Brian:
What did you encounter when you started your career with IBM in Columbus, GA?
Cecilia:
It's funny that you asked that question. The IBM office in Columbus, Georgia was a remote office from Atlanta. The accounts that we dealt with in Columbus were spread out; different from an urban city like Atlanta where a city block or two could be your entire territory.
As a Systems Engineer, my territory could be vast and wide dealing with, guess what, companies that are run by older white men. I would have conversations with my manager about different accounts and he would tell me that he was not going to send me to certain accounts because he already knew that the contacts there were racists and he was trying to protect me.
I appreciated that but can you imagine, well this young black girl straight out of college going to visit some company out in Podunk, Georgia?
It's interesting that he knew, he already knew, which accounts to keep me away from.
Brian:
You could have opened the door and taught them a thing or two.
Cecilia:
It's not so much that because I think when you're older it's hard to change who you are. Was my advancement stymieing a little bit because I didn't have access to the same accounts?
But I'm still alive.
Brian:
Early in my career in Jacksonville, I had a good friend and colleague. We worked together, played tennis, and I was an usher at his wedding. Once another colleague and then a friend of ours was in the hospital and we went to visit her. When he and his wife left the room, she said "who let those black people come in here"? I thought to myself, this is the sweetest little southern woman you ever did meet. I further thought, I can't believe this is a person that I call my friend.
Cecilia:
You didn't truly know her, yet you knew her, right? That's my point. Yeah, some of it you won't know. You really won't know because today we are very good, especially with coworkers, we don't mix work and politics and work and church, and because of that sometimes you really won't know where people stand.
I've always known that you had to be better than your white counterpart.
I mean that's kind of like what you're taught. Yeah, you're going to college because you need a degree, but you still needed to be better despite it. You need to look better; you need to be better educated and hopefully, you'll get the same salary, not always a guarantee. Maybe you'll get in on the ground floor, but you won't move.
There's a lot of people on the ground floor, but who's up there at the top? You can feel better about all those on the ground floor and then you just keep on doing what you've been doing, being content about where you are with little hope to go any further. You can see it happening.
You can now see more women, running corporations. But again, where's the color among the upper ranks.
Brian:
I can think of one. She was the CEO of Xerox (Ursula Burns became CEO of Xerox, the first black woman to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company). But that's all I could think of right now and women are held to a different standard than men.
Cecilia:
Absolutely and it is 2020. That's why the highest job in the land, the presidency, it's critical that you get a woman. It's critical that you get a black person. That's when little kids will see and imagine that, okay, we can be president.