Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (review)

This is a much needed and useful collection of essays, photographs, cartoons, and other sources that makes obvious but long ignored connections between the histories of technology and African Americans. The book offers a variety of questions, methods, and sources that seek to "simply . . . open up the topic for further exploration" (p. 1). Ranging from the celebratory to the theoretical, each of the essays contributes to its overall purpose of proposing and demonstrating complex approaches to the integration of African American history and the history of technology.

In his introductory essay, Bruce Sinclair theorizes about why the African American experience in technology has been obscured and excluded, and suggests a process for recovering and integrating these histories. He accounts for the segregation of the histories of race and technology by analyzing the myth of black technical incompetence and the "conservative approach" embedded in the origins of the history of technology as an academic specialty. Simultaneously, African Americans were painted with the brush of technological ineptitude, denied access to technical education and work, and written out of the history of technology. Sinclair argues that historians must begin to correct the record by employing new analytical tools that go beyond commemoration. Finding and giving credit to inventors who have been omitted from the historic record could be one approach, but this is problematic because blacks have had limited access to the patent system and a more complex experience would be overlooked.

Sinclair postulates that an examination of "the worlds of labor and consumption" would reveal African Americans engaging with technology in ways previously unimagined (p. 6). Indeed, it is at work that most people first have contact with complex machines and processes. Work is generally where skill and knowledge are expressed. And it is in the practice of consumption that people interpret and shape technologies to their own needs and desires. Hence, a broad definition of technology to include these interactions is required to fully capture the relationship between race and technology.

Sinclair has carefully selected essays that illustrate his hypotheses. For example, Judith Carney utilizes a geographical and historical approach based upon Arab and European descriptions of rice cultivation in Africa (rather than American planter accounts) to prove that Africans possessed skills and knowledge before they were enslaved in America. Slaveholders desired these people as much for their expertise as for their labor. In an essay addressing a similar point, Barbara Garrity-Blake proposes an "analytical category of invisible technology" that extends the definition of technology by proposing that chanteys (songs) sung by fishermen were a form of technology because they allowed the men to lift weights that were otherwise unbearable. Portia James's essay on African American inventors from 1619 to 1920 also rectifies the fallacy of black technological inferiority. On the other hand, Nina Lerman and Amy Slaton show that ability can be repressed and redirected according to the institutional design and availability of access to technical education.

During periods of limited employment and educational opportunities, African Americans demonstrated their agency in the way they consumed new technologies. Kathleen Franz's depiction of the black experience with the automobile elucidates the mechanical aptitude of African Americans and their ability to change the very meaning of the use of technology. African Americans used automobiles to prove their ability to understand a new technology, to gain social status, and, more important, to avoid racial oppression in the form of segregation. Similarly, Rebecca Herzig traces how technology and race mutually reshape each other "both symbolically and materially" (p. 163). The use of X rays to remove unwanted hair and to lighten skin reflects the importance of race in motivating the design of new technologies and also shows how technologies can be used to alter racial identity. Herzig urges the "bridging" of race and technology to both write "better history" and contribute to social justice (p. 166).

In a critique of how museums depict African American history, Lonnie Bunch offers...