"Remarkably Little Had Changed."
Old: (still applicable) Linux Foundation, With Zero African-American Employees (in a Country Where 13.4% Identify as African-American), Boasts About Its “Support for the Black Community”
Black or African American not even mentioned.
The “we” in question takes several forms as Ford follows his own advice in a new memoir “Think Black” (available now in print and digital versions); a frank and poignant story of family, progress, technology, racism and corporate secrets that stretches from today’s hashtag-headlines to the dawn of the digital age.Ford’s father, John Stanley Ford, was the first African American software engineer at IBM in 1947, hand-picked personally by firebrand tech tycoon Thomas J. Watson. The author eventually followed suit and became one of the company’s very few black employees some 20 years later. In the past, IBM’s white employees had refused to accept a black colleague and did everything in their power to humiliate, subvert, and undermine the elder Ford.
And, years later, remarkably little had changed.
Look back, ‘Think Black’: Racism, corporate secrets, and two generations of trailblazers at IBM