Denise R. James, MSEE, BSEE

Response to James Damore, former software engineer at Google

Denise R. James
Aug 8, 2017 · 6 min read

James, this article is a response to your article “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.”(1) James is my favorite name because my maternal great, great grandfather was named James Horton. He was a slave in Atlanta. I found his free son’s death certificate online whose name was Anderson James. His father’s name was on this death certificate, James Horton. My aunt showed me Anderson’s free pass certificate. My uncle told me Anderson did not want the slave masters name as his last name, so he took his father’s first name James. It is my last name and your first name. We are the same.

I do not know what Anderson did to become free. I know his son, my grandfather, built houses and roads in Atlanta due to FDR’s government contracts to Negroes. My grandfather told me of stories where he did construction work for whites who refused to pay him. He had no recourse. My mother’s inheritance was stolen in more ways than one. When my uncle moved to Chicago at the age of 17, he worked as a contractor and was not hired by most whites and underpaid by the few that did hire him. He also enrolled in Phillips High School, the school that would accept blacks. This was before the 1964 civil rights act. Legally home loans were not given to blacks in white neighborhoods.

I was born a negro. It states so on my birth certificate. My father is White. I neither met him nor anyone from his side of the family. I had my DNA tested and I am 62% Scandinavian and Great Britain, 48% Congo. Interracial marriage was prohibited in the US until 1967. (2)

I grew up in the inner city of Chicago about 40 miles from Aurora, where you lived. I attended Kenwood High School because my aunt lived in the district. I was homeless my last two years of high school and sometimes stayed with my sister who lived in Englewood. One day my counselor told me, “I transferred you to Englewood because you missed too many days”. Fortunately, after I told my home room teacher I was transferred, he told me to go to class and he would reverse the transfer. If not for this teacher, I doubt I would have earned a HS diploma. My counselor discouraged me from taking physics. She said I should be trying to graduate. It was the best class ever. I fell in love with physics, electrical engineering and computer science. I got my easiest A in that class. As you were accepted into the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora based on your SAT scores, I was accepted into the University of Illinois Engineering College based on my ACT scores. When I got my first engineering job in college the hiring manager told me, “you were the only one that knew what you were talking about”. On my first day at my first job as an engineer, the secretary informed me, “We had a woman engineer once. She was weird”. I had an outstanding manager that made my work productive and enjoyable. When he left, I had no mentor. My new manager gave me a bad performance review and put an awful letter in my personnel file. When I challenged it, the white manager said he did not want the black diversity manager to represent me because there may be some kinship. In the movie, Hidden Figures, all of the successful black women engineers had a white male mentor. Fortunately, I got to work at Ford with the best mentor, supervisor, I had until he retired in 2000. That was the end of my successful career at Ford. I have no concerns being the only female engineer in my automotive departments. I love and breathe engineering. Even though I have not been able to get engineering employment in the last two years, I am in the Udacity self driving car program. I was chosen to be a mentor by this amazing company.

While reading your manifesto online I learned that TL:DR means, ‘too long, don’t read’. I will address a few points to not get that same rating.

De-moralize diversity.

Important issues like diversity that you support are a moral issue. Moral issues do translate into cost and benefits for any corporation. The Birmingham bus boycott costs the public transportation company lots of revenue. Birmingham was definitely not concerned about the cost losses in the boycott. It was the USSC that ordered the bus company to stop discriminating against blacks. Google is pursuing diversity because it is profitable.

Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

Our nation was built on having a group of people, blacks, as slaves to build this country and another group, Native Americans, were killed for their land. Less than sixty years ago it was legal to deny a group, blacks housing, jobs and other basic civil rights. These civil laws have not stopped discrimination as much as a criminal law may have. After giving groups additional help for centuries, then stop and say no one gets any additional help anymore is not moral.

Stop alienating conservatives

We should not accept conservatives that support a president that advocates for grabbing women by the <obscene expletive deleted>, who advertised the birther lie about our first black president and disparaged Mexicans. Anyone that supports these misogynist and racist actions should be alienated.

Women in Computing

When I graduated in 1984, 37% of computer science degrees went to women. Software engineering has become more people oriented, yet the number of women computer science degrees have now dropped to less than half of this number. (3) I majored in electrical engineering because the industry was not recognizing software. I was always the first in my software study groups to get the algorithms and code. Nobody loves coding more than me and I am amazing at it. Check out my github. (4) With my electrical engineering computer science and control systems expertise, I have not found a job in Silicon Valley. I even moved there for two years. I got called by recruiters for Tesla. They tell me, ‘the employees at Tesla do not have the experience you have in automotive and control systems’. It has not led me to a job.

Confront Google’s biases

I have a BSEE, MSEE and over twenty years of automotive powertrain control product design and development with Ford and Honda. I had a phone interview with the self driving company at Google. The white male hiring manager did not invite me for an interview. I mentioned to a Googler at a black Google event that at Ford, the white hiring manager delegated his interview to a black female engineer. I was hired by two black female engineers and my white manager. She told me, ‘you will not find two black engineers here’.

Ironically, you are suing Google with the laws liberals fought for starting with the 1964 civil rights act that barred discrimination on jobs and housing due to race. I wish it were made a criminal act instead. As a child, I marched with my aunts in Chicago against discrimination. We attended the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s church on Sundays. At the age of 11, I pleaded with my mother to go to Indianapolis to protest injustice. I was as innocent as Emmet Till was. It was normal for women get fired when she became pregnant. It was not against the law to fire pregnant women until the 1979 anti-discrimination pregnancy act. (5)

How did you get in Google without an engineering or computer science degree?

References:

1. https://everipedia.org/wiki/james-damore-1/#ixzz4pAkAiTJV

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage

3. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

4. https://github.com/DeniseJames

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_Discrimination_Act

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