Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  IBM claimed that this secrecy was necessary to maintain high employee morale and to fend off personnel poaching by other companies. For me, nothing could have been further from the truth. Not knowing what jobs were available to me, and what qualifications I needed to determine my own future, felt disempowering and disingenuous.

  “The truth,” Dick Hudson replied, “is that they are paying a lot of black people, and some white people too, low wages. They don’t recognize any employee organizations, and they’re afraid that we’re going to use this information to organize [into unions].”17

  Hudson appealed the NLRB’s finding, and the board split two-to-one in their second ruling against him. The board concluded, “By denying the very information needed to discuss wages, a company like IBM muzzles employees who seek to engage in concerted activity for mutual aid or protection,” but then the board agreed that IBM’s need for this level of secrecy outweighed their employees’ right to know.18

  Howard Jenkins, the sole Black man on the NLRB board hearing Hudson’s appeal, issued a strongly worded dissent. He warned that wage secrecy permitted a company to “maintain in perpetuity unlawful racial discrimination by making confidential all data regarding such unlawful activity.”19

  Dick Hudson’s case continued to work its way through the justice system until April 1980, when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the judgment of a lower court against him, ending his appeal.20

  Many of IBM’s legal actions related to Edward Mann and to members of the BWA came late in my father’s career, at a time when he often found himself on special assignment to IBM’s Legal Department. I don’t know what he knew about charges of racial discrimination at IBM, about IBM moles in BWA meetings, or about the circumstances by which Dick Hudson anonymously received copies of IBM’s internal wage guidelines.

  I do know that, like his father before him, my father was not a union man, and the Black Workers Alliance of IBM Employees had many trappings of a union. I also know that my father had bumped up against IBM’s racially discriminatory glass ceiling early in his career, many years before it became a rallying point for BWA. My father and BWA shared a common desire to see more Blacks promoted to positions of power within the company, as a bulwark against racial discrimination. While BWA’s methods to achieve this goal were public and active, my father’s methods were private and quiet—he flew under the company’s radar.

  In 1980, IBM had 207,000 employees, 18,000 of whom were Black. That’s roughly 8.7 percent of IBM’s total workforce, and that includes employees in nontechnical and nonmanagerial positions.21 The statistics regarding the percentage of Blacks in technical or managerial positions in the workforce of current high-tech firms don’t look any better. A report released by the Center for Employment Equity analyzed data from 177 Silicon Valley firms based on 2016 Equal Employment Opportunity reports. Black men held 1 percent of all executive positions, 1.5 percent of all managerial positions, and 1.8 percent of professional positions of any type. The data for Black women was even more dismal: they held only 0.4 percent of all executive positions, 0.9 percent of all managerial positions, and only 1.1 percent of professional positions of any type. Furthermore, the report made clear that these alarming statistics were not a “pipeline problem.” Qualified Blacks at all levels could be found, if high-tech firms wished to find them.22

  My father’s early concerns, for which he mounted a covert operation; those expressed by now-defunct groups like the National Black Workers Alliance of IBM Employees; and those tragically acted out by Edward Thomas Mann have not been addressed. Recent data for Blacks in high technology paint a dreary picture. Data for other minorities and marginalized groups are not much better. Diversity is needed in high tech. That need has been present since my father first began at IBM, and the future of high tech balances on satisfying this need.

  15

  The Egg

  “It looks like an egg,” I said.

  “That’s what we wanted,” my father replied.

  “Why?”

  “What’s an egg have inside?”

  “A chicken.”

  My father laughed. “Yes, and what does a chicken represent?”

  “A bird.”

  He laughed harder. “Yes. The next generation. Let’s go inside the egg.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “The future.”

  It was 1964, and I was thirteen. He grabbed my hand and we walked into the IBM pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Our family bypassed the waiting throng and handed special passes to the gate attendant. We stepped into an auditorium and took our seats with several hundred others. Moments later the platform rose, and we were lifted up into the future.

  Inside the egg, IBM’s pavilion known as the “Information Machine,” a tuxedoed narrator talked viewers through Think, a film with nine independent but interrelated images projected onto large screens—quite a technical feat in 1964. Think made the point that “the method used in solving even the most complicated problems is essentially the same method we all use daily.”1

  While GM’s World’s Fair pavilion foretold the car of the future, the Information Machine made no such forecasts about computers. The personal computer was not predicted. The internet was not presaged. Facebook and Twitter were not prognosticated. IBM simply promised that any future technology based on computers—whatever that technology turned out to be—would function very similarly to the way humans function, with the unspoken caveat “only faster, and better.”

  IBM wanted ordinary people to become more comfortable with extraordinary technology, and they did so by drawing parallels between the computer and the human brain in terms that were remarkably intelligent and sophisticated by today’s standards. They did not “talk down” to the audience or “dumb down” the Information Machine, and of the 185,000 people who visited the fair each day, the IBM pavilion ranked second only to the GM pavilion in popularity.

  Many New York City IBM employees, my father among them, did stints overseeing the various smaller exhibitions under the “IBM egg”—giving out punch cards, managing computerized handwriting recognition, retrieving online information, and helping visitors type on the company’s newly released Selectric typewriters. They always wore white shirts and ties, even on hot summer days, and they always stood tall. After all, they were the chaperones of tomorrow, and the IBM pavilion demonstrated their determination to make that future a friendly place.

  Ever faster, ever smaller, ever smarter, technological progress proceeds at a steadily upward pace. Sometimes up, sometimes down, progress in race relations takes one step forward, then a few steps back. IBM’s Information Machine promised a future in which complex social issues, like race relations, could be addressed through a benevolent digital technology to the benefit of all citizens. Yet, fifty years later, that promise remains largely unfulfilled. Technological progress is now a significant barrier to progress in race relations.

  * * *

  Navigate to Microsoft’s Bing search page (www.bing.com), and type in the phrase “black on white crime” (be sure to include the quotes to keep the words together in that order). When I did this on August 6, 2018, I received the results shown in the figure here.2

  Dylann Roof typed these same keywords into his browser prior to the evening of June 17, 2015, when, after sitting in prayer with members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, he rose and turned his Glock 9mm pistol on them, murdering nine people: Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, 54, manager for the Charleston County Public Library system; Susie Jackson, 87, a Bible study and choir member; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, a church officer; Depayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, a pastor and a school administrator; Clementa C. Pinckney, 41, church pastor and state senator; Tywanza Sanders, 26, a Bible study member and grandnephew of Susie Jackson; Daniel Simmons, 74, a pastor; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a pastor, speech therapist, and high school track coach; and Myra Thompson, 59, a Bible study teacher.

&nbs
p; Roof described the reasons he searched the internet:

  The results of a Bing search for “black on white crime.”

  Courtesy of the author

  The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

  From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again, I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.3

  Roof actually entered his search into Google, but after much adverse publicity the company changed its search algorithm so the results now obtained are far from those Roof saw. Search results are constantly changing. Results from my Bing search, however, were closer to those obtained by Roof, even though they were still not exactly those returned to him. Roof’s search first led to a website for the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), an organization designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group and a “modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group.”4

  In an article on the CCC website in 2001, the group proclaims, “God is the author of racism because God is the One who divided mankind into different types. . . . Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God because the separation of the races is consistent with God’s over-arching plan of redemption that the races be kept separate.”5

  CCC has attempted to affix a veneer of respectability to its overlapping agenda and overlapping membership with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once dubbed the councils the “uptown Klan,” while author Hodding Carter referred to them as “a country club Klan.” CCC meetings resemble Rotary Club gatherings more than klaverns gathered around a backwoods fire. When CCC’s founder, Gordon Baum, died in March 2015, board member and self-avowed White nationalist Jared Taylor took over as the group’s spokesperson.

  My Bing search for “black on white crime” did not unearth the CCC’s website, but the second result returned is from Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance organization, and the first is from Alex Jones’s Infowars site. Jones’s claim to infamy lies in his attack on the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. He proposed via his internet podcast that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged by the “deep state,” that no one died there, and that grieving parents are simply acting. He’s since been successfully sued by many of those grieving parents.

  Neither the Council of Conservative Citizens nor Jared Taylor nor Alex Jones qualify in any rational universe as valid sources of information about race relations, yet they are ranked high on the list of internet search results. Presumably, at the time of Roof’s search, Google ranked the Council of Conservative Citizens within the top five results for “black on white crime.”

  “The top two positions in the search results matter the most,” says psychologist Robert Epstein, who has studied how people interact with internet search engines. “The top two draw 50 percent of clicks, and the numbers go down from there, so what’s at the top is extremely, extremely powerful.”6

  Most people believe a common fallacy: the higher a search result is ranked, the more valid and trustworthy the source. Altering a website’s search ranking manipulates an internet user’s perception of the truth. In fact, this process has been given a name: SEME, short for search engine manipulation effect. As several large-scale studies throughout the world have shown, SEME can produce dramatic swings in opinions and behavior, including how people vote.7

  A causal arc between internet search results and murder should not be drawn. Still, in Roof’s manifesto, one senses a young man’s search for some truths about race using a technology common to us all. I’m left to wonder what would have happened had Dylann Roof’s search pointed him to an FBI website with actual crime statistics by race, or to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s résumé on the CCC, or to any number of other sites that had debunked the notion of the prevalence of Black-on-White crime and hoaxes such as Sandy Hook executed by the “deep state.”

  Internet search, as the case of Dylann Roof so tragically shows, is no place to begin a discourse on race relations, yet it is precisely the first place where many turn today. Google distanced itself from any such connection to hate sites: “The views expressed by hate sites are not in any way endorsed by Google, but search is a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware, and violations of our webmaster guidelines, including spam and deception.”8

  The problem, however, is not what content to remove but how content initially finds its way into search results. Here, one can draw a direct link between the technological future my father, and those like him, sought to bring about, and the actual digital world we now inhabit. IBM’s Information Machine portrayed a digital future in which ordinary citizens would reap the benefits of the extraordinary powers of computers to abstract and solve the most pressing challenges facing humankind. Google, Bing, and others are heirs to this legacy of the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

  Apolitical. Neutral. Nondiscriminatory. Beyond race and ethnicity. A democratizing force. People voting with a mouse click. Shifting the balance of power. Transcending national and cultural boundaries. A connected world linked together by shared ideas and ideals. This is the vision of a technological future that grew out of the challenges met in Cambridge on the floors of Tech Square; the vision I saw at the 1964 World’s Fair; the vision promoted by early adopters of the internet; and the vision that found its way into the goals, plans, and mission statements of so many technology start-ups, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook. Sadly, this vision has morphed into a dystopian nightmare that many today simply sleepwalk through.

  Search results do not simply materialize from somewhere deep in cyberspace as magical answers to keywords entered by a user. All search results, and their order of appearance, are manipulated. Search engine companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo manipulate search results through algorithms that scour trillions of internet pages and rank them according to predetermined criteria. What you see is what search providers want you to see. Google, for example, accepts advertising and has a financial incentive to show certain results higher than others. The company charges advertisers on a cost-per-click basis—the higher the click count, the more the advertiser pays, the higher the revenue for Google.

  Algorithmic manipulation is the business model of most search providers. But algorithms are actually coded by individuals who, consciously or unconsciously, embed their own personal biases into the computer code they write, with often devastating consequences for progress in race relations. In 2014, prior to the publication of her book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, University of California professor Safiya Umoja Noble went online to s
earch for information about young Black women to share with her stepdaughter and niece. She entered the phrase “black girls” into Google, and from the trillions of pages indexed she received first-page results that featured “Black Booty on the Beach,” “Sugary Black Pussy,” and other pornographic references to Black women.9

  In June 2016, Kabir Alli, a Black teenager from the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, videotaped his comparison of Google Image searches for “three black teenagers” and “three white teenagers.” The image search for Black teens revealed a series of mug shots, while that for White teens showed wholesome, all-American youth.10 Google, once again, issued a statement denying any responsibility for the content it displayed, and once again, shortly after this revelation, the search results were tweaked so the disparity disappeared from the first page of search results.

  In May 2015, users entering the term “nigga house” (or its variations) into Google Maps were directed to the location of the White House. Google apologized for and corrected the error, which occurred because third-party users could easily access the Google Maps platform and subvert it for their own purposes.11 This, then, brings to light another failing of using the internet as the basis for public access to information and public discourse about critical social issues: internet search engines are relatively porous and fairly easily manipulated by outside actors.