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 father’s 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 […]

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