Computer Science

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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7. 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."

8. Pursell, Introduction (n. 2 above), xn. 9. See, for instance, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology

(New York, 1997); Donald Cardwell, Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology (New York, 2001); Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technol- ogy and Culture (Chicago, 2005); and David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

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Nor can historians interested in race rely fully on the techniques that have worked for bringing gender analysis into the study of technology. Much of this work fits into two categories of scholarship: research that in- serts women into meta-historical narratives, and that which explores the importance of women in the design and innovation process through their roles as consumers. Yet accomplishing either purpose requires archives with relevant documents. Thanks to the fact that women often were innovators,

on their own and through their husbands, records of their activities can be located. Personal papers offer further opportunities for exploring women's unreported contributions, just as business records permit excavation of their influence as buyers (or not) of new technologies. When studies such as Ruth Oldenziel's survey of the importance of women's knowledge in modern engineering projects and Ruth Schwartz Cowan's exploration of household technologies appeared, they inspired generations of feminist scholars to write women into the history of technology and pointed them toward the resources they have needed to do it.10

Similar excavation work by scholars on race also inspires excitement. Judith Carney's groundbreaking work revealed that the skills of African Americans enabled rice cultivation in the antebellum South, while Venus

Green's articles (and subsequent book) demonstrated how race influenced both the implementation and reception of new technologies in the Bell Sys- tem. Anne Kelly Knowles's research explored the under-appreciated contri- butions of black labor to the Confederate iron industry. Along with path- breaking studies such as Rayvon Fouché's and Lisa Nakamura's, their work comprises a significant body of scholarship that leaves little doubt that peo- ple of color and the history of technology have, in Sinclair's words, "always been intertwined."11 But good records that allow scholars to undertake this kind of study simply are not as plentiful as they are when they examine women (white women), as many of us know from experience. One may find, for example, photos of black, Asian American, or Latino workers, but all too rarely does one find correspondence or detailed data on the racial breakdown of workers or accounts of racial stratification in the work-

place.12 Such documents signal the possibility of alternative technological narratives, but often the data required to write them remains elusive.

10. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Ma- chines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam, 1999); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for

Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1985).

11. Sinclair, "Preface" (n. 3 above), vii; Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby f. Davidson (Baltimore, 2003); Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York, 2002).

12. 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

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de Id PEÑA I Archives and Race

Arguably, the very success of historical scholarship on gender and tech- nology obscures the challenges of prioritizing race as an analytical category in histories of technology. Because it is possible, even if difficult, to write women into technological histories by combing known sources and by locating alternative archives, we have as a profession effectively "diversi- fied," especially compared to where we stood two decades ago. Important work has been accomplished, and it has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the factors that influence technological production and consumption in the United States. At the same time, much of this work on women is primarily about white women. As recent scholarship on intersectionality in sociology and cultural studies has demonstrated, oppression does not impact lives through the separate lenses of one's gender, race, class, or sexuality; rather, these forms interlock, creating "intersections" that comprise our lived expe- rience.13 Our success in writing women into the history of technology should make us more eager to unearth the underpinnings of race.14 Yet this can be difficult, both because the methodologies of studying race may not be the same as those used to explore gender, and because of the tendency of SHOT, at panels like the one where I first presented these ideas in 2007, to combine papers on race and gender into a single category. This "bundling" may keep us from noticing that the success of one has not really foreshad- owed the success of the other.

The challenge historians of technology face at this point in the process of encouraging critical race studies within the history of technology is, I believe, what Sinclair has referred to as the "problem of sources."15 Rather than imagining "race" as a term that describes particular individuals marked as nonwhite, I want to suggest that we think of race as an epistemology at play in all technological production and consumption. This concept makes it possible to see the significance of the obvious: that white people have race. And they make it, sustain it, and protect it in part through technology. More

importantly, this approach suggests that it is not only the problem of sources

that keeps us from integrating race fully into our analyses. Instead, the real difficulty occurs in tandem: difficult-to-locate sources combine with our own tendencies to fail to see all that can be found in what is available, and

to creatively engage and interpret it in order to draw race out of the archive.

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Hagley Library and Archives, Wilmington, Delaware. 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.

13. Leslie McCall, "The Complexity of Intersectionality," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (November 2007): 1771-1800.

14. 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.

15. Bruce Sinclair, "Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology," in Technology and the African-American Experience (n. 1 above), 12.

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I am not the first scholar to argue that racial difference and whiteness are constructed through technology. Sinclair identifies the foundation of this history in his assertion that "the heart of the distinctions drawn between black and white people in this country" has been whites' success at "defining African Americans as technically incompetent and then . . . deny- ing them access to education, control over complex machinery, or the power of patent rights law."16 Studies by Herzig and Hammonds enable us to see that this situation is not limited to actual, tangible inequities such as the right to own property, attend school, or pursue employment. People of color – particularly African Americans prior to the 1960s – have been held to particular, culturally constructed categories deemed "race" by techno- logical tools and scientific systems.

Speaking of technology and race, Herzig argues in Technology and the African-American Experience that "the two emerge simultaneously through particular, identifiable practices," a process she illustrates by showing how technologies of hair management and evaluation have served to "prove" racial difference in the twentieth century.17 In Herzig's more recent edited volume with Hammonds, the two historians enrich this argument with pri-

mary sources illustrating how scientific inquiry, defined as "laborious acts of observation, quantification, and experimentation," have effectively brought "specific categories of people . . . into being."18

If, however, we allow race to refer to nonwhite people, we have to admit

that the most powerful racial category brought into "being" by science and technology has been whiteness. In a 2007 essay, Joel Dinerstein argues that technology as a concept in American culture functions as a "white mythol- ogy." By exploring the trajectory of technological utopias, Dinerstein dem- onstrates that the rhetoric of white Americans has repeatedly positioned technology, created by white knowledge, as a means of realizing, purifying, and enhancing the human experience.19 He argues, in fact, that these nar- ratives have grown stronger over time, emerging in recent post-human dis- course that seeks to counter the increasing ethnic diversity among Ameri- cans. The result is an ideal image of a disembodied, technologically enabled body that in form and privilege is white.

Dinerstein specifically addresses whiteness, but that topic does not need to be mentioned to be present. George Lipsitz has argued that racism's most virulent form is not personal prejudice, but rather "structured advantage" that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites, while posing

16. Ibid., 2.

17. Herzig, "Race in Histories of American Technology" (n. 3 above), 159. 18. Hammonds and Herzig (n. 1 above), xii. 19. Joel Dinerstein, "Posthumanism and Its Discontents, in Rewiring the Nation :

The Place of Technology in American Studies, ed. Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyana- than (Baltimore, 2007), 16.

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

impediments to those same things for people of color.20 As is also clear in cultural histories like David Nye's Second Creation, white actors rarely men- tion whiteness as the goal they seek to create through technological sys- tems, even as those systems, in action, always protect white positions of power. This makes sense. Given that technology, as I have previously de- fined it, is "the material or systemic results of human attempts to extend the

limits of power over the body and its surroundings," one would expect to find a "possessive investment in technology" in our history.21

Here, studies of the history of technology and gender can provide a model. The earliest analyses of race and technology, in fact, traced the path earlier worn by historians who initially devoted their attention to gender questions. An important shift occurred when scholarship emerged that instead of adding gender (read women) to the existing narrative, adopted gender as a lens through which to view the field as a whole. In Roger Horo- witz's edited collection Boys and Their Toys, for instance, a number of essays

address the ways in which technological innovation emerged from mascu- line social networks, and how technological products appealed to male consumers because of embedded values and functional characteristics.22

Masculine cultures and male-centered communities have not only pro- duced particular technologies and driven desires to consume technological objects, they have also made it possible to see technological epistemologies as both right and good, a process that has been particularly pronounced in times of war.23

This shift – from regarding gender as corollary to regarding it as foun- dational – has enabled historians to move beyond adding new people to existing technological narratives, and instead to reach a place where the analyst now asks questions of the narratives themselves. Such an approach affects both our point of focus and the significance of the histories we write. While adding women through gender creates a more diverse record of the history of technology, viewing the history of technology through gender actually enhances our understanding of what technology does and for whom. Including men in gendered analysis was the crucial turn, one that needs to be mirrored now by the realization that white people have race. Rather than focusing primarily on adding what is missing, let us also

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20. George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998), 106.

21. Carolyn de la Peña, "'Slow and Low Progress,' or Why American Studies Should Do Technology," in Rewiring the "Nation" 362.

22. Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys: Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (New York, 2001).

23. Michael Adas discovered that data-heavy assessments of success in Vietnam communicated "facts" along with particular masculine forms of status; see Adas, Domi- nance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

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push our evidence to reveal the race-influenced ideologies that have in part created and perpetuated the absences.

To accomplish this task, historians need to interact in a different way with their archives. Few historical subjects are self-reflexive about their whiteness. Just as racism, in Sinclair's words, has "whitened the national

narrative,"24 so too has it whitened our technological stories – so much so that race as race is rarely mentioned, and when it is discussed, it nearly al- ways refers to a person of color. To explore whiteness, historians must first raise the subject. Yet bringing it up poses a challenge for practitioners in a field in which particular kinds of evidence are valued and a certain amount of objectivity is required to do "good work." Studying whiteness means working with evidence more interpretive than tangible; it requires imagi- native analyses of language and satisfaction with identifying possible moti- vations of subjects, rather than definitive trajectories of innovation, pro- duction, and consumption. We have to wrestle with the data, and then we have to wrestle with ourselves.

Yet the stretch beyond the archive is not a new one for historians. In her

influential essay "Embellishing a Life of Labor," Lizabeth Cohen worked between available records and the study of objects to locate common aspi- rations and accommodations for working-class immigrants in the early twentieth century that were otherwise obscured from the historical record. Similarly, Eric Wolf argued in Europe and the People Without History that a creative stretch between macro- and micro -histories was required to enable

"both the people who claim history as their own and the people to whom history has been denied" to emerge "as participants in the same historical trajectory."25

These scholars wrote nearly thirty years ago. In order to write the histo-

ries on race and technology that are missing, we must, again, become the historians who ask about what is missing from the record and the archives. We have to be willing to talk about race, even when our subjects did not.26 It is a risk, and it can lead to overreaching in one's analysis, misreading the data, and simply getting things wrong. It can also open up essential new ter- rain in the study of how racialized thinking has shaped technological inno- vation and influenced our engagement with its objects in the United States.

The remainder of this essay discusses two case studies from my own

24. Sinclair, "Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology" (n. 15 above), 2. 25. 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; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 9.

26. 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.

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

work as a means of exploring strategies for using historical records in alter- native ways and asking different questions about race and technology. The first examines how race, while ostensibly discussed as an issue concerning people of color, actually is used rhetori

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