Part 1:Reflect on dela Peña'sdiscussion of how race has been treated in the literature on technology. How does she outline some of the ways that whiteness and racism have played a role in the cultural understanding of race and technology?What evidence of this have you noticed? What are some ways that this could begin to be addressed?
Part 2: How doesNoble think that search engines and their algorithms reflect and contribute to the racist / sexist / etc. prejudices found in society? What are some ways that internettechnologies deepen racial inequalities?What in your own experience have been effects of internet technologies on equality and prejudice? What are some ways we could approach internet technologies to address this?
The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race Author(s): CAROLYN de la PEÑA Source: Technology and Culture , October 2010, Vol. 51, No. 4 (October 2010), pp. 919- 937 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of Technology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40928032 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press and Society for the History of Technology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Technology and Culture This content downloaded from �������������24.228.187.34 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 23:04:44 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms http://www.jstor.com/stable/40928032 The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race CAROLYN de la PEÑA What gets remembered is not simply a matter of documents but also of choice, of deciding what we will write about. And that decision often rests on what we imagine is possible to write about. - Bruce Sinclair, 2004 At the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in 2004, I presented a paper in a session titled "Race and Technology" - the only ses- sion at this meeting that directly engaged race. I have a very clear memory of looking out at the group (I'd call it a crowd, but I think there were maybe fifteen people in attendance) assembled to hear the paper and intuiting that perhaps race was not a core concern for historians of technology. My reaction was both right and wrong. In fact, the year I made my pres- entation, Bruce Sinclair published Technology and the African-American Experience, a collection of essays on the relationship between race and tech- nology, prefaced by an eloquent case for the importance of weaving race into our approach to the technological past. The next year, Carroll PurselPs A Hammer in Their Hands, a collection of primary sources on African- American contributions to technology, showcased the resources available to historians who would work on race, while urging those reading to start writing. These books were followed in 2008 by Evelynn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig's edited volume on race and science. Race, we might con- clude, is becoming a core concern for a growing number of scholars work- ing in and around the edges of the history of technology, and we now have the edited volumes to prove it.1 Carolyn de la Peña is professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. The original draft of this essay was circulated and presented at SHOT's Fiftieth Anniver- sary Workshop in October 2007 in Washington, D.C. This workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 0623056. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. ©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/10/5104-0009/919-37 1. Bruce Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and 919 This content downloaded from �������������24.228.187.34 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 23:04:44 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE OCTOBER 2010 VOL. 51 Yet if a critical mass of historians in the field seems interested in devel- oping studies that engage race, it is also apparent that most of us are not yet pursuing such a task. Pursell wrote in 2005 that "even a cursory glance" at the literature in the field reveals "the almost total lack of attention to mat- ters of race, just as gender was once ignored."2 His assertion echoed Sin- clair's comment a year earlier that the relationship between race and tech- nology "has yet to be understood," and Herzig's more stark assessment that "generally, historians of technology ignore the subject of race altogether."3 A quick survey of articles published in Technology and Culture suggests that not much has changed during the intervening years. Between 2004 and 2009, four articles out of the roughly hundred published devoted primary attention to analyzing the relationship between race and technology.4 These four articles doubled the number that appeared between 1999 and 2003. Between 1995 and 1998 there were three,5 and between 1989 and 1994, none.6 So, the situation has improved over the years, but even the four pub- lished between 2004 and 2009 account for only 4 percent of the total num- ber of articles in the journal. Opportunities for Study (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) (the epigraph that begins this essay is found on page 13); Carroll Pursell, ed., A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary His- tory of Technology and the African-American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Eve- lynn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig, eds., The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). 2. Pursell, Introduction, in A Hammer in Their Hands, xn. 3. Sinclair, "Preface," in Technology and the African-American Experience, vii; Rebecca Herzig, "Race in Histories of American Technology," in Technology and the African- American Experience, 156. 4. William Storey, "Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth- Century Southern Africa," Technology and Culture 45 (October 2004): 687-71 1; Carolyn de la Peña, "'Bleaching the Ethiopian': Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-ray Experiments," Technology and Culture 47 (January 2006): 27-55; Ron Eglash, "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature," Technology and Culture 48 (April 2007): 360-69; and Abby Kinchy, "African Americans in the Atomic Age: Postwar Perspectives on Race and the Bomb, 1945-1967" Technology and Culture 50 (April 2009): 291-315. 5. The five that appeared between 1995 and 2003 were Venus Green, "Race and Tech- nology: African- American Women in the Bell System, 1945-1980," supplement to Technology and Culture 36 (April 1995): S101-S143; Venus Green, "Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of 'Personal Service' in the Bell System, 1878-1921," Tech- nology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 912-49; Judith Carney, "Landscapes of Technol- ogy Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities," Technology and Culture 37 (January 1996): 5-35; Rebecca Herzig, '"North American Hiroshima Maidens' and the X-Ray," Technology and Culture 40 (October 1999): 723-45; and Anne Kelly Knowles, "Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry," Technology and Culture 42 (January 2001): 1-26. Four additional 1997 articles dealing with gender also included race as a core category: those by Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Roger Howoritz in the January issue, and that by Warren Belasco in the July issue. 6. Additional studies of transnationahsm and colonialism appear in tour 1 &C arti- cles between 1989 and 2002 and seven between 2003 and 2009. These might include sub- stantive racial analysis, but I did not review them as my focus here is scholarship on race in the United States. 920 This content downloaded from �������������24.228.187.34 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 23:04:44 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms de Id PEÑA I Archives and Race Historians of technology stand at a moment when a vast discrepancy exists between what we would like to be doing and what we are accom- plishing. We can, in the fashion of the books that have appeared, make the argument that historians must regard race as inextricably linked to the his- tory of technology in the United States. And we can continue to publish technological histories that do not pay attention to race. Interestingly, given that this essay originated as remarks presented at a workshop panel on "Race and Gender," this discrepancy does not apply to the question of gen- der and the history of technology. Both gender and race were largely absent from the early decades of the field, but twenty years ago, historians of tech- nology began urging one another to take gender seriously, and many have done so. One could argue, of course, that the push to study gender simply came sooner than did the push to study race, and we have simply not waited long enough to see a thousand flowers bloom. But I conclude that this seems unlikely to happen. Gender studies flourished following the first major publications during the 1970s in the history of technology, but we are now a decade past those calls to take race seriously.7 The sticking point seems to be the challenge of translating such calls into action. Part of the difficulty is the process of conducting the research upon which all historical scholarship must rest. We cannot rely on the ar- chives or methods that have well served many others engaged in the history of technology to serve the study of race and technology. The history of technology began with engineers telling stories about their own crea- tions - and it continues to be, as Pursell puts it, one that "privileges design."8 Engineers and inventors have long been the actors, and techno- logical innovations the sites. Until recently, these stories did not, by and large, feature nonwhites. Add to this pattern the structuring we tend to bring to historical study itself, a tendency to use time periods rather than categories as our scaffolds for analysis. Surveys of the field continue to fea- ture temporally driven narratives of major technologies such as steam engines, aircraft, and information processing. Much scholarship also tends to focus on big questions concerning the relationship between technology and cultural values or social change, rather than examining cultures and social relations embedded in the technologies themselves.9 Within this landscape there are few built-in mechanisms for producing scholarship that prioritizes race. NSF ESSAY SERIES 7. One can date the first "call" to take race