This morning I progressed through chapter 1 of Technology and the African-American Experience. It is a collection of essays edited by Bruce Sinclair. I purchased this book because before becoming a doctoral student, much of the improvement in my life has been born out of reading of Africans in America. This book examines the intersection of race and technology and it is mind-blowing. Here is a quote from page 1


White Americans, including those as committed to Enlightenment ideals as Thomas Jefferson—even as he corresponded with Benjamin Banneker, the African American astronomer and almanac maker—believed that black people among them were mentally inferior, and by that they didn’t just mean a capacity for advanced intellectual accomplishment. What good would freedom be, one southerner put it, to a field hand whose highest faculties were taxed “to discriminate between cotton and crop-grass, and to strike one with a hoe without hitting the other? (Sinclair 2004, p.1).

Now we are getting somewhere. This document the origins of the concept that African Americans do not have the ingenuity to invent and that technological innovation to be left to those of a lighter hue. Was Thomas Jefferson a white supremacist. I like that term better than racist because it is more precise. After reading the chapter I wrote 2 pages in my chapter 1. Again this is zero-draft stuff. This book has me very excited about how I will fit this historical viewpoint into my chapter 1,so I am going to take it to work and read another chapter. I would like to get through the book and capture my thoughts for the weekend. My goal is to craft first draft and send it to Margaret on November 1.