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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPowerful LAT piece: "My father was IBM's first black software engineer."
Title:
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My father was IBMs first black software engineer. The racism he fought persists in the high-tech world today
By CLYDE W. FORD
SEP. 22, 2019 3 AM
John Stanley Ford, my father, was the first black software engineer in America, hired by IBM in 1946. Passed over for promotions, discriminated against in pay, with many inside IBM working to ensure his failure, he still viewed his job as an opportunity of a lifetime. He refused to give up.
Minority underrepresentation in high tech has been present since the earliest days of the industry. In reflecting upon my fathers career for a new memoir I wrote about him, I saw important lessons about the history and nature of racism in high tech, and about the steps that corporations and individuals can take to bring about much-needed change.
IBM publicly represents itself as a company with deep roots in diversity and inclusion, but history tells a different story. The roots of racism in high tech coincide with the advent of the digital age, when in the late 1920s a fledgling company run by a cutthroat but savvy businessman named Thomas J. Watson saw an opportunity in eugenics.
Eugenics is a pseudoscience that seeks to create a racially pure master human race by eliminating those deemed inferior. In 1928, the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., had undertaken a project to identify mixed-race individuals on the island of Jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control. Realizing the massive amount of data to be collected and compiled, Watson stepped in with IBM to provide the punched-card technology crucial for the Jamaica projects success.
SEP. 22, 2019 3 AM
John Stanley Ford, my father, was the first black software engineer in America, hired by IBM in 1946. Passed over for promotions, discriminated against in pay, with many inside IBM working to ensure his failure, he still viewed his job as an opportunity of a lifetime. He refused to give up.
Minority underrepresentation in high tech has been present since the earliest days of the industry. In reflecting upon my fathers career for a new memoir I wrote about him, I saw important lessons about the history and nature of racism in high tech, and about the steps that corporations and individuals can take to bring about much-needed change.
IBM publicly represents itself as a company with deep roots in diversity and inclusion, but history tells a different story. The roots of racism in high tech coincide with the advent of the digital age, when in the late 1920s a fledgling company run by a cutthroat but savvy businessman named Thomas J. Watson saw an opportunity in eugenics.
Eugenics is a pseudoscience that seeks to create a racially pure master human race by eliminating those deemed inferior. In 1928, the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., had undertaken a project to identify mixed-race individuals on the island of Jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control. Realizing the massive amount of data to be collected and compiled, Watson stepped in with IBM to provide the punched-card technology crucial for the Jamaica projects success.
We may have come far, but we've still so far to go.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-09-20/ibm-nazi-germany-tech-racism-father
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Powerful LAT piece: "My father was IBM's first black software engineer." (Original Post)
Pluvious
Sep 2019
OP
catrose
(5,065 posts)1. true, true
Thanks for the Holocaust, IBM
Karadeniz
(22,499 posts)2. Why did they hire him...to make his life miserable? Missed opportunity.
Hekate
(90,642 posts)5. My guess is 2 dynamics of the time: Tokenism, by which the company "proves" their inclusivity by...
...hiring, say, one Jew, or one woman, or in this case, one black man. Second: the candidate is highly overqualified, and besides, the company doesn't have a token yet.
malaise
(268,919 posts)3. Thanks for this
Sending it to some folks
CrispyQ
(36,457 posts)4. An excellent piece.