From Black Inventors to One Laptop Per Child: Exporting a Racial Politics of Technology

The epigraph is one representative snapshot of the historical relationship that African Americans have had with technology and the institutions that support these technologies. The lawyer who spoke this statement in a patent rights battle involving an African American inventor at the turn of the twentieth century probably did not recognize the irony in his utterance. He clearly intended it to come off as a slight against African American work ethics; instead it reads completely the opposite. Outside of the “lazy negro” phrase, the comment can be interpreted as a smart and innovative labor-saving solution to a problem of fieldwork. Thus, the hay rake inventor-if there is actually one person who “invented” the hay rake-may have been lazy, but I would think of this person as being industrious, innovative, and simply smart. The idea of not wanting to clean up something by hand has brought the world a plethora of mechanical, automated, and robotic vacuuming devices. What is most important about this quote has less to do with the rake and more to do with the perceived technological limitations of African American people. Beyond the basic insult, the lawyer is contending that African Americans are technologically incom - petent. Understanding that this quote comes from the late nineteenth century, it is just an extension of the tradition of African American inability that deemed these people incapable of caring for themselves.2 This quote not only reflects the historic connections between race and technology in the United States, but can reference similar relationships throughout the globe. Laziness has been a pejorative term deployed by Western colonizers in Africa, Asia, and India long before the group of people transported to North America became known as Negroes.3 Of course, deeming someone as lazy is an effective technique to substantiate unequal treatment and subjugation. The racial politics of difference 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8111 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 creation and use. These historical assumptions about the meager mental capacities of the world’s brown people were easily and effectively reproduced in technological realms. The creative ability to invent, innovate, and merely use technology-thought of as a god-given ability well into the twentieth centuryhas regularly been denied to so-called intellectually inferior peoples of color who could only survive through the benevolent assistance of others not like themselves. Well before the twentieth century white Westerners brought (and still do) Christianity to the unsaved brown people of the world.4 By the late twentieth century this missionary zeal had been reborn in a desire to save the same people through science and technology rather than religion.5 Brown people, once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age.