As he seeks to contextualize his father’s and his own time as minority hires at IBM, Ford includes too few fully fleshed-out personal anecdotes among footnoted summaries of other books about IBM and its famed chair, Thomas J. Watson, who personally hired the author’s father. Ford contrasts Watson’s bringing his father onboard with IBM’s involvement with such racist horrors as eugenics, the Holocaust, and apartheid. Less convincingly presented are Ford’s views on how the atmosphere at IBM impacted his father or himself and the dynamics of institutional racism that 'thinking black' apparently helped them fend off.
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