Black History Month Heroes: August Gorman from "Superman III"

Finally, Superman delivers a Black computer programmer. No more waiting!

NASA shouldn't have to go to the ends of the earth to find a capable Black scientist. Hollywood has already given us Miles Dyson from Terminator 2; Dr. Ed Brazzelton from The Core; the genius Black hacker from Die Hard and the computer hacker from Transformers; not to mention Luther Stickell from Mission: Impossible.

Weren't they based on real people? 

Yet less than one quarter of one percent of the computer science professors in America are Black, a cause for major concern over the future of computing in general. The lack of Black participation in the creating of computer science is, of course, never brought up in polite conversation, for - paradoxically - their being non-participants wasn't a hindrance to its creation.

It's still a crisis that we must take seriously. Data on diversity in undergraduate degrees awarded in computer science can be found here, with links to post-graduate information here.

The great search for a Black scientist should start and end in Hollywood, an incubator for creating a false paradigm of positive Black intellectual giants pushing the bounds of man's perception of technology. Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America is a book that discusses this very theme:

Following up on Ralph Ellison’s intimation that blacks serve as "the machines inside the machine," Color Monitors examines the designation of black bodies as natural machines for the information age. Martin Kevorkian shows how African Americans are consistently depicted as highly skilled, intelligent, and technologically savvy as they work to solve complex computer problems in popular movies, corporate advertising, and contemporary fiction. But is this progress? Or do such seemingly positive depictions have more disturbing implications? Kevorkian provocatively asserts that whites’ historical "fear of a black planet" has in the age of microprocessing converged with a new fear of computers and the possibility that digital imperatives will engulf human creativity. 

Analyzing escapist fantasies from Mission: Impossible to Minority Report, Kevorkian argues that the placement of a black man in front of a computer screen doubly reassures audiences: he is nonthreatening, safely occupied—even imprisoned—by the very machine he attempts to control, an occupation that simultaneously frees the action heroes from any electronic headaches. The study concludes with some alternatives to this scheme, looking to a network of recent authors, with shared affinities for Ellison and Pynchon, willing to think inside the black box of technology.

 Race in American Science Fiction is another (brand-new) book that discusses similar themes. The small percentage of Black students who actually take the AP exam in computer science, calculus and physics notwithstanding, one can imagine what a minute number of Black students across the nation have ever had a Black professor of computer science in college. If less than half of all Black college students have had a Black college professor (Black professors are normally clustered in Afro-American studies) one could logically surmise that less than one percent of one percent of Black students enrolled in computer science have had a Black computer science professor.

Those Black students who attend Auburn University help bolster that number significantly.

With lower scores on the mathematics portion of the SAT, Black students are at a severe disadvantage that no amount of proper cultural infusion through hip hop could ever remedy. Could this be why Black people aren't found in Silicon Valley?:

"Saying the Silicon Valley tech industry needs to do a better job of hiring native-born blacks, Latinos and some other minority groups, minority leaders picketed Google's Mountain View headquarters [Thursday], asking the Internet giant and other large valley companies to disclose their workplace diversity data," Mike Swift reported Friday for the San Jose Mercury News.

"The protest, organized by the Black Economic Council, the Latino Business Chamber of Greater Los Angeles, and the National Asian American Coalition was sparked by a series of reports in the Mercury News last year.

"Hispanics and blacks, the newspaper found, made up a smaller share of the valley's computer workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, even as their share grew across the nation."  

Jorge Corralejo, chairman of the Latino Business Chamber of Greater LA, told Journal-isms that the group had met with members of Congress and with U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and intended to continue to press their case in those quarters.

Faith Bautista, president and CEO of the National Asian American Coalition, said in a news release, "On the surface, everything is well for Asian Americans at Silicon Valley since up to 50 percent of their employees are listed as Asian Americans. Sadly, up to 90 percent are improperly classified as Asian Americans but, are in fact, H-1B visa workers from abroad."

The Mercury News story continued, "The protest drew about two dozen people to the Googleplex, as minority leaders criticized Google, Apple and 20 other Silicon Valley tech companies that refused to share their workforce diversity data with them. The leaders called on the federal government to review the H-1B work visa program that tech companies use to hire engineers from abroad, unless the companies comply.
"The groups are filing a complaint with the federal government, saying of 34 Silicon Valley tech companies from which they requested workforce data, just 12 agreed to share it. The groups are asking the government to force the companies to disclose their data. They said they singled out Google for Thursday's protest because of its growth and visibility."

As reported last year, the American Society of News Editors, recognizing that Internet companies are increasingly hiring journalists, added "online-only newspapers" to its annual diversity census of print newspapers. A Yahoo spokeswoman later told Journal-isms flatly, "We do not release our diversity statistics."

The nondisclosers are not all in Silicon Valley. Huffington Post did not participate, and neither did AOL, MinnPost.com, Salon.com, Talking Points Memo (TPM Media LLC), the Daily Beast, Bloomberg or Politico. All but MinnPost.com are based on the East Coast.

In its news release announcing the demonstration, the groups said, "The available data demonstrates that no industry may have a worse record in California in the hiring of Blacks, Latinos, Southeast Asian Americans and women than Google, Apple and Oracle. Based on data from the 12 Silicon Valley companies that [publicly] released their EEO-1 data, the minority groups' expert states that Google's Black employees, for example, could be at just one percent, Latinos at two percent and women at the 20 percent level. In contrast, Stanford, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, has an entering freshman class that has 17.2 percent Latinos and 11.1 percent Blacks.

How in the world can we ever expect to have advanced technology - courtesy of Black people in Hollywood blockbusters - if so few Black people are employed in the private sector helping bring innovation through diversity that is so sorely needed?

That we have reached a world blessed with the technology we have today despite Black participation in the creation of these technologies is a miracle. Silicon Valley's lack of Black people is an obvious indicator of culturally biased education system that will always be Waiting for Superman. Without Black people how can we expect to have innovation in Silicon Valley?

All of the great inventions - including the Super Soaker - are courtesy of Black people. Right? That's what movies have taught an unsuspecting American population through an ingenious form of behavioral modification.

Remember Superman III? That's okay, most people don't. Richard Pyror, one of the top entertainers of the day, starred as, well, a bumbling idiot who had an uncanny knack for computer programming:

August "Gus" Gorman (Richard Pryor), an unemployed ne'er-do-well, discovers a knack for computer programming. After embezzling from his new employer's payroll (through a technique known as salami slicing), Gorman is brought to the attention of the CEO, Ross Webster. Webster (Robert Vaughn) is obsessed with the computer's potential to aid him in his schemes to rule the world financially. Joined by his sister Vera (Annie Ross) and his "psychic nutritionist" Lorelei Ambrosia (Pamela Stephenson), Webster blackmails Gorman into helping him.

His scheme is described in greater detail here:

He develops a piece of software that activates whenever the company makes a payment that involves a fraction of a penny. The program rounds the payment down to the nearest cent, and shuffles the fraction into Pryor’s secret account. Across the entire company, the fractions divert thousands of dollars into Pryor’s hands. Managers at the company discover the scam, but conclude that its designer is so clever he would probably never do anything to reveal himself. At that moment, Pryor arrives at work in a brand new Ferrari. (This process — called salami slicing because you steal only a tiny slice at a time — was recycled with hilarious effect in the movie Office Space, which every manager ought to see if only to inoculate themselves against turning into Initech Division VP Bill Lunbergh, pictured.)

Gorman's scheme is apparent because he got "nigger rich" and showed it off. In reality, setting himself on fire with  crack pipe was the pinnacle of Mr. Pryor's real-life technological ability, a move that made Prometheus cringe.

There are of course Black students who excel at math and enter into a career in computer science. That number is low.

There are a lot of popular movies that highlight this small percentage of Black computer scientists in prominent roles. A lot.

August Gorman is one of those Black Fictional Heroes that help paint a false picture of the world. Movies play an important role in behavioral modification; and any time a dearth of prominent Black dentists, scientists, medical doctors, computer programmers or all around nice guys are depicted on the big screen, trouble ensues.

As to the question of why there are so few Black super villains, the answer to that should be obvious. Black people are always good!

Richard Pryor's Superman III scene is found here.

Black History Month Heroes: Miles Dyson from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day"

Toward the end of the first Terminator film, a Mexican gas attendant tells Sarah Connor, "There's a storm coming."

She calmly replies, "I know."

Thankfully, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we find the culprit responsible for the death and destruction of 99.9 percent of mankind and worse, the progenitor of that storm prophesied by the Mexican gas attendant from the first film.

Miles Dyson is the individual who conjured up an Indian Armageddon Rain Dance by reverse engineering the Terminators partially destroyed robotic arm from the first film and creating advanced weaponry that will become self-aware and wage war on humanity:

Miles Bennett Dyson, a high ranking employee at Cyberdyne Systems, will invent a new microprocessor that will revolutionize the entire military computer system.

Dyson is asked permission to conduct a test with a device that is only referred to as 'it'. When one of his co-workers asks where it came from, he gives him the same answer he received from his superiors: Don't ask. Dyson goes into the vault, where he observes a fragment of a computer chip, and a metal robot arm that was clearly once attached to a Terminator.

Dyson is an individual of unbelievable brilliance, capable of devising imaginative uses for captured, advanced technology and crafting weapons systems unfortunately are equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI). He is also a Black person.

Played by Joe Morton, Dyson is a tragic figure in the Terminator mythology. When confronted with the truth of his Frankenstein creation, he finds regurgitation the only reaction:

Sarah Connor: [narrating] Dyson listened while the Terminator laid it all down: Skynet, Judgment Day, the history of things to come. It's not everyday you find out that you're responsible for 3 billion deaths. He took it pretty well.
Miles Dyson: I feel like I'm gonna throw up.

However, in the film he leads the ragtag of doomsday warriors into the heart of Cyberdyne Systems and ultimately sacrifices his own life so that John Connor can live:

"Knowing his injuries were fatal, Miles bid the others to escape and stayed behind to trigger the bombs' remote, which would be flipped by a large piece of the Neural Net Processor model in Miles's hand which he would drop when he died. The SWAT team realized this too late when they cornered him at gunpoint as he lay on the ground, and promptly panicked, running away. Miles succumbed to his injuries with a heartfelt and slow death noted by shallowed labored breathing and died a few seconds later. His lifeless hand dropped the model on the trigger, destroying the lab and a sizable portion of Cyberdyne Headquarters."

Remember, Black people don't like movies where they don't save the world and Dyson does his damnedest to save the world from the cold grip of steel that the Terminators wield.

Why the inclusion of Miles Dyson into the fictional world of Black History Month's look at how movies help craft a make-believe view of the world? Simple. Terminator 2 made half a billion dollars in the worldwide box office and has sold millions of copies on VHS and DVD.

The noble character of Dyson in the film is one of the shining examples of fictional Black History Month at SBPDL, for Black scientists are a rare breed to behold in the real world.

We have discussed the unfortunate reality of Black people and Nobel Peace Prize (only wins for literature and peace, never for science or math).

Worse, Silicon Valley is looking under every rock for a real-life Miles Dyson:

"San Jose's black population fell by about 11 percent from 2000 to 2006, to about 27,000, even though the city's total population is growing. In San Francisco, where the African-American population is down more than 15 percent since 2000, Mayor Gavin Newsom has called for the creation of a task force to try to stabilize the city's black population.

Some black engineers, executives and managers at Silicon Valley tech companies say that while their numbers have never been large, the dwindling population can add to a feeling of isolation, both in and outside the office.

There's a shorter supply of people who can serve as mentors or champions when companies start deciding whom to lay off.

"You are happy to see another African American when you see them because it's so rare," said Pamela Jackson, director of product marketing for Symantec, the Cupertino software maker that is headed by one of the most prominent black chief executives in the valley, John Thompson. "But you become very accustomed to being the only one in a meeting. It doesn't mean you ever like it, or anything like that."

Every effort to find engineering talent in the Black community is underway and yet the results aren't encouraging:

"However, African Americans hold only about 8 percent of BSCS degrees, according to Women, Minorities, and Persons With Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2000, a study by the National Science Foundation (Arlington, VA) that was based on figures from 1996. But many African Americans are doing well in the field. Diversity/Careers talked to nine of them."

Worse, one of the schools were the fictional Miles Dyson might have been educated - the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) - has failed to find a Black person worthy of hiring or promoting in one score:

In some departments, such as chemistry, mathematics, and nuclear science and engineering, no minorities have been hired in the last two decades, according to the report, which was more than two years in the making.

MIT's first comprehensive study of faculty racial diversity and the experiences of underrepresented minority professors highlights a national problem across academia: the need to improve the pipeline of black and Hispanic scholars.

Blacks and Hispanics make up only 6 percent of MIT faculty, an increase of 4.5 percent since 2000 but far below the university's goal of achieving parity with the nation, where underrepresented minorities make up 30 percent of the population."

These statistics are unkind to the false idol of Dyson, when you consider how few doctoral degrees are awarded to Black people which only further cements his place among the fictional heroes of Black History Month at SBPDL:

"A strong indicator of the fact that African Americans as a group continue to avoid most of the natural sciences appears in the statistics for specific disciplines. In 2004, 2,100 doctorates were awarded by universities in the United States in the fields of mathematical statistics, botany, optics physics, human and animal pathology, zoology, astrophysics, geometry, geophysics and seismology, general mathematics, nuclear physics, astronomy, marine sciences, nuclear engineering, polymer and plastics engineering, veterinary medicine, topology, hydrology and water resources, animal nutrition, wildlife/range management, number theory, fisheries science and management, atmospheric dynamics, engineering physics, paleontology, plant physiology, general atmospheric science, mathematical operations research, endocrinology, metallurgical engineering, meteorology, ocean engineering, poultry science, stratigraphy and sedimentation, wood science, polymer physics, acoustics, mineralogy and petrology, bacteriology, logic, ceramics science engineering, animal breeding and genetics, computing theory and practice, and mining and mineral engineering. Not one of these 2,100 doctoral degrees went to an African American."

Sadly, something called the racial gap in learning persists despite trillions of dollars being spent to fill this cataclysmic chasm of injustice that an army of well-trained Crusading White Pedagogues isn't likely to overturn.

So if you can't change nature, do your best to stifle any nutriment:

"Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse."

Miles Dyson is a Black scientist that makes George Washington Carver achievements in furthering mankind's usage of the peanut appear trivial in comparison. However, Black people in the real-world have an almost visceral hatred of technology. Indeed, HP Computers fail to recognize Black people!

But why in the world are we deprived a real-life Miles Dyson?:

"I was reminded of the computer journalist Robert X. Cringely's documentary film Triumph of the Nerds (1996), about the creation of the current cyber-elite. Cringely spent time with young people at swap meets, watching them become entranced with electronics and the technological future, building their own machines and dreaming of starting the next Apple. There were no blacks in sight. Young black Americans, who could have been cashing in on the bonanza that was then buzzing through cyberspace, didn't appear to be aware of it. What kind of job could be more appropriate for a technologically literate inner-city youth than to perform this kind of service?

What is intriguing, and deeply disturbing, is that blacks have participated as equals in the technological world only as consumers, otherwise existing on the margins of the ethos that defines the nation, underrepresented as designers, innovators, and implementers of our systems and machines. As a group, they have suffered from something that can loosely be called technological illiteracy."

Stuff Black People Don't Like find Miles Dyson one of the top 5 examples of a fictional Black History Month hero. He helped improve a version of an advanced microprocessor, which ultimately brought about judgment day. Black people still search for a real Dyson, with no evidence of any coming soon.

Perhaps it is fitting that the man behind many of the actual creations that lead to the development of the microprocessor, William Shockley, predicted a future judgment day when the ranks of those technological illiterate far exceeded those capable of running a technological advanced society.

A storm is coming, indeed. Nothing we can do will change this. Sometimes, in the face of judgment, all you can is laugh.

#84. Only Winning Nobel Prizes for Peace

SBPDL has tried to make it clear to everyone that We Live in a Black World now, regardless of the demographic figures. All that matters anymore is the United States number one and two exports – sports and Mein Obama – and the citizens of not only our country but the entire world consume both in vast quantities.

From the National Basketball Association (NBA) to the National Football League (NFL), the citizens of our country will follow their professional team to the gates of Hell if they had too, and with sports being one of our top forms of economic production in the nation, we might as well admit the US is not even a service economy anymore, but a hybrid sports-consumption economic society.

Sports project a positive image of Black people – if you don’t read Jeff Benedict’s work - since Black people are capable of performing the extraordinary feat of running with a football and putting a ball into basket. However, one skill that eludes Black people is flying planes, a task no amount of government intervention can rightfully alter.

Our second most valuable export is Barack Obama, a real-life General Zod. Black people know this, which is why they support him with nearly unanimous numbers and why the look to him as being the man who drove the stake deep into the heart of Pre-Obama America.

His approval rating in America might be slipping – among everyone but Black people - and social unrest might be just around the corner as the economy slides into disaster mode – just ask the good citizens of Detroit – but Zod/Obama has finally been given the honor that he rightfully deserves; a Nobel Prize for Peace:

"A beaming President Barack Obama said Friday he was both honored and humbled to win the Nobel Peace Prize and would accept it as a "call to action" to work with other nations to solve the world's most pressing problems.

Obama told reporters in the White House Rose Garden that he wasn't sure he had done enough to earn the award, or deserved to be in the company of the "transformative figures" who had won it before him.

But, he said, "I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century."

Barack Obama is seen as the 21^st version of Ozymandias, and in this Black man rests the ability for the world to be unified (which the Nobel committee took into consideration for his prize):

Ozymandias was another name for Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses' throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”

The Nobel Prize is correct to award Obama with this honor, for his election has lead to peace in the United States. Were it not for his election, the chaotic scene in Detroit, where upwards to 50,000 Black people thought they would be getting a stimulus check, would be repeated in every major city. Black people have the highest unemployment of any racial group in America and yet, having a fellow Black occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue keeps alive the prospect of hope and change.

A white person in office would be cause for riots, as no positive net growth in jobs is beyond the horizon, and the rate of unemployment will only aggregate in the coming months. Yet, Obama is seen as the figure who can eradicate this imbalance, merely by maintaining his current melanin level.

Sadly, the Nobel Prize for Peace that Obama was bestowed is but another honor given to a Black person for Peace:

“The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, it was not until 1950 that a Black person was a recipient. An African American from Detroit, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche was the first black man to receive the distinguished prize for his work as a United Nations mediator; his efforts led to the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreement.

Ten other remarkable Blacks have received a Nobel: Albert John Luthuli, 1960 Peace Prize; Martin Luther King Jr., 1964 Peace Prize; Sir William Arthur Lewis, 1979 Economics Prize; Bishop Desmond Tutu, 1984 Peace Prize; Wole Soyinka, 1986 Literature Prize; Derek Walcott, 1992 Literature Prize; Toni Morrison, 1993 Literature Prize; Nelson Mandela, 1993 Peace Prize, Kofi Annan 2001 Peace Prize and Wangari Maathai, 2004.”

How peaceful is the world currently? Let’s just say the United Nations is considering calling rape a tool of war, which doesn’t bode to well for those who are committing it in open warfare in America.

No, Black people have been honored primarily for bringing a faux-peace to the world, where it has quickly devolved into an even more bellicose state than it was before – a precursor of things to come in the United States with Obama’s latest gift from Nobel.

Take for instance Dr. Bunche. He sure did a good job ending that Arab-Israel conflict, didn’t he? Or Desmond Tutu of South Africa, as his nation is a beacon of peace and prosperity.

What other honors does the Nobel Committee give? Alfred Nobel stated this, in his will:

“The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Black people have won 11 Nobel Prizes, with most coming in the peace category and others in the literature and economics category, or 1.4 percent of all Nobel’s given out.

Never has a Black person won a Nobel Prize for work in the field of chemistry, physics or medicine and sadly, no award is handed out for best overall athlete.

William Shockley and James Watson, however, both won Nobel Prizes for their work in ENSURING humanity survived.

Obama is seen as the man who has brought peace to the world, as he has skillfully kept the United States from entering economically-fueled riots, but the scene in Detroit earlier this week showed what is coming. The Nobel Prize he won is a great honor, but it may turn out to be short lived. Stuff Black People Don’t like includes only winning Nobel Prizes for Peace, because more than 70 percent of their awards have come in this category.

The Nobel Prize is thus inherently racist for only awarding prizes in the fields of chemistry, physics and medicine to white people or Asians. Black people have made contributions in these fields… haven’t they?