young people, many of whom dont have a history of knowing about the mississippi democraticfreedom struggle and all that went on then. I think its important. Digital literacy doesnt just mean teaching a person how to read the screen area and its really what is the information behind that screen that youneed to know about . Where is that information generated from whats the history that exists . Thats important as well which is why Digital Literacy encompasses such a wide range and thats what is important so to be more specific, bringing in people who understand the history and helping students. Lets take a pot or an idea. Lets type it in on a search engine, what results can we get . Who comes up first. Are they . Whats the history behind them. Its Critical Thinking that you start to develop which we need more of and i can tell you is a former College Teacher we need more of that in our population and thats the way you do it. Its a great platform, technology can be a wonderful platform to help develop Critical Thinking the hind Digital Literacy the short answer to a long question, i do say some more about that in the book. I actually give i think 10 or 12 different specific strategies or Digital Literacy might be of importance and im more than happy to have more of a conversation about that. Thank you. Anyone else. You guys have Great Questions and i appreciate this i had a question about your fathers internalized racism and i was wondering if that shifted with the 60s, the black panthers movement, like is beautifuland this whole movements that happened. Did it shift his perception of how he viewed himself and the blackcommunity . Thats a great question and the short answer is number did the movements outside shipped my dads views of himself as a black man . My dad really bought into murray and jenkins and all of the bell curve stop and all that craziness about africanamericans and people of color and intelligence. And you would find him reading this stuff and saying well, they say it here. Not having even literacy there to understand much of that research and been debunked because it fit in to a narrative that he had about himself. My dad was born in 1919 which teens he was born right at the ascendancy of the 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 and we had many fights about that. My sister, and i say this in the book so i dont mind saying it now. My sister had children of different colors and my dad would selectively whisper messages about their intelligence. It was really traumatic. So again, what i wanted to present in the book is this contrast. You see these contrasts everywhere, the contrast between ibm as a Great Company and with a dark history , contrast between me and mydad and within my dad so. The book is about how you reconcile all these varying contrasts. So again thank you for that question. I really appreciate it. This is cool. This is a cooldiscussion, thank you. Anyone else . Yes. And we will probably make this the last question. I was wondering if you have any advice. We know that elder is in is biased and are used for everything from the criminal Justice System to how long people are probate paroled and facial recognition is out of our control because it out of the hands of other governmentalagencies. How can we as individuals who dont believe in these biases essentially, how do we overcome or work towards a different future iguess . That is the question, thats not just a good question, that is the question in front of us and there are a number of ways to do this. As activists, first of all there are a couple of organizations that are doing algorithmic vetting. So they are looking at some of the algorithms, some of the software, some of the products and saying this actually passes the smell test of being more inclusive and not as biased so aligning yourself with those organizations and helping to work with them and help them do their work. Thats just one of the things that we can do. The other thing we can do is just like in action, we can say to them and sit down with a microsoft or with and im is on and its one of the wonderful things about this book is its given me the opportunity to do some of these things, to sit down with folks who 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. You need to bring in somebody who can tell you about the history of how this technology has been used because maybe if youve got a developer whose writing code and understand that history, he or she will think twice before they decide to create a game like slave tetris because they dont understand that history and i guarantee whoever wrote slave tetris, had no clue about the atlantic slave trade and what really happened but had they would have never created a game like that. Theres a ton of other games they could have created so education, just like we were saying before, not just with thetechnology but the history behind the technology is also really important. And i 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 they sit down at a screen point to whats going on and if you knowsomething more than what they see on that screen, say it. Talk to them about it. That is where its going to make a change. In the young people who go on to become the developers, who go on to write the code. Have this level of understanding of what they are faced with. And the responsibility of creating analgorithm. When they understand that i think things might be different. So those are just some ideas. I say a little more in the book, im more than happy to talk to you about that further. Thank you all so much. This has just been great. Im going to be outside with annie blooms book, signing copies of books for anybody who would like this and i want to thank them for the opportunity to share these thoughts and ideas. This has been a very special opportunity for me. Thank you. [applause] the u. S. Senate returns today at 2 pm eastern for whats scheduled to be a pro forma session but the house and senate this week past Coronavirus Relief legislation including more funding for small businesses, hospitals and testing. Talks continue on a larger relief package for congress to deliver as early as may 4 due to the pandemic. Watch live coverage of the house on cspan and the senate on cspan2. Youre watching a special edition of books tv airing now during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus outbreak. Tonight we focus on history. First musician tim macgraw and biographer john meacham discuss history through song and then Wilfrid Mcclay on his book land of hope a history in america and later eric at least america for americans looks atprejudice towards immigrants through american history. Enjoy books tv now and over the weekend on cspan2. Hello. My name is connor moran, director of the wisconsin book festival. Thank you for being here tonight. I believe this was the seventh of eight events in this room and it is the 30th out of 32 events just today and the third day of the wisconsin book festival so thank you somuch. Evive seen many of you all day. I couldnt be more pleased to be introducing megan phelpsroper for her book on followed. We were talking in the back, her discussion of life in a li