The history of technology, the resistance of archives, and the whiteness of race

Technology and Culture

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 919-937

  De La Peña, Carolyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 78649883263     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Bruce Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) (the epigraph that begins this essay is found on page 13)
2. Carroll Pursell, ed., A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)
3. Evelynn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig, eds., The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).
4. Pursell, "Introduction," in A Hammer in Their Hands, xii.
5. Sinclair, "Preface," in Technology and the African-American Experience, vii
6. Rebecca Herzig, "Race in Histories of American Technology," in Technology and the African-American Experience, 156.
7. William Storey, "Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa," Technology and Culture 45 (October 2004): 687-711;
8. Carolyn de la Peña, "'Bleaching the Ethiopian': Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-ray Experiments," Technology and Culture 47 (January 2006): 27-55;
9. Ron Eglash, "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature," Technology and Culture 48 (April 2007): 360-69;
10. 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.
11. The five that appeared between 1995 and 2003 were Venus Green, "Race and Technology: African-American Women in the Bell System, 1945-1980," supplement to Technology and Culture 36 (April 1995): S101-S143;
12. Venus Green, "Goodbye Central: Automation and the Decline of'Personal Service' in the Bell System, 1878-1921," Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 912-49;
13. Judith Carney, "Landscapes of Technology Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities," Technology and Culture 37 (January 1996): 5-35; (Pubitemid 126094170)
14. Rebecca Herzig, "'North American Hiroshima Maidens' and the X-Ray," Technology and Culture 40 (October 1999): 723-45;
15. 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.
16. Additional studies of transnationalism and colonialism appear in four T&C articles between 1989 and 2002 and seven between 2003 and 2009. These might include substantive racial analysis, but I did not review them as my focus here is scholarship on race in the United States.
17. One can date the first "call" to take race seriously in a number of ways. Here, I am choosing to do so by the publication of Herzig's "'North American Hiroshima Maidens'" in 1999, although one could set the date to 1995 with Green's "Race and Technology.
18. Pursell, "Introduction" (n. 2 above), xii.
19. See, for instance, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York, 1997)
20. Donald Cardwell, Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology (New York, 2001)
21. Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago, 2005)
22. David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
23. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam, 1999)
24. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1985).
25. Sinclair, "Preface" (n. 3 above), vii
26. Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in theAgeof Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson (Baltimore, 2003).
27. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York, 2002).
28. Here, I am thinking of my own use of two manuscript collections: the Krispy Kreme Donut collection at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., and the Monsanto Company Newsletter collection at the Hagley Library and Archives, Wilmington, Delaware.
29. One example of just this kind of rich technological history is Vicki Ruiz's Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1987). Ruiz's account rests upon her own extensive interviews and oral histories.
30. Leslie McCall, "The Complexity of Intersectionality," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (November 2007): 1771-1800.
31. Ruth Frankenberg offered a multifaceted description of the way that race shapes white women's lives in White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, 1993), 1-2.
32. Bruce Sinclair, "Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology" in Technology and the African-American Experience (n. 1 above), 12.
33. Ibid., 2. Bruce Sinclair, "Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology" in Technology and the African-American Experience (n. 1 above), 12.
34. Herzig, "Race in Histories of American Technology" (n. 3 above), 159.
35. Hammonds and Herzig (n. 1 above), xii.
36. Joel Dinerstein, "Posthumanism and Its Discontents," in Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies, ed. Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyanathan (Baltimore, 2007), 16.
37. George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998), 106.
38. Carolyn de la Pena, "'Slow and Low Progress,' or Why American Studies Should Do Technology" in Rewiring the "Nation," 362.
39. Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys: Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (New York, 2001).
40. Michael Adas discovered that data-heavy assessments of success in Vietnam communicated "facts" along with particular masculine forms of status; see Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission (Cambridge,Mass., 2006).
41. Sinclair, "Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology" (n. 15 above), 2.
42. Lizabeth Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915," in Material Culture Studies in America: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Schlereth (1982; rept., Walnut Creek, Calif., 1999), 289-305;
43. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 9.
44. A comparison could be drawn to "action research," a process by which scholars place themselves in the midst of social structures in order to think and rethink their questions from the point of view of multiple actors in the midst of real-time issues of concern. Here, the immersion is with the imagined actors of history, however, rather than a living community.
45. Carolyn de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York, 2003); de la Peña, "'Bleaching the Ethiopian'" (n. 4 above).
46. Even after extensive searching in old newspapers, I found only two stories other than those I had seen earlier. The problem was that small-town papers were infrequently archived, yet it was such papers that often reported these stories. There was also a brief story in the June 1908 issue of Popular Mechanics-with a photo included-of one of the copycat experiments in Philadelphia.
47. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), 226.
48. See Nakamura (n. 11 above); Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst, Mass., 2003); and Fouché (n. 11 above).
49. Pursell, "Introduction" (n. 2 above), xiii.
50. Poppy Cannon, Unforbidden Sweets (New York, 1958), 21, 56, 107.
51. Ruth West, Stop Dieting! Start Losing! (New York, 1956), 12.
52. Myra Waldo, The Slenderella Cook Book (New York, 1957), 15.
53. The "Like" campaign, designed by J. Walter Thompson to promote Seven-Up's new diet soda, featured only white women in its advertisements, nearly all of them blonde. Advertisements from the Thompson Agency's Like campaign of 1969 can be found in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History in Duke University's Special Collections Library, Durham, N.C.
54. See, for example, Ebony advertisements from its issues of: December 1985, 63; September 1986, 63; and January 1987, 116-17. For information on Michael Jackson's pitch for Pepsi (which resulted in the infamous scalp fire) and Coke's subsequent enlistment of black celebrities to sell Coke and Diet Coke
55. see Pamela Noel, "TV Ad Wars' Newest Weapon," Ebony, July 1984, 81-86. Ads for artificially sweetened products that featured African Americans in non-African-American newspapers and magazines frequently featured famous men.
56. See, for example, Flip and Geraldine Wilson with Diet Seven-Up in McCall's, March 1981, 69; Bill Cosby promoting Jell-O Instant Pudding in the Los Angeles Times, 9 June 1985, AJ67
57. Famous Amos pitching chocolate soda in the New York Times, 3 November 1985, 73.
58. Most infamous of these were the Tuskegee experiments, begun in the 1930s and extending into the 1970s, wherein hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, mostly poor sharecroppers, were not offered penicillin treatments long after they were available so that researchers could better understand the long-term impact of leaving the condition untreated. Another layer of distrust, especially for women, may have been added by the specific experience of black women's bodies within American medical practice, where reproductive health services have frequently been inferior and at times damaging for women of color. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee-Study-of-Untreat ed-Syphilis-in-the- Negro-Male (accessed 27 May 2010).
59. For the history of scientific arguments in favor of white superiority, see David Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)
60. Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African-American Experience (n. 1 above)
61. and Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1997).
62. For more on African-American women and reproductive science, see Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York,1997).
63. Linda Villarosa, ed., Body and Soul: The Black Women's Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being (New York, 1994), 51, 309.
64. Jessica B. Harris, "Celebrating Our Cuisine," in The Black Women's Health Book (Seattle, 1994), 305-9.
65. Of eight recent cookbooks aimed at African Americans, including two weight-loss-focused texts, only one used artificial sweetener in a recipe. That book, The New Soul Food Cookbook for People with Diabetes, was published by the American Diabetes Association, and even those three recipes that called for sugar-free gelatin also included sugar.
66. LaBelle, quoted in Kimberly Nettles, "'Saving' Soul Food," Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 7, no. 3 (2007): 111;
67. see also Wilbert Jones, The New Soul Food Cookbook (New York, 1996). For an extensive list of African-American cookbooks, including titles aimed at controlling diabetes or facilitating weight loss, see Nettles, "'Saving' Soul Food.
68. In 2007 the York, Pennsylvania, Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) parish featured three films as part of its Vespers emphasis on "health-related information." One of them was an interview with Dr. Russell Blaylock on the health effects of sweeteners (see http://www.naturalnews.com/020550- excitotoxins-MSG.html [accessed 25 May 2010])
69. another was Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World, directed by Cori Brackett and J. T. Waldron (2006).
70. See also Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (Bloomington, Ind., 2007), esp. 146-49, 164.
71. Lipsitz (n. 20 above).