“Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.” (From Wikipedia)
Race is a social construct and has no meaning, thus, racism has no meaning. What I am writing about here is the “White Trash” (book by the same name by Nancy Isenberg) practice of “Racecraft” (book by the same name by Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields). “White Trash” needs no further explanation, we know it when we see it, but “Racecraft” may. “Racecraft” is the magical thinking use of race, which does not exist, for racism.” Whitetrash” practices “Racecraft.” Similarly, “Racecraft” like “Witchcraft” is figuratively equated with demonic possession. AT&T rudely pulled out the stops to implement “Racecraft” for a racist end. They might as well tried to burn me at the stake.
The Reading, Pennsylvania AT&T plant I transferred into was an integrated circuit research and development facility; it was originally a Western Electric plant in 1952. Western Electric was first established in 1869 to develop electrical parts and manufacture electrical equipment. When AT&T was incorporated in 1882, Western Electric became its major manufacturer of telephone equipment. The Reading facility had a reputation as dysfunctional or backward. At the Holmdel, New Jersey AT&T Bell Laboratories facility I transferred from, I was in my friend’s office when we heard rumors of horror stories at the Reading, Pennsylvania, location. Reading, Pennsylvania was thirty miles northwest of my hometown in Collegeville, so I took an interest in the stories. At least one black Member of the Technical Staff at the labs informed me that he toured the Reading facility with the prospect of taking a supervisory position there in the 1970s but declined and said, “The place was not the right place for me.” He noted a climate of racism. The place was not the right place for any person of color. Research has informed me that the Klu Klux Klan has a history in Reading, Pennsylvania (where I eventually worked and was assaulted).
Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania, died in 2009 in a nursing home in West Reading, Pennsylvania. He had no known survivors, and the local paper was advertising for someone to claim his body. Pennsylvania had the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Pennsylvania faction), and the National Alliance. In the mid-1980s, this combination of apparent white supremacy and pure nonsense (which was opaque to me at the time because of my focus on engineering) proved almost fatal.
The Reading plant designed and deposited integrated circuits on a semiconductor substrate such as silicon and gallium arsenide wafers, sliced those wafers, and packaged them into individual chips. Historically, the claim to fame for developing the first transistor went to an AT&T Bell Laboratories team led by a racist research engineer named Dr. William Shockley. After leaving Bell Labs, he started Shockley Labs in an area of California that became Silicon Valley. (In fact, William Shockley is credited with starting Silicon Valley.) In an interview with William F. Buckley on the television show “Firing Line” on June 10, 1974 (https://youtu.be/7JOIqkh2ms8), William Shockley called for the sterilization of people of color because of their high birth rates and low IQs. Even William F. Buckley, a devout conservative, commented that these ideas of William Shockley were unfounded. Shockley had no formal training in genetics. The Nazis used this premise of inferiority against the Jews in German concentration camps, and I would not be surprised if most whites did not still think this today. (Germany followed the United States’s racist and forced sterilization lead.) This racist milieu was the culture that I found myself in at AT&T Bell Laboratories, even though modern science says race does not exist.
From the Nazi Dachau concentration camp terminal (leading to death), aviation experiments on their Jewish citizens (held in freezing water to simulate the experience of downed German pilots in the North and Baltic seas, and other chemical and biological experiments) came the cruel notion of human manipulation, and the resultant malice man could inflict on others deemed inferior in the name of science. Coming out of WWII, the United States (with the fear of falling behind in mind-control techniques) pulled out the stops to find any potential strategic advantage to control the minds of individuals, groups, and entire nations. In their quest to compete with the Russians and China to control the minds of men during the cold war, the CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, and other agencies used psychological techniques (Psychological Warfare or Psychological Operations (Psyc-Ops)) perfected on unwitting participants in operations such as MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, and later COINTELPRO, and now in the perpetual WAR ON TERROR. This tinkering on the minds-of-men research follows a meandering path to me (and others, including you). The danger is the pain and suffering inflicted on innocent victims of research and exploitation and (possibly greater) the soul-crushing harm on the experimenters and the society that witness such abuse and normalize it. We all lose something when we torture others; it is the breakdown of civilization and makes us no better than animals.
These invasions of men’s minds allow those in power (and those seeking power) to sell their souls and peer deeply into the private lives of unsuspecting Americans; our innocents as society begins a descent on a slippery slope. This invasion of men’s minds could metaphorically be the biblical “Tree of Knowledge” where man wishes to know everything, things they shouldn’t know. During projects MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, and COINTELPRO, “They systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects, and, like the Nazis, they chose to victimize special groups of people whose existence they considered, out of prejudice and convenience, less worthy than their own. Wherever their extreme experiments went, the CIA sponsors picked for subjects their own equivalents of the Nazis’ Jews and gypsies: mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, and prisoners, often from minority ethnic groups.”[1]
The psychological harm I experienced is not defined under United States torture law Code 18 U.S.C. 2340A, because as written, torture is defined as occurring outside the United States.
United States Code 18 U.S.C. 2340A is written as follows:
(a)Offense.—
Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b)Jurisdiction.—There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if—
(1)
the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2)
the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.
(c)Conspiracy.—
A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
United States Code 18 U.S.C. 2340A defines Torture as follows:
(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
42 U.S. Code § 2000dd – Prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States Government.
(a)In general
No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
(b)Construction
Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose any geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under this section.
(c)Limitation on supersedure
The provisions of this section shall not be superseded, except by a provision of law enacted after December 30, 2005, which specifically repeals, modifies, or supersedes the provisions of this section.
(d)Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment defined
In this section, the term “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December designed to prevent tor 10, 1984.
Since I eventually lost all of my cases and exhausted my legal remedies in the United States, I could pursue inhumane and degrading treatment as defined by the United Nations. The United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT)) to prevent torture and other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. The Convention came into force on June 26, 1987, a year after I was forced on mental disability. 1986 was the year I was forced on mental disability, after I lost fifty pounds because AT&T stopped disability payments, and just after graduating from Air Force Officer Candidate School on April 3, 1987.
In the next chapter, I will present a Court of Appeals case that I initially won but later lost (because of the Torture Judge – Jay S. Bybee) using the 1866 Civil Rights Act.
[1] The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Times Books 1978, by John Marks