The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 by Autumn Womack (review)

As our varying cultures, societies, and communities embrace the changing nature of identity and we become more comfortable with the differences that define human existence, it is still relevant and important to investigate how we have gotten to where we are and examine the underpinning social, political, and cultural structures that have helped to fashion this reality. In a refreshingly interdisciplinary way, Autumn Womack takes up this task in The Matter of Black Living.

The text launches this investigation with the provocative subheading "Undisciplining Data" in the introductory chapter, "Data and the Matter of Blackness." This beginning sets the stage for Womack's thoughtful and carefully argued study aimed at disentangling, and more optimistically disrupting, the processes by which Black folks and Black life are represented as data to quantify, systematize, organize, and ultimately solve the problem of Black people in the United States. Womack's point of entry is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when this American conundrum was simplistically known as the Negro Problem. What is most interesting about this text is that Womack leans away from the expected trajectory about race, Blackness, and data. That space is comprised of contemporary studies that reveal the ways algorithmic biases shape Black lives, control Black communities, and precipitate a host of actions that continue the tradition of technological violence levied against Black people. Though Womack acknowledges the importance of these works, The Matter of Black Living propels us to a moment a century earlier, when the foundation of contemporary data violence was born. In this regard, Womack demands that we question the power of social scientific investigation that made data the gold standard of understanding and ultimately categorizing Black people and Black living. It is the interrogation into the ways that data have been deployed to circumscribe Black life that is a central concern of the book. It is not only the ways in which data and Blackness are co-constituted but the racialized imperative of social scientific disciplines that made Blackness the problem and the new technological tools of data acquisition and analysis the solution that this study brings into higher relief. Moreover, the text questions the processes by which the data of Black life were acquired, as well as how the desire to have a clean and tidy solution to the Negro Problem drove the need to universalize and flatten Black life. If the construction of the data and data sets that represent Blackness is flawed from the outset, then it is seemingly impossible for that data to become information, knowledge, or wisdom.

The text navigates the interlaced claims "that black life and data cohered at the turn of the twentieth century, albeit asymmetrically and insufficiently; that African American cultural producers intervened into these debates along experimental lines; and, finally, that these experiments doubled as rubrics for literary and aesthetic practice" (p. 32). Three chapters that loosely correspond to the prior claims and focus on the technologies of the social survey, photography, and film animate the bulk of the book. In the chapter "The Social Survey: The Survey Spirit," Womack contends that social surveys were not just instruments for or methods of data collection but were modern visual technologies that reconceptualized our understanding for observing life. Thus, the social survey could provide an opportunity to conceptualize Black life beyond that of merely quantified data. The second chapter, "Photography: Looking Out," works through the interrelationships between photography as a technology of creating data and as a technique of capturing, revealing, and expressing the vitality of Black life. The third chapter, "Film: Overexposure," argues that the medium of film, for some Black people, was more than just a collection of moving images but could be an instrument through which Black people could record the rich textures of their own lives and intervene in the statistical rigidity required to answer the Negro Problem.

Overall, Autumn Womack has authored a text that...