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by Clyde W. Ford


  By the mid-1980s, the call for divestment in South Africa, and in those companies supporting apartheid, grew around the world and especially in the United States. Typical of this movement was a flyer produced by the University of Chicago Coalition for Divestment, which listed not only IBM’s direct support of apartheid but also the extensive use of IBM equipment in all aspects of South Africa’s pervasive defense industry.42 Even a group of IBM employees, known as the Black Workers Alliance, joined the mounting call for divestment.

  Averse to negative publicity, in 1986 IBM announced the sale of its South African business and the company’s pullout from the country. Divestment groups and opponents of apartheid celebrated an apparent major victory.43 Instead, they should have been studying history, especially IBM’s history in Nazi Germany. While it looked as though IBM bowed to international pressure on divestment, in truth the company did not back down in South Africa. It simply borrowed a play from its handbook of “dirty tricks.” IBM divested itself from South Africa by selling its business to a South African concern that promptly announced everything would proceed as usual.

  “There will be no change in the supply of IBM products,” the managing director of the new company assured anxious customers.44 For Sakwe Balintulo, arguing before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and for agencies like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed briefs in support of Balintulo’s appeal, IBM’s actions in South Africa smacked of how the company had behaved in support of the Third Reich. They asserted that IBM simply ran the new company, as before, from New York.45 One IBM dealer in South Africa observed, “Nothing has really changed except that IBM no longer has to account for its presence in South Africa.”46

  Not long after Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster Prison, South Africa entered into a period of deep soul-searching and healing, a period it is still in today. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) convened many meetings throughout the country, bringing apartheid victims face-to-face with perpetrators of the most horrific crimes against them. Perpetrators were asked to listen to the stories of the people and their loved ones whom they’d hurt or harmed before being given the opportunity to confess the acts they’d committed and to seek amnesty. The TRC sought reconciliation, not retribution, and no prosecutions were brought against those who testified truthfully and completely.

  During the decades of apartheid, billions of dollars were siphoned from South Africa by international corporations like IBM that supported the regime. Special hearings were held to allow IBM, and other corporations that had benefited from apartheid, to appear before the TRC. IBM and many other international corporations did not appear before the TRC seeking forgiveness. Former TRC head Dumisa Ntsebeza described what happened. “All they came to do there was to justify what they did,” Ntsebeza said. “All of them felt there wasn’t a need to come to the TRC and plead for amnesty.”47

  It appeared that, once again, IBM would make huge profits from the death and suffering of one group of people at the brutal hands of another and would escape unscathed, unbowed, and unrepentant. But in 2002, Ntsebeza, a lawyer, brought suit in New York against IBM on behalf of several dozen Black South Africans. Ntsebeza asserted that IBM should be held liable for the harm it had inflicted on Black South Africans from its wide-scale support of apartheid. The case wound its way through the US justice system. Then, in August 2014, Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York issued a final ruling against Ntsebeza and the other plaintiffs on the grounds that any IBM actions in violation of international law had taken place outside the United States. The case, Scheindlin ruled, had no standing under US law. She added, “That these plaintiffs are left without relief in an American court is regrettable,” but she stood by her decision as upholding legal precedent, “no matter what my personal view of the law may be.”48

  Even faced with Scheindlin’s ruling, Ntsebeza did not give up.

  In 2015, Ntsebeza argued before the US Supreme Court that Judge Scheindlin’s ruling should be overturned and the plaintiffs’ original suit should be reinstated in light of new information about the violations of international law committed by IBM on US soil in support of apartheid.

  In June 2016, fourteen years after a plea was entered in New York, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Ntsebeza case and let Judge Scheindlin’s lower court ruling stand.

  Still, there’s hope for justice. Khulumani, one of the many groups supporting the claims against IBM, has not exercised its right to appeal a related case in front of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York or the Supreme Court based on even newer information from the South African Department of Justice archives about apartheid-era abuses committed by IBM. Khulumani said it reserves the opportunity to exercise its rights at some future date.49

  Thirty years after apartheid, sixty years after Thomas J. Watson Sr.’s death, seventy years after the Holocaust, and nearly one hundred years after eugenics and IBM’s founding, the company is still engaged in the application of the latest digital technology for racial classification.50 In the years after the 9/11 attacks in New York City, as part of their major involvement in the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI), which installed CCTV cameras around the city, IBM used secret camera footage of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers, provided by the New York City Police Department, to refine IBM facial recognition software to search for and identify people by “hair color, facial hair, and skin tone.”51 It’s a painful, cruel irony that this IBM software is now known as “Watson Visual Recognition.”52

  I’ve often wondered what IBM engineers thought about as they developed the punch card templates that helped identify mixed-race individuals on the island of Jamaica, what went through the minds of IBM employees knowingly working on similar technology to support Hitler’s regime, and how anyone would want to help further the brutality and viciousness of apartheid.

  Rick Kjeldsen, a former IBM researcher working on facial recognition during these formative years, provided a window into the minds of those behind IBM’s racial classification technology.

  “We were certainly worried about where the heck this was going,” he said in an interview with The Intercept. “There were a couple of us that were always talking about this, you know, ‘If this gets better, this could be an issue.’”53

  Facial recognition technology did get better. It did become an issue. Only as outside researchers, like Joy Buolamwini, a Ghanaian-American computer scientist at MIT, stand up to companies like IBM is there any public accounting of the racial bias in this latest iteration of racial classification technology, and with some hope, under the watchful eyes of researcher-activists like her, this bias may eventually change.54

  Watson and his IBM did not create my father’s 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 that wound to heal. My father’s belief in the importance of skin color in determining one’s destiny only grew stronger over the years of his employment. IBM’s dark history, however unconscious, seems to have gotten under my father’s skin.

  12

  The King Is Dead

  Heat and humidity roiled New York City that April evening in 1968. I had just left a meeting with longtime civil rights activist Preston Wilcox on creating independent, community-based schools in Harlem. I walked along 125th Street, heading for the subway to the Port Authority bus station at the George Washington Bridge. From there I’d catch a bus home to Rockland County. An announcer’s voice pierced through the crackling static of an all-news radio station coming from a storefront I passed. “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” the deep voice droned, “the apostle of nonviolence and civil rights, has been killed by a gunman in Memphis, Tennessee.” I began to cry. The bullet that bloodied King’s body also wounded me, leaving me with a gash of hate where I’d once held a glimmer of hope that America might someday address the urgent issue of race.

  Stepping onto the #20 bus, I made my
way to a seat at the far back, recoiling both inside and in my nearly fetal posture from anything having to do with the passengers—all White—around me. In the following days, weeks, and months, I shed off my White friends, left the liberal Unitarian-Universalist church I’d grown up in, let my hair spring out into an Afro, and began to wear African garb. America had failed me, and I did all I could to distance myself from her dominant White culture. At first, my parents thought this reaction would pass, that it represented my response to the overwhelming tragedy of Memphis. When it did not abate, they grew concerned because it fed into a larger, ongoing conflict with my father that had raged over the past several years.

  * * *

  In January 1967, at fifteen, with money I earned from working as a page at the Donnell Branch of the New York Public Library, I purchased a copy of Playboy magazine—the first and only time I ever did. The cover featured paintings of past Playmates in gilded frames and various stages of undress. Unlike my father, I did not hide the magazine; instead, I proclaimed to both parents the reasons for my purchase. Yes, it contained titillating, seductive pictures of women, but it also contained an interview destined to make that issue famous—the first-ever, full-length interview in the American press with Fidel Castro.

  This caught my father in another bind: he valued my intellectual curiosity, but at the same time he felt uncomfortable with my sexuality, and he also hated Castro. Our fight that night erupted not over the centerfold of Playboy but over the centerpiece of Castro’s ideas: a game of chess played not with pieces but with words.

  “He’s a commie,” my father said.

  “So what if he’s telling the truth about Batista?”

  “What truth?”

  “That America backed Batista, who was a dictator, because Cuba made money for American corporations and bankers.”

  “America does not back dictators; we oust them. I served in the army. We fought to oust Hitler and Mussolini.”

  “Then what about Diem in South Vietnam?”

  “What about him? He was a dictator whom the South Vietnamese overthrew.”

  “No. He was overthrown by a coup orchestrated by the CIA, who then put in place a military junta of their liking.”

  “Still, he was a dictator who’s no longer in power, thanks to the United States.”

  “I’ll grant you that Diem treated Buddhists terribly, which led them to protest, and ultimately one monk publicly lit himself on fire.”

  My father smiled. “My point, exactly. It’s better that Diem and his brother are gone.”

  “But it’s not better. That’s the problem. Diem resisted unification with the North. By backing the coup, America has backed an inept military junta and set the country deeper in war with North Vietnam.”

  “He’s a commie anyway.”

  “Who’s a commie?”

  “Ho Chi Minh, the guy who leads the North.”

  “He wrested control from the French, instituted economic reforms to help the people, and wants to hold a national reunification election, which Diem would never agree to, and now America’s puppets in the South won’t agree to either. Thomas Jefferson was Ho Chi Minh’s hero.”

  “So what? He needs to be gone, which is why we’re fighting the Vietcong.”

  “Just like Castro needs to be gone?”

  “Yep, just like Castro, that commie. You’ll see when you join the army.”

  “I don’t think you get that I’ll never join the army.”

  “You’re only fifteen now, but there’s a draft. You won’t have a choice.”

  “I’d rather go to Canada than to Vietnam. I won’t kill Brown people fighting for their freedom and liberty when America doesn’t even grant freedom and liberty to Black people in this country.”

  “You go to Canada and I’ll disown you. No son of mine’s going to refuse service to his country. I served with pride, and you will too.”

  “Yeah, and where’d that service get you?” Check.

  “A job with IBM.”

  “Too bad working for IBM doesn’t make you a man.” Mate.

  For once, I’d left my father with nothing to say.

  I marched in protest of the Vietnam War. I played my guitar and sang in protest of the war. I dressed in protest of the war. And when I turned sixteen, I wrote my draft board asking if they seriously wanted to teach an angry young Black man how to kill for the sake of war.

  During these years, the gulf between my father and me grew, and we spoke little. Even though we lived outside of New York City, I continued to attend Stuyvesant High School, which meant that each weekday I drove down from Rockland County to New York City with my father and mother. She let us off on the New York City side of the George Washington Bridge, where we got on a subway, and she then drove to her job as a public-school principal. My father always wore a suit and tie, always carried his briefcase. But when I pinned an anti-war button on my jacket, he refused to ride in the same subway car as me. When I carried my guitar to school, he refused to ride in the same subway car. When I dressed in blue jeans or wore boots or a Greek fisherman’s hat, he refused to be seen with me in the subway. It embarrassed him, he said, to have a son like me, and he did not want anyone at IBM to see us together.

  My father developed a unique form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of being the first Black systems engineer at IBM, one known to many who are racial, ethnic, or gender “firsts” in some aspect of their lives. Hypervigilance is a significant part of the symptom cluster he experienced, a reaction to feeling “under a microscope,” “always on display,” or “representing one’s race.” Said simply, my father’s hypervigilance was a reaction to the racism he experienced within IBM.

  Along with this hypervigilance came a heightened awareness of being “visible”—knowing that others could see and identify him, even if he could not see and identify them. He needed always to be “on guard.” Hence he chose not to be near me, in part, for fear that others might surreptitiously see him in association with beliefs or ideas that threatened his continued employment at IBM.

  As bizarre as this hypervigilance seems, and as hurtful as it was, my father’s fears were not wholly unfounded. Years earlier, my mother had driven my sister, me, and our cousins to the IBM Country Club on Long Island one rainy weekday. With little to do in the rain, we left early, but before leaving we stopped to use the restrooms. In the pavilion we entered, only the women’s restroom was open while the men’s room was being cleaned. My mother stood guard outside while I used one of the female stalls. Though we never saw anyone, news of the event got back to my father’s manager, who upbraided him, and he, in turn, upbraided my mother and me for jeopardizing his job.

  Heightened awareness of being “invisible” is another side of this symptom cluster, again something known to many Black “firsts.” Like the kids who said to me, “We mean no offense,” and went on to talk about “the Niggers” as though I did not exist, within IBM my father had been passed over for promotions and given the task of training others who would then become his superiors, as though he too were invisible.

  * * *

  Spring 1968 drew out violence like a poultice drawing out poison from a snakebite. Two months after King’s assassination in Memphis, Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. And only a few weeks after King’s death, Columbia University erupted in student protest. At the time of the Columbia University uprising, I was a student at Stuyvesant High School. While college recruiters came courting Stuyvesant’s Black students that spring, so did Black students from Columbia. Sam Anderson and Ray Brown, two Black student leaders of the Columbia protest, talked to a group of us at Stuyvesant. What I heard about letting go of the “turn the other cheek” message of civil rights struck a chord. Sam and Ray took me and another kid, Steven, under their wings, and we became known as the “little brothers” of Columbia’s revolutionary Black students. We helped organize a protest at Stuyvesant, and we used the lessons learned from Columbia when we arrived at Wesleya
n University that fall.

  Meanwhile, my father grew more concerned at my shift toward Black radical thought and action. He wanted to get me away from the tempting influences of New York City, so when I proposed that I travel to Africa that summer as a high school graduation present, he and my mother jumped in to contribute to the funds I’d already saved for the trip.

  My father saw me off by saying, “There’s an IBM office in Accra. If you get in trouble or need help, just go there. They’ll get in touch with me. And you’ll get all the help you need.”

  * * *

  To shouts of Oságyefo, Oságyefo, Oságyefo (Redeemer, Redeemer, Redeemer), Kwame Nkrumah acceded to the presidency of Ghana in 1960 after leading the fight for independence from Britain. He advocated for Pan-Africanism. He established the Organization of African Unity. He invited W. E. B. Du Bois to live in Ghana, where he ultimately died. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and even John F. Kennedy lauded Nkrumah. In the late 1960s, important figures in the Black freedom struggle, like Maya Angelou, called Ghana home. In 1966, with the assistance of the CIA, Nkrumah was ousted. Still, in those days of my youthful radicalism, Nkrumah stood as my hero, and Ghana as a country I too might someday call home.

  I left for Ghana shortly after my graduation from Stuyvesant. Right from the beginning, many things went wrong. The Black tour group I traveled with had been promised a direct flight from Kennedy Airport to Dakar, Senegal, and then on to Accra, Ghana. Instead, the tour company bounced us around Europe for several days—Madrid, Lisbon, Zurich—before finally getting us to Ghana. I kissed the ground when I landed, thrilled to finally set foot on African soil. Then, after we cleared customs, Ghanaian authorities advised us to leave immediately. I was devastated. The tour company had made no arrangements for us in the country. If we chose to stay, we’d be on our own. Half the group turned around and left. I’d come too far to go home.

 

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