Before transferring to the micro-electronics facility in Pennsylvania, my first supervisor at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, was a fat redneck from the deep South. (That is a lie. He was not my first supervisor; he was my second. The first supervisor who hired me before I went to Princeton for my MSE in computer engineering was promoted before I got back. He was only my supervisor for the summer of 1980. He was a Vietnam Vet. He tried to insult my intelligence by telling me, with a wry smile, to remove the aluminum foil before I put food into the department’s microwave. Any person with an electrical engineering degree would know not to put aluminum foil in a microwave.) I don’t say my redneck supervisor was a redneck lightly. It appeared that the director (from Kentucky) selected him to break me, … but, in a way, I broke him instead because, due to me he cried at work. I’m not proud of making him cry, it is just a fact, and shows the affect I have on people. It went like this, near the end of my time in New Jersey working under his management, and while he was crying, he told me, “Every time I look at a black person, it doesn’t matter if they have a Ph.D. or not, I think negative thoughts about that black person.” To me, his crying was strange but normal in the context of people that I had to work with. I think he was expecting me to empathize with him. I didn’t, but state and federal court judges did. When I sued AT&T in subsequent lawsuits, the judges felt sorrier for my redneck boss (Steve Walters) crying than they did for me having to work with him and being forced on mental disability.
I’m unique. My 65% African (Nigerian and Congolese) and 35% Dutch descent, Ivy-League graduate computer engineering degree, and my childhood raised on a small farm in a small rural town, in an all-white historically Mennonite community, in South Eastern Pennsylvania, threatens people to the point of tears. I think people are scared of me. It was as if I was the sum of all their fears, and it took all these years to figure out how to use their fear in my favor. (I wake up to myself every day, I don’t see anything that unique about me, but other people do.) I became a Targeted Individual (TI), was assaulted and battered twice at work, and (because of their fears that I complained to the police) poisoned with LSD, possibly in a potent mix of jealousy, significant part admiration, and considerable part fear. I have to “Stay the Course” and be confident that, in the end, I will be vindicated no matter how long it takes, … a year or a million years.
I have seen things no one should see. Poisoned with LSD by definition makes me different, and if it has happened to anyone else, I sure would appreciate it if they would tell me. I have seen the eyes of rage and fear of white people for the simple fact of me existing. I have seen black people almost jump out of their skin as if I was some savior; come to free them from the slavery and oppression of their work. I was naïve and did not know how special I was, how pedestrian they felt, and what their fear made them capable of, primarily when they worked in enclaves of silent desperation. I often felt these insecure people worked across the color line to gang up and oppress me because of my superiority of not being one of them. Most people walk around in a state of depression. They tell me of their alienation by their lack of smile and resultant strangeness, for example crying at work.
I have often thought of a connection between subatomic particle physics and Buddhism, but never really contemplated the relatively simple question of who I was in relation to the internal alienation and fear of the people I am writing about here. If I glance at it, I can clearly see their nervousness and falling apart. This takes no deep thought or rumination, nothing more than a glance, and I can more correctly respond to their stressed induced coma. It is a gift only if I put very little effort into it; it is a curse if I try to think deeply about their state of mind. I’ve been trying too hard, it is who I am that makes all the difference. It is my calmness that causes them distress and my goal is only to get calmer; less is more. They scurry around in depths of desperation and my strength is that I have nothing to do.
I can imagine that I represent to them, the civilization that built the Great Pyramids in 2600 B.C. (The Great Pyramid of Giza, near Cairo, was constructed for Pharaoh Khufu around 2550 BC. There were no advanced civilizations in Europe in 2600 B.C. Stonehenge is the most prominent structure in Europe from that period, but forty-three arranged stones do not make a pyramid.) It is as if people see in me the face of God (or the Sun God Ra) that they hope exists but they know in their faulty mind that this God is not them. My calmness made these people nervous, but for a long time I did not realize how inferior they felt. They feel like imposters and they feared who they become. They could not stand that I did not recognize the truth of how rotten they felt on the inside; I did not feel their pain. They had to strike out, and I can’t blame them; this was all my fault. Facing me is like facing their mortality. I would later understand that their weakness (fear) was my strength, but I had to be humble. I had to use “Soft Power.”
Hard power is coercive and uses force, while “Soft Power” coopts people’s feelings to make them want what you have to offer. A Harvard professor, Joseph Nye says that with soft power, “the best propaganda is not propaganda,” further explaining that during the Information Age, “credibility is the scarcest resource.” These people believe they are not credible, so they look outside themselves, to me; like a flower following the sun’s arc, like a moth to a flame. I have to stay credible while I watch them emotionally self destruct.
As an engineering student who fastidiously, at one point, studied eight hours a day, deep thinking for me was meditation. I was in the bliss of meditation while the people who hated me lived a Life of Hell, shown by their frowning and making faces around me. Incredibly, two people can be in the same time and space and have different understandings of reality. I finally realized they did not hate me; they hated themselves for who they were, the Hell they were living, and who they had become, and they wanted company. They were probably never loved; their birth was perhaps a mistake. You can tell who they are because they are sociopaths who make a big deal of nothing, me. It takes a lot of effort for a good man to teach a psychopath. It serves no purpose to get angry with them; I pity them. These were the same type of human beings I went to grammar school with; they turned cold and distant, but nothing they could do could make me hate them. I see them as helpless.
People will do things from the anonymity of a group that they would never do in the open as an individual. But as I first wrote the second draft of the text above from a halfway house in the ghetto of Watts, California, years later, I didn’t have the wisdom I have now. So I went from wearing suits daily to work to wearing blue jeans every day to fit in at Watts. When I moved to California, I did not have a single pair of blue jeans. After receiving Veterans Administration (VA) Disability in 2018 and moving onto my forty-six-foot yacht in Marina del Rey, California, I’ve worn suits, cuff-link shirts, ties, and sweaters in the winter of 2021 to stay warm on my motorcycle. But looking back on it now, in 2022, I think that, as a child, I had that wisdom growing up but lost it from the constant harassment and LSD drugging at work, from having to respond to a hostile workplace. So now I don’t think it is worth working if people are constantly jealous of you and make work impossible. At one point, the department head involved in my drugging (Lew Miller) told me, “I don’t care if you don’t get any work done here at all. Just get along with these people.” Some people can’t work; things are better for everyone if they pay me not to work. In 1995 I was working out at Gold’s Gym, and Magic Johnson had just acquired Magic Johnson Theaters in Crenshaw. I had just started an MA in Communications Management at USC and asked him for a job. We were in the locker room and he looked at me and said, “Some people are not meant to work.” Since my father died in a car accident when I was six, I grew up poorer than most of my white friends in my town, but I had many of them. I was not threatening. Things got harry when they lost the innocents of their youth, and I grew up. It was when I worked professionally that I had no white friends.
In 1986, while working for AT&T Bell Laboratories, after building my new house on the five acres my mother willed me (and wanting to give back to my hometown, which was the source of my bliss), I volunteered for the Air Force National Guard. My purpose for joining was in the event of an earthquake, flood, or natural disaster, I could protect my friends, but the Air Force had other ideas. The Air Force began a Top-Secret Security Clearance background check for my Air Force National Guard Top Secret Communications Officer duties. I joined without the intention of doing anything Top Secret, but I guess the Air Force wanted to push my graduate computer engineering Ivy League degree into the secret territory. I had the naïve idea that joining the military would garner a measure of respect, that people would accept me better, but it engendered even more fear of me. Possibly when unsavory characters at AT&T, steeped in their own military Cult of Intelligence, got wind of my pending commission as an Air Force Lieutenant, they perhaps could not take it any longer and acted out by striking me. In retaliation for my reporting these assaults and batteries to the police, they drugged me with LSD during lunch at work.
Not that I was really hurt or scared of these two assaults at work, they were more a nuisance, a loss to my ego, a distraction from my work, and were the last straw. The real reason I did not let these assaults at work slide was that I figured that the black guy who was forced on disability just before I transferred in there (or someone else who couldn’t take this abuse) was wronged, and I decided to stand up for them by standing up for myself. If I was just thinking of myself, I could have let the whole thing slide and forgotten about it.
The integrated circuit and micro-electronics division I worked for at AT&T was spun-off as Lucent Technologies in 1996 (the year I lost my home to bankruptcy), 2007 to Lucent-Alcatel, and now Nokia as of 2016. When I sued them again in 2008, what started as a suit against AT&T Bell Laboratories morphed into a lawsuit against Lucent-Alcatel, a French Company. I eventually lost, won, and lost a final decision in that case. The final loss came in a decision by a panel of judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California, which included Judge Jay Bybee. Jay Bybee previously signed the Torture Memo for George Bush, when Bybee worked in the Justice Department. The Torture Memo made it legal to torture up to organ failure. Even though the type of torture Jay Bybee approved was later deemed illegal, having him as a judge did not make me feel good because the Lucent mental disability plan is torture.
In his book “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” John Marks wrote of the Top Secret and veiled story that LSD was developed as an operational drug by the American Government. It was used for interrogations, to create assassins, and to discredit foreign and domestic individuals in public for reasons of National Security. (LSD was thought a powerful drug in the arsenal of the CIA.) When I first joined AT&T, AT&T was just off from being a monopoly telecommunications company, sanctioned with all of the American government’s grace. (Early on, the monopoly status of the nationwide communications system was needed for the standardization of electronic equipment for ubiquitous use, so all of the equipment worked nationally and internationally). AT&T (later Lucent-Alcatel, now Nokia) used LSD to discredit and Gas Light me to disregard my assault, battery, and racial discrimination complaint. AT&T thought that they could get away with it. Every time I tried to discuss my complaint, AT&T and Lucent viciously retaliated in a manner way beyond reason that proved, to me, that they had something to hide. In biblical terms, they acted Demonically, and my survival makes me Divine.
I was not the first person drugged against their will, and because dark powers in high places think they can get away with it, I won’t be the last. The first other case of drugging I found was one of Paul Robeson, a black singer, actor, and activist of the 1940s and 50s. While researching Paul Robeson’s FBI file on microfiche in the downtown Los Angeles public library, I asked the Asian librarian about other possible research sources on unwitting LSD drugging; she replied, “Oh, the CIA Test.” A random librarian spontaneously connected unwitting LSD poisoning with the CIA. This technique appears to be an open secret that a random Los Angeles librarian knows. After 35 years of my experience of LSD drugging, retaliatory forced mental disability, and now VA mental disability, I consider myself an honorary member of the CIA.
To put this memoir in context, I have to clarify for the skeptics the radical ideology of AT&T Bell Laboratories (and especially the facility in Reading, Pennsylvania), which situated their racialized mindset in the 1950s, right smack in the middle of the start of the cold war and before the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s. In hindsight, I realize now that most people I had difficulty with at AT&T had active duty time in the Vietnam War. This military connection always appeared to dummy things down. The odds are that these problematic people came back from their service to America changed by PTSD and were emotionally damaged; they never spiritually evolved. People are not born damaged; they are made that way. I don’t think they believed in God. Besides individuals, the culture at work where I was assault and battered was bizarre, and race negatively impacted outcomes. The Reading, Pennsylvania location was like a work culture marooned in some time and dimensional vortex, a kind of ”Twilight Zone.” Almost everything at AT&T Bell Labs was based on perceived intelligence, and blacks were generally not allowed to be as intelligent as whites.
Something is ironic when it can be shown to be something opposite of what it is believed to be; “Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended.” I have a theory based on physics to show you the irony of racial color, that black people are really white and white people are really black. Things are not what they appear. It goes like this: When light hits an object, that object absorbs some of the photons/light and reflects others. The photons that the object absorbs resonates with the object’s surface and produces the heat we can feel. I conjecture that objects resonate with these photons because these photons have the same wavelength characteristics as the surface of that object; the absorbed light’s wavelengths are germane to that object and have the same wavelength characteristics as the surface.
On the other hand, the light that the object reflects is the light we see in our eyes, but it is not the light that has the wavelength characteristics of that object (the surface of the object absorbed those wavelengths, and we do not see them). For example, when a red apple reflects/rejects red light into our eyes, this is light that does not resonate with the surface wavelength characteristics of the apple. Thus the apple is every color (that it absorbs) but not the red color reflected into our eyes. Thus, the red apple is actually every color but red. For another example, when white light hits the surface of a white person, he/she absorbs some light (that resonates with their skin surface and causes heat) and reflects/rejects some light that we see. The white person resonates/absorbs with every color that we don’t see. Thus, a white person is every color, but white (they are black), and in analogy, a black person is every color but black (they are white).
Of course, no person is either pure white or black. (I first thought of this in an undergraduate physics class in 1980.) I brought this up in a photography lighting class at Santa Monica College in Los Angeles, California, in 2016; the teacher did not want to agree with me (I expected that he wouldn’t, and that is why I brought it up in the first place). However, the imaging technician who ran the photography computer printing laboratory (and knew more about the characteristics of color) did agree with me. So things in physical space are not what they appear. Race is opposite of what it appears to be, thus, it is ironic. Africans built great pyramids in Egypt while Caucasians pushed rocks around in Stonehenge.
Normality is on a sliding scale; what I experienced at work was not normal by any stretch of the imagination. I would go so far as to say inhumane torture. When I told one department head, Bob Sanferrare, at AT&T that I was surprised to see the same racism inside of Bell Laboratories that I saw outside and that I did not expect such blatant racism, he retorted, “You are naive.” Unfortunately, he was not sophisticated or critical enough to ignore his biased judgments. If I was as defective as it appeared AT&T assumed I was, then I would expect such advanced creatures to pity me, not cry, strike out at me, and then force me on mental disability when I complained. Instead, I pitied them. I expected much more from supposedly intelligent people at AT&T. Going in, I had anticipated that since I was apparently working with smart people in an organization with one of the highest concentrations of PhDs in the world, ignorant racism would not exist. I thought they could use reason to overcome biased judgments. Unfortunately for him, Bob Sanferrare reasoned the opposite way, that because racism existed outside Bell Labs, it would naturally exist inside it. I had thought science was unbiased. In hindsight, he was correct because he made it that way as a leader, and I was dead wrong. He probably thought it was better to go along with the racism that he saw than lose his job. Bob Sanferrare was Italian, and he thought it better to go along with their hierachy of races than to lose his place in the reshuffling. With all this effort to convince me of my inferiority, I can only assume that I am superior. I AM GOD.
I might as well say this now; I noticed a strange aggressiveness in the young, less attractive white females at work directed at me. This aggressiveness was tolerated if not initiated by my management. It was as if they had painted themselves into a corner, and now they had to live the rest of their lives with it. These white females would almost jump out of their skin at me, almost as if they were expressing some pent-up oppression they could not communicate or verbalize. They released a sort of pent-up psychic energy that needed a safe space to release. This clear mental breakdown is uncomfortable to see. Seeing the racially actuated psychic release of tension in people is never easy and is disturbing. In acting parlance, they broke character. (I have seen the same thing in people who identify as black.) It did not help that these white females were never the most attractive. Having a beautiful woman jump out of her skin at you (if done correctly) is a pleasurable experience. I noticed tension in these females bubbling below the surface of their perception. Work was ugly; aesthetics were not valued.