Anticipation laced the air on those mornings when my father left home knowing he’d receive his employee review that day. Excitement sparked between my mother, my sister, and me as we anxiously waited to learn of the pay raise hidden, it seemed, in each review. As long as my father remained loyal to IBM, IBM remained loyal to him. Watson insisted on such loyalty.
My father idolized Watson. He felt a special bond with the man, one that transcended even the bond between father and son. At the start of my father’s career as the first Black systems engineer at IBM, hired directly by the Old Man, my father placed Watson on a pedestal, viewing him as a kind of boon-bestowing demigod who’d reached down from the heavens to give my father a gift he could never adequately repay.
5
Voices of the Dead
I first heard the voices of the dead along the West African coast. In Ghana, during the summer of 1968, the Atlantic lashed the rocks beneath the Elmina Castle, an ominous monolith of weather-beaten white stone. Built by the Portuguese in 1482, Elmina (officially, São Jorge da Mina Castle, the Castle of St. George of the Mines) was named for the mines along this stretch of coast known then as the Gold Coast. But the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, also mined human treasure at Elmina, a place where, for four hundred years, countless thousands of people began their passage into the disconsolate and treacherous world of slavery.
A wizened, slightly stooped old man emerged from the shadows of Elmina carrying an oil lamp.
He stared at me, then intoned in a high-pitched, crackling whisper, “This way.”
He motioned with his finger, and I followed him across the threshold of the fortress, beginning my descent into the darkness of the abyss.
Dark, damp, and cramped, a long, narrow passageway led down to a chamber that once held male slaves. From years of walking this corridor, the caretaker’s hunched back seemed perfectly matched to the shape of the tunnel. He walked slowly. His oil lamp swung. Its rusted iron handle groaned with each step. I crouched so low I was almost on all fours.
Halfway down this cramped corridor, the old man paused abruptly in front of an iron-reinforced wooden door.
“When a slave died,” he murmured, “this door was opened, and his body washed out to sea.”
The rhythmic pounding of waves enveloped us as we plunged deeper into the castle’s inner vault, some fifty feet beneath the sea. There the old man dimmed his lamp, and when my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I could barely make out a window the size of my fist atop a small shaft leading up from the cave we stood in. Through that small opening came the only air and light allowed into this hopeless pit.
As I moved around to take the measure of this awful place, something crunched under my feet, like the sound of stepping on fallen leaves, only heavier and metallic. Unable to see, I reached down and groped in the dark until my fingers found their way over one, two, three links of a chain. I had walked atop the rusted remains of slave chains. The more I moved about this Neptunian dungeon, the more I felt the rusting chains everywhere underfoot.
The caretaker remained silent. Surely, he had seen this before: the sons of slaves walking on the chains of their fathers.
Finally, in a slow, measured cadence, he said, “You know, your ancestors could have been in this very room.”
But I was well beyond the caretaker’s words. My body had grown heavy. My feet felt shackled in place. That’s when I began hearing the voices. Certain at first that it was just the roar of the sea, I listened closely and made out what sounded like the low murmur of distant conversation. The rumbling traveled closer and closer—one, then two, then three, then layer upon layer of voices; a cacophony of humans not moaning or sighing but talking in hushed tones among themselves. I strained harder to hear. Suddenly a message shot forth from the darkness! It ricocheted off the dank earthen walls, bounced back and forth over and over again in time with the rhythm of the sea.
The ghostly voices spoke in unison. “Whatever you do, my son,” the voices said, “make your life count for us. . . . Whatever you do, my son, make your life count for us. . . . Whatever you do, my son, make your life count for us. . . .” Their echo slowly trailed away.
Sweat beaded my brow. Tears flooded my eyes. My heart raced. My mind failed to make logical sense of what had just happened. It felt as though I had been riveted in place for hours, when in reality only a few moments had passed.
Unsure to whom I spoke, I said to the darkness, “Yes, I know.” Then I turned slowly to face the caretaker and said more deliberately, “Yes, I know.”1
Elmina represented a moment of personal reckoning—with evil, with brutality, with the worst of human beings, but most of all with what it meant for me to be Black. One route toward this reckoning is resignation that being Black in America will always mean facing brutality and oppression, whether in chains from a slaver or cuffs from a police officer predisposed to violence against people of color. While I can never ignore or forget the brutality perpetrated in this country against people who look like me, I am not ready to define myself solely in terms of this brutality and oppression. Doing so, I believe, leads down the road of victimization.
Another available route is denial. Slavery, Jim Crow, oppression—all that happened long ago and has no bearing on being Black in America now. At any rate, you are who you are, leave the past behind, and get on with the present and the future. My father’s view of race was a variation on this theme. He was born with darker skin, and therefore, he believed, he was less capable, less intelligent, and less desirable. Though his dark skin was not his fault, it was his burden, and he simply had to make the best of it. This belief set my father and me at odds. What those who espouse such beliefs fail to recognize is that past trauma is not simply left behind. Whether trauma is passed along to subsequent generations through the child-rearing practices of those who directly experienced it, or whether trauma actually causes changes in DNA, as some studies suggest, trauma is transgenerational and cannot simply be ignored.2
I have long believed in a third path, a way neither laden with victimization nor lightened through denial—a way that fully embraces both our historical and our present-day struggle against racism, brutality, oppression, and violence. Instead of impediments, this way views these challenges as obstacles and trials along the long course of a heroic journey.3 I found it personally liberating to view our collective history and present-day circumstances in such mythic terms. The weight of generations lifted from my shoulders. I could release much of the anger and despair that accompanied victimization, and the disbelief and dissociation that accompanied denial.
Viewing our collective experience in this way was also in keeping with how traditional African societies healed from the trauma of brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, ripped from their midst and sold into slavery. My father read my thoughts on these matters, even though what I wrote conflicted with his own warped and wounded self-view. However, I do recall one time when he stepped into my life as my hero.
* * *
“I work for IBM!”
My guidance counselor flinched and then sat upright in his chair.
“I’ll be damned if my son goes to high school to become an airplane mechanic!”
My junior high school guidance counselor tamped down the air. “I understand, Mr. Ford,” he said. “I understand.”
The counselor motioned for me to step outside his office. Hushed tones of their heated conversation seeped from beneath the door. I could not make out what they said, but my father emerged from the counselor’s office fifteen minutes later, smiling.
“Checkmate!” he pronounced. “It’s all taken care of.”
I swelled with pride. My father took a half day off from IBM to confront my guidance counselor. He stood up for me visibly, vigorously, and vociferously. I had not seen him do this before, and I do not remember seeing him do this again. But from that point on, no one dared mention Aviation High School as a future educational option for me.
/> At this time, in the mid-1960s, New York City boasted of three elite academic high schools: Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School, and Stuyvesant High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We lived in the Bronx, so naturally my father wanted me to attend Bronx High School of Science. But I’d have none of that and insisted on Stuyvesant instead. All three schools required passing a common entrance exam for admittance, an exam that I took not long after my father met with my guidance counselor . . . and failed!
Still, by 1966, affirmative action had taken hold, and twenty-five Black and Latino boys, for whom Stuyvesant was deemed beyond their academic grasp, were given a second chance: attend ten weeks of summer school in mathematics and English, and then try to keep up with the school’s rigorous classes. Twenty of us made it through that grueling summer course, and all twenty of us graduated from Stuyvesant in the top rungs of our class.
I entered Stuyvesant at fourteen, younger than many other students. After finishing my geometry homework one Sunday, I doodled with a straightedge and compass while watching a championship football game on television. Much to my surprise, it appeared that my doodles solved an age-old mathematical problem originally stated by the ancient Greeks: the trisection of an arbitrary angle (i.e., make three equal angles from any given angle) using only an unmarked straightedge and a compass.
I cleaned up my doodles and showed the solution to my geometry teacher that Monday. This man enjoyed metaphorically cracking the whip. He’d taught geometry to us students of color that summer, with an understanding, he said unabashedly, that some of us would not succeed. But he took one look at my trisection and whisked me off to see the chairman of Stuyvesant’s Mathematics Department. The two men conferred in hushed tones behind closed doors before approaching me in the waiting room.
“You do realize this is Nobel-level work?” the chairman said.
Since it was mathematics, he’d probably confused the Fields Medal with the Nobel Prize, but still his voice conveyed excitement with not a scintilla of sarcasm. Stuyvesant, after all, proudly counted more than its share of Nobel laureates among former students.
“For the sake of the school, and for you,” my geometry teacher said, “we think you should sit out classes for the next few days until we can determine exactly what to do.”
And so Stuyvesant debated what to do with a fourteen-year-old Black kid whom many (my mathematics teacher initially among them) felt should not have been at the school in the first place, a Black kid who’d apparently just solved one of the three great unsolved mathematical problems of antiquity.
Meanwhile, in a fitting nod to antiquity, the son of an Egyptian diplomat went to work on my solution. Stuyvesant, an all-male school at the time, counted among its student body many sons of ambassadors and diplomats. This kid was one of them, and he was smart . . . really smart. Constructing an airtight geometric proof, he showed that my solution was at best an approximation, not an exact solution, but for certain angles, it was an excellent approximation.
That proved enough for Stuyvesant’s Mathematics Department. Though disappointed at missing out on an international award, the head of the department concluded that any student who concocted a good approximation for a centuries-old problem belonged in Stuyvesant’s top mathematics classes. They proceeded to drop me into advanced placement calculus and matrix algebra, where I found myself alongside fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who also took mathematics classes at Columbia University because they were smarter than any of the teachers at Stuyvesant.
I felt as though someone had pushed me off the deep end of a pool before ascertaining that I could swim, and then, only once I was flailing around in the water, yelled, “Swim!” I struggled for several weeks, particularly in calculus, until discovering that New York University ran a television series called Sunrise Semester that taught college-level classes on-air. Sunrise Semester’s freshman calculus program aired at six a.m., and the curriculum matched Stuyvesant’s closely, except that it was one week ahead. So each morning, I’d get up to watch college calculus on television prior to sitting in a calculus class at high school. This one-week head start provided me enough runway until I learned to “swim” on my own and gave up Sunrise Semester altogether.
One lesson I take from my experience at Stuyvesant is that skin color and test scores have little to do with intellect or academic performance. I also think of the many young Black kids who, in the face of America’s retrenchment from affirmative action, will never be afforded the opportunities afforded me—and how a real Nobel laureate with dark skin might thereby be lost forever.
There is, of course, another equally serious side to this tale, one that cuts to the quick of the deep and abiding connection between technology and race. From my junior high school guidance counselor’s office to my high school Mathematics Department office, my experience was a microcosm of the four-hundred-plus-year experience of African Americans in the face of technology, from their first contact with Europeans to the present day.
My junior high school guidance counselor could not see me. I’d completed seventh and eighth grades in a single year and had received high grades in the most advanced mathematics courses taught at the school. Still, my guidance counselor saw only a Black kid he thought ought not to be directed toward academia, but instead toward an industrial trade. Save for the intervention of my father, I would have been one of a long line of Blacks whose intellectual worth was evaluated based on the color of their skin, and found lacking.
From the earliest contacts between Europeans and Africans, starting in the fifteenth century to the present day, a remarkably consistent theme in racial relations has been that people with darker skin are perceived as less intelligent. Some have simply stated this as a matter of fact. Others have purported to prove this using a variety of pseudoscientific methods, while still others have taken to the methods of modern science to bolster this claim.
Armed with papal bulls sanctifying the slaughter and enslavement of Africans,4 fifteenth-century Portuguese sailors, rounding Cape Verde, the westernmost tip of Africa, arrived along the West African coast and encountered people with dark skin whom many considered to be descendants of Ham, the cursed biblical son of Noah. Referring to these people as “primitives” and “savages,” early tales from these voyagers told of bizarre African physical, social, and cultural traits, as seen through European eyes. Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions already had a well-developed symbology of black and white: black was held to be evil and demonic; and white, virtuous and pure. What to make, then, of people with black skin? Surely they too were from evil, demonic stock. And in the centuries that followed these first voyagers to Africa, Europeans set out to prove just that.
As Europeans encountered other peoples around the world—Africans and people from the Near and Far East—an ordering of traits, especially intelligence, unfolded: white-yellow-brown-black, with white, of course, the most intelligent and black the least. Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, a German physician in the late eighteenth century, dissected the cadavers of African Americans returning with the British to Europe at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War: loyalist Blacks, many of whom had been slaves in the American colonies but then fought with the British in exchange for their freedom. Von Sömmerring, employing pseudoscientific volumetric measurements of the cranial capacity of European and African skulls, claimed to show that Black Americans, with less cranial volume than Europeans and by virtue of their African ancestry, lacked the intellect of Europeans, Asians, or East Indians. Black Americans, von Sömmerring concluded, should simply resign themselves to their fate and live within a social environment of permanent inferiority.5
Von Sömmerring was, of course, one of many before him, and many after, who claimed that skin color determined intelligence. Since von Sömmerring’s time, every decade or so some new theory emerges claiming to prove the connection between the two. The rise of eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s is an iteration of this assertion. An op-ed in the New Y
ork Times in 2018 resurfaced the topic again, this time purportedly based on the latest DNA findings.6
No matter that each resurfacing of the claim linking race and intelligence is debunked or disproven, this seems a never-ending debate with one clear effect: a majority of White Americans believe that Black Americans are lazier and less intelligent than Whites, and they believe that Blacks do little to change their dismal economic circumstances.7 Sadly, recent polls show that the percentage of the American population holding such beliefs is growing, rather than shrinking, over time.8
The beliefs espoused by von Sömmerring and others like him, by eugenics and similar movements, though repulsive to many, still have currency to this day. Acting on such beliefs, people in positions of power, like my guidance counselor, even if they are well-intentioned, exact devastating consequences for young Black students who lack advocates to fight for them.
* * *
I do not know what tense words passed between my guidance counselor and my father that day. But I do not recall my guidance counselor ever once calling me into his office for guidance after my father’s visit. I am fairly certain that one crucial aspect of race remained unstated and undiscussed between these two men, even as it loomed large over their exchange. And that is the linkage between technology and race, and the role technology continues to play in shaping the experience of race in America. Technology and my future concerned both my guidance counselor and my father. Aviation is, after all, an advanced technological field. But my guidance counselor pushed for me to become an aviation mechanic, while my father understood that the future of nearly all fields—including aviation—lay in computers and digital technology and that Black people had every right to lay claim to that future.
Think Black Page 6