Leveraging a usable past: family history and the epistemology of civic life

Editorial note: I started this essay in 2018 as I was working my way into the ideas behind my current project-in-progress American Storyworlds. I’ve revised it 116 times and it’s still a work in progress. I’m publishing it now, in its imperfect form, as I’m starting to make that project public. Also, I chose not to engage the current attacks on race scholarship, because that is a separate argument and this is already a very long post.

Nations are built on narratives. So much of the turmoil in which we Americans find ourselves has to do with the battle for control of the historical narrative on which our civic life is built. Whether individually or collectively, the way that we remember history has important implications for the way we constitute community, assess media credibility, and conduct civic life. In the wake of profound political, social, technological, and economic dislocations since the end of World War II, generations of scholarship unearthing the suppressed history of oppressed communities have helped to undermine grand narratives of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. They have also engendered backlash and cultural fragmentation.

In 1995, technical communications theorist Johndan Johnson-Eilola contemplated how networked, hypertext communications technologies would alter our ways of constituting identity and community. In an essay that was highly influential (and novel in form) for its time, he argued that we needed to understand this shift in the larger context of the shift from modernism to post-modernism and its concomitant loss of faith in the institutions, technologies, and social arrangements that were supposed to have put us on the inexorable path to progress. According to him, “Postmodernism can help explain such concepts as the rise of contract over permanent labor, the growth of global markets and information networks, interdisciplinary teams in business and industry, among other things. But we will gain productive and valued positions in the workplace only if we begin to understand these cultural developments in new ways.”

The backlash against both shifting circumstances and norms of discourse has been broad and deep: Hate crimes are on the rise; authoritarianism is resurgent. Violent protests over Civil War monuments, calls to change the faces on US currency, the debate over reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans, and arguments over social studies curricula are visible reminders of both our fragmented understanding of the past, and the divergent ways in which we harness the past to envision possible futures.

The historical narratives that frame our everyday lives come from our schools, our religious institutions, our civic and fraternal organizations, our families, the media we consume and the networks we create. Increasingly, they also come from information that is served to by opaque algorithms – search engines, social media platforms, and genealogy platforms that mine public records and members’ text, media, and DNA inputs to give subscribers a version of where they come from and to whom they are connected.

I’ve found that there are two sets of competing meta-narratives of American history: a dominant narrative held by the acknowledged descendants of (mostly European) voluntary immigrants, and a set of counter-narratives held by descendants of the indigenous people and of those who were brought here involuntarily from Africa. I refer to the “acknowledged” descendants of voluntary immigrants because many of us who are descended from those Native Americans and Africans also have European ancestors, many of whom raped our foremothers to produce children that they regarded as mere chattel. I refer to voluntary immigrants to account for those who came to the United States of their own volition from Africa, Asia and Latin America believing that there would be greater opportunities for them than there were in their countries of origin. The narratives don’t map neatly on to facile narratives of liberal, conservative or progressive ideologies, which is why I personally find most of the discourse about political polarization and tribalism incredibly unhelpful.

The dominant narratives hold that the United States was founded on noble ideals of liberty and equality, and while we haven’t always lived up to those ideals, we’ve been on a path of inexorable progress. To them, the system is fundamentally sound, and anyone who works hard and plays by the rules will eventually succeed. Failure is usually assumed to be a failure of individual character, poor parenting, or a degenerate subculture.

The counter-narratives hold that like the Athenians of old, the Founders only intended for the blessings of liberty to be available to men such as themselves, using wealth they extracted from the property and labor of indigenous people, indentured people, women, and enslaved people. Any progress we’ve achieved toward becoming a real democracy has been the result of agitation, that agitation must continue. Abolitionist and suffragist Frederick Douglas told us,“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Now, what that “agitation” should look like, what constitutes progress, and how any of this should be articulated are matters of considerable debate. One only has to ponder Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ oft-cited identification with the protagonist of Richard Wright’s protest novel Native Son to understand that agreeing that there is a thing called racism that limits people’s life chances is a far cry from agreeing on what the response to that empirical reality should be.

Journalism’s limits in facilitating public conversations

Journalists play a role in the development of collective memory and national identity, and the ways in which historical memory affects intercultural relations, public policy and the body politic. As Elizabeth Le has demonstrated, journalists ground their news analysis in culturally-specific historical narratives. For much of American history, mainstream journalism has upheld the dominant narrative – a narrative suffused with a belief in Black deviance and the importance of ensuring that the expansion of rights and social benefits are restricted to those who are deserving. For example, in her 2014 book, Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story, Natalie Byfield connects press participation in the rush to judgment of five Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted for the brutal rape and beating of young investment banker to racist myths that justified 19th century lynchings. . Eric Deggans’ 2012 book, Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, documented ways in which mainstream news and opinion media exacerbated prejudice and xenophobia. Amy Alexander’s 2015 memoir, Uncovering Race: A Black Woman’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention, connected the lack of diversity in mainstream newsrooms to their failure to reflect the diversity of the communities they covered.

Mainstream news publications’ efforts to go beyond the dominant historical narrative have gained some traction in recent years. For example, Ta-Nehesi Coates’ 2014 essay,”The Case for Reparations” traced the historical roots of housing discrimination in Chicago as an example of generations of policies and practices that stole wealth from African Americans. The article sparked wide debate leading to a Congressional hearing and support from Democratic presidential candidates.

In a 2019 interview with New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, Coates said, “When I wrote ‘The Case for Reparations,’ my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing,” According to Coates, what’s needed is a thorough examination of the damage wrought by white supremacy, accompanied by “a policy of repair.” Even conservative pundit David Brooks agreed:

The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

David Brooks, The Case for Reparations, March 7, 2019

A diverse and inclusive American polity requires the creation of more effective face-to-face and virtual spaces that permit an honest reckoning with our divergent understandings of history. The creation of such spaces poses challenges to journalists, historians and civic media designers that have yet to be fully articulated. We haven’t fully reckoned with the ways in which “the people formerly known as the audience” use media technologies to construct their own knowledge frameworks, and the ways in the owners of those technologies and malign actors exploit exploit those efforts.

In the classroom, I have encouraged students to use research methods derived from journalism, history and African American studies to develop family and community histories that inform a personal articulation of what it means to be American. I’ve then asked them to listen to other student and community members’ experiences to consider how their individual perspectives might be integrated into a collective vision of American identity. Students have responded positively to this approach, saying that it has broadened their understanding of their own intersectional identities in relation to others. These anecdotal experiences lead me to wonder whether there are ways that journalists and civic media creators might use similar methods to facilitate informed dialog and community building around historical memory.

Mediating family history

Genealogical research is one way that many of us construct personal knowledge frameworks. Over the last decade, the advent of such services as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org has accelerated that interest, with millions of people contributing records, photographs, family stories and DNA, giving rise to discourse communities in which evidence is shared and vetted among people who would not otherwise encounter each other. These massive databases have also attracted other interested parties, such as scholars and law enforcement, leading to debates over ethics and privacy in some instances.

Finding Your Roots, a television show on the PBS network hosted by Harvard University African American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, advances an optimistic vision of the potential of genealogical research to undermine prejudice:

“By decoding our DNA, and untangling the branches of our family, we’ll discover how blurred the lines that divide us truly are.” Henry Louis Gates, Finding Your Roots

“[W]e have more in common than we have differences, and color doesn’t mean a thing.” Joe Madison, radio host, on Finding Your Roots https://www.thecrisismagazine.com/single-post/2019/04/09/Radio-Host-Joe-Madison-Finds-His-Roots

With the expansion of digital archives and commercially-owned genealogy databases, I am alert to both the possibilities and dangers of these emergent technologies: algorithmic bias, surveillance and “sousveillance,” and the crafting of false, mythic histories in the service of ethno-nationalist ideologies. (Browne, 2014, Noble, 2016) At the same time, communities of practice such as the restorative narrative movement, the racial dialog work of David Campt and others, along with theorists such as Ramesh Srinivasan and Michelle Ferrier suggest design processes and computing architectures that might lead to the creation of constructive and non- exploitative spaces.

While I approach this topic from my own standpoint as an African American woman, I’m aware that many people with other backgrounds feel impelled to make similar explorations. Journalist, scholar and civic media entrepreneur Michelle Ferrier notes:


As bell hooks suggests, the overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance (hooks, 2481). So the task of my narratives was and continues to be to provide a space for those “shared sensibilities” that cut across gender, race, class and sexual practice.

The Signifying Quilt: A Patchwork-Type of Narrative

Communication scholar Peter Lunt has observed that explorations of family history have become one popular means of addressing this dislocation:

“[T]he idea of finding out about oneself through an exploration of the character and lives of ancestors is a growing social practice reflected in popular culture. Tracing one’s personal traits through past family members and extending the sense of family and identity back in time potentially enriches personal identity and link personal, social and cultural memory.”


Lunt, P. (2017). The media construction of family history: An analysis of “Who do you think you are?” Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 42(3), 293–307. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2017-0034

For all of the import that these meaning-making and community-building practices have for the people who engage in genealogical research and consuming media about it, attention from journalists has been limited. In a 2008 article for Memory Studies, journalism historian Carol Kitch notes that until recently, journalists and scholars have held the mundane interests and lore of their audiences in low regard, thinking “we are the ones who know what matters most.” However, the collapse of traditional journalism’s business model and the critiques of extractive journalistic practices advanced by such critics as Lewis Raven-Wallace have created a new openness to new ways of understanding and centering community information needs and collaborating with communities to meet those needs. (For examples, see Andrea Wenzel, Freepress, Sue Robinson) Might these epistemic communities of family historians be allies in journalists’ efforts to report true stories that are considered useful and trustworthy?

My interest in these possibilities are informed by my own experiences as a cisgender, middle-class, African American woman three generations removed from slavery, educated in elite, predominantly white universities, with a professional background as a journalist and professional communicator in corporate, non-profit and academic settings. My efforts to make sense of the places in which I found myself led to explorations of family and community history that made me acutely aware of the ways in white supremacy, patriarchy and class bias distort the knowledge that is available to us. But they also make me aware of the liberating potential of recovered ancestral memory.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I was a college student when I first became fascinated with researching my family history while watching the 70s miniseries “Roots” with my father. Although I knew that we had descended from enslaved people, I was shocked when my father casually remarked that his grandfather had not only been enslaved — he’d talked about seeing people get whipped and having their feet chopped off for running away. None of my elders had talked about knowing any family members who had been enslaved. I had no idea that I had grown up with a grandmother, great-aunts and great-uncles who were children of enslaved people. Roots loosened their stammering tongues. I had been interested in African American history since elementary school, but now I was animated by the possibility that there might be a way to understand how my family and I were, as Helen Epstein put it, “possessed by a past that [we] had not lived.”

As Roy Campanella II noted in an appreciation of Haley after the latter’s sudden death in 1992, Roots was an “astonishing feat of genealogical detective work across three continents” that began with his grandmother’s oral history about “the African” and reportedly resulted in Haley being able to trace his family back to the Gambian village from which his ancestor had been abducted. “In doing so,” Campanella added, “he told the story of 30 million Americans of African descent, made it possible for us to share in his profound journey of discovery, and won our admiration and respect.”

Or perhaps he told the story that we wanted to believe – that somehow it might be possible to reconnect what had been sundered by slavery and circumstance, and by so doing, build a high ground on which we too could stand, hoist our babies to the stars and declare, “Behold! The only thing greater than yourself!” While Roots was a pop culture phenomenon and a media sensation, historians and professional genealogists cast doubt on the accuracy of the the book. A plagiarism lawsuit was filed and settled.

Historian Donald Wright has reported that the power of Roots and resulting miniseries has been such that Haley’s putative ancestral village remade itself in the image of the novel and marketed itself as a tourist attraction. Despite its failings, the Roots phenomenon did help inspire a new generation of African American historians and genealogists to take up the task of finding and popularizing methods for excavating family histories. These included the founding of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in 1977, as well as the publication of Charles Blockson’s guide, Black Genealogy, the same year. Blockson’s work was part of larger movement of black scholars and activists – black studies, ethnic studies and women’s studies were fledgling fields during my college years. By placing the experiences and intellectual production of oppressed people at the center of their analysis, these scholars theorized new knowledge frameworks – such as intersectionality, queer theory and feminist theory – for understanding ourselves and our relationships to each other.

Learning to “read against the archive”

Blockson’s book gave readers lessons in archival research and his life’s work of archive-building sought to correct gaps, omissions and distortions in the archival records. His work was part of the intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 70s, but it echoed calls by earlier generations of social scientists, historians to undertake systematic studies of the lives African Americans with the goal of developing policies to support their progress in the years after Reconstruction. As far back as 1898, W.EB. Du Bois, considered one of the founding fathers of black studies, opined:


Americans are born in many cases with deep, fierce convictions on the Negro question, and in other cases imbibe them from their environment. When such men come to write on the subject, without technical training, without breadth of view, and in some cases without a deep sense of the sanctity of scientific truth, their testimony, however interesting as opinion, must of necessity be worthless as science ([1898] 1978:76)

cf Earl Wright, II and Thomas Calhoun, “Jim Crow Sociology: Toward an understanding of the origin and principles of black sociology via the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory

Sociologist Elliot Rudwick supported Du Bois’ indictment:


[T]he “general point of view” of the first sociologists to study the black man was that “the Negro is an inferior race because of either biological or social hereditary or both.” . . . These conclusions were generally supported by the marshalling of a vast amount of statistical data on the pathological aspects of Negro life.In short, “The sociological theories which were implicit in the writings on the Negro problem were merely rationalizations of the existing racial situation.” (P. 48)


cf Earl Wright, II and Thomas Calhoun, “Jim Crow Sociology: Toward an understanding of the origin and principles of black sociology via the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory

The fruits of this labor are evident throughout the academy and among serious journalists. There lies, at its heart, an expanded definition of intellectual activity coupled with the adaptation of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Speaking of the evolution of black studies, sociologist Abdul Alkalimat says:

Black intellectual history is rich and dynamic. It is constituted by the rich intellectual culture of black people, encoded in the political culture of everyday life. This includes messages in the quilts, in drum beats, and in children’s stories, popular music, presentation of self strategies and esthetic rituals in hair, dress and body motion, style and plain old conversation in the vernacular.

eBlack, Reflections and Research Practices, 2000

Commenting on the methods employed by Du Bois and other sociologists, historians and anthropologists who shared his commitment to antiracist scholarship, Alkalimat identifies five research practices at the core of their scholarship:

  • Compiling bibliographies
  • Archiving
  • Building data sets
  • Setting up sustainable organizations
  • Theory building

Before the 1990s, most of this work was generally ignored or dismissed by mainstream institutions, journals and publications. Du Bois’ Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, is now recognized as “America’s first major empirical sociological study” – combining ethnographic interviews, comprehensive data collection and analysis, archival material, data visualizations, and participant observation. Du Bois and his colleagues extended that methodology to the design and execution of the Atlanta University Studies, a series of systematic examinations of various aspects of black life conducted from 1897-1914. However, C.W. Anderson notes that Du Bois and other reform-minded urban sociologists “were systematically erased from the remembered history of sociology for more than a hundred years.” Instead, Robert Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago were credited with the creation of the first laboratory in urban sociology. In contrast to Du Bois and his contemporaries, the “Chicago School “ sociologists favored theory over empiricism, and statistical sampling over comprehensive data collection. (Also see Wright, 2016)

Had I spent my undergraduate years at a historically Black college or university (HBCU), there’s a chance that I would have learned about DuBois in my classes instead of seeking him out on my own. There’s a chance that I might even have learned about Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History with its Journal of African American History. However, I matriculated at Princeton. Consequently, the canonical sources I was trained to consult and the methods of inquiry I was taught were created by people who were unlikely to have been exposed to scholarship created by people of color. The canonical secondary sources penned by the people WEB DuBois derided as “the car-window sociologist[s]” either do not know or do not credit Black scholars and my community’s ways of knowing.

A case in point: In the semester before I learned about Great-grandfather, I did an independent research paper on the Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company (MESBIC) under the direction of Prof. Barbara Nelson, then on the faculty Princeton’s school of public policy and international affairs. MESBICS were investment firms licensed by the federal Small Business Administration that offered both equity and debt financing to entrepreneurs of color. SBICs still exist, but the MESBIC program went by the wayside some time ago. My interest stemmed from growing up in Philadelphia, where Rev. Leon Sullivan‘s church was doing transformational work through its job training center, affordable housing development, shopping center and a foray into light manufacturing.

It was these tensions – between what we were taught and what we lived, between what was prescribed and what we needed, between the interests we were being trained to uphold and the needs we hoped to address, that propelled the agitation for new academic disciplines that built on the work of such institutions as Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Freedom Schools and the Highlander Folk School. These were institutions that valued scholarship and rigor in the ultimate service of social justice. Pedigreed scholars partnered with organic intellectuals, journalists, and activists to combat miseducation and engender progressive change.

Thus, the first generation of African American Studies scholars didn’t just challenge the racist distortions and omissions of the established disciplines – they were championing a model of scholarship that the had already been rejected. As Abdul Alkalimat has noted, as African American Studies evolved, many of its leading scholars would also eschew community engagement and activism in favor of more traditional teaching, publishing and service. It is, however, this set of research practices and community engagement that holds promise for community-centered journalists today.

Finding my roots

Like most people, my own foray into genealogy was a personal quest to make sense of myself by understanding my family’s past.

Digging into census records and probate records made any pretense to dispassionate inquiry impossible. Because our existence was most frequently recorded in relation to our property value, with only as much detail as was required for the pecuniary or political purposes of the people who called themselves our masters. The slave census schedules only include the owner’s names, so I was forced to rely on family lore to find the records that most likely referred to my Great-grandpa and his family. Seeing that document was a gut punch, as I explained in this 2016 interview with Princeton University undergraduates studying the relationship between the University and slavery.

Facts, methods and mysteries

Genealogical research becomes guesswork when the subjects of the research were considered unimportant by the people who generated the records. Oral histories, family photographs and documents are essential, as is contact and information-sharing between scattered branches of the family. My father’s generation started organizing reunions in the 1980s to ensure that my generation would know his generation’s first cousins, and we could begin to document the family story. Two cousins built an extensive family tree that we published and disseminated in 1990. One of my cousins even went to Utah to dig into the Mormon archives there. In 1988, I teamed up with a photographer to create a photo essay exhibit that traced the arc of our family’s story from slavery to the late 1980s. So we had a great deal of information even before the advent of Ancestry.com and similar databases.

The advent of computerized genealogy search services has been both a blessing and a challenge. The cousins who had done the original genealogical research became our fact-checkers. Census records often misspelled names: Jordan Mitchell is variously referred to as Jordin and Jerfin and he’s given a non-existent son named Grover, who we’ve determined is actually George. Nelson Mitchell’s son Frayforan doesn’t appear at all, but his sister’s testimony led us to understand that he had been renamed either Frank or Frazier in various records, including his death certificate. One grandfather doesn’t show up as a member of the household in which we know he was raised – except, possibly as a “servant” in the 1900 census. And if that listing is accurate, his birthday was actually three years earlier than he thought. According to my uncle, that’s a possibility – he said my grandmother told him that my grandfather chose a birthdate because he wasn’t sure when he was born. Poor rural Georgians didn’t commonly have birth certificates. One of my uncles, born in 1921, learned that when he went to apply for a passport.

Between the oral histories and uncertain documents, this is what I’ve been able to confirm about my father’s family. My paternal great-great grandparents were Holland and Judy Priscilla Mitchell from Hancock County, Georgia. Holland was born around 1811; Judy Priscilla was born around 1824. According to my late Cousin Ella, either Holland or Judy Priscilla’s father might have been an Indian who was forced out of Georgia during the Trail of Tears. She didn’t know his name. The census records say that their parents were Negroes. Their slave master was a man named John HW Mitchell. According to their son Jordan, my great-grandfather, Holland was a barrel maker, a craft requiring considerable strength and skill. According to their daughter Elsie, all the slaves on the Mitchell plantation had to eat their meals from a horse trough. As small children, they saw whippings, beatings, mutilations. Elsie recalled that when news came that the Civil War had ended, they ran about the plantation shouting, “We are free!”

Jordan married Martha Holsey. Her father worked for Mrs. Linton Stephens – the wife of the former state Supreme Court judge and the sister-in-law of Jefferson Davis’ Vice President. It appears Lucius Holsey, bishop of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, was a cousin. Lucius’ white father acknowledged him and that left him in a somewhat privileged position. He became a leading advocate for Black rights in the wake of the Atlanta riots of 1906. One of Elsie’s sons might have gone into ministry and advocacy work with him in Atlanta. Most members of the family were farmers, though.

Jordan’s youngest daughter, Mattie, married Jesse Pearson. Not long before their marriage Jesse lived with his sister Christine and her husband Abraham. They worked on land owned by Abraham’s father, Guy. Abraham’s sister, Nettie, was a wardrobe mistress for Ma Rainey. She married Rainey’s piano player, who was known as Georgia Tom. The young couple moved to Chicago, where Nettie died in a car accident that also the baby she was carrying. Her heartbroken young husband turned wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and Thomas A Dorsey became one of the founding fathers of Gospel Music.

Meanwhile, my mother told me that I should investigate her father’s lineage, although I didn’t make headway there until after her death in 2009. My grandfather, Owen Barnes, Sr., was drafted into World War II when my mother was a toddler. He died in a VA hospital when she was seven. She never got to know him, but she was right that his family was fascinating. Of course, by the time I started digging into his story, I had the benefit of Ancestry.com and other genealogical databases, and that would lead to a few surprises.

My grandmother kept a family Bible that had the name of Owen’s parents, so that was my starting point. Fortunately, there’s a sizable group of relatives on Ancestry researching this family. Through their shared trees, photos, census records and death certificates, I learned that, Owen Barnes, Sr.’s maternal grandparents, Lewis and Mary Smith McLaine, were born in 1847 and 1852, respectively, in Cecil County, Maryland. In the photos below, they both look to be of mixed race. Although we have the name of Lewis’ parents, it’s not clear what happened to them. By the time of the 1860 census, he is living with an unrelated group of people. He is, however, listed as a free person. He became a cobbler.

Mary’s father, Alfred G. Smith (1811-1884), was a millwright, and the 1870 census identifies him as a mulatto. Cecil County Maryland is home to the Perry Point Mansion House and Mill. It’s likely that Alfred worked there. The grist mill had been built by Henry Stump (1734-1814), whose daughter Mary married a man named Hugh Smith (1754-1839). Hugh Smith’s father, Thomas, had managed the mill, and Hugh took it over after his father died. They had a son named William, born in 1785. Ancestry’s algorithm suggested that William might have been Alfred’s father. If that’s correct, then part of the family’s lineage goes back to at least 14th century England.

At some point, Alfred and Mary found their way to Haverford, Pennsylvania, where they started their family. That’s where my great-grandmother Elva was born. Elva’s brother, Smith McLaine, married a schoolteacher who had, at some point, worked for the Institute for Colored Youth, now known as Cheyney University. Two of their daughters became STEM pioneers – although their contributions have only recently been acknowledged. I didn’t know these women, although I recall my mother referring to two of my grandfather’s cousins who were still living in the Philadelphia area. She couldn’t remember their names and I couldn’t find them before they died.

The daughters, Alyce Mc Laine Hall and Alma Mc Laine White, were gifted at math. A 1928 graduate of West Chester University, Alyce was hired by the War Department to be part of a secret team of women mathematicians who calculated the ballistics of missiles during World War II. She was the only African American on the team. They were known as the Top Secret Rosies, as in Rosie the Riveter. At war’s end, Alyce eventually returned to her earlier career as a math teacher in Philadelphia, but Alma had a 40 year-career working for the Navy.

Documentary filmmaker LeAnn Ericson first learned about Alyce Hall in the course of producing her 2010 film, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II. She interviewed four of the ten women who had been part of the project, but all she was to learn about Alyce was her name. As this Winter, 2014 article in the magazine of the Society of Women Engineers explains, Ericson eventually found and interviewed Alyce Hall’s family with the help of forensic genealogists. That’s how she learned about Alma’s accomplishments as well.

I’ve been in touch with a distant maternal cousin who did know these women. He credits them as a formative influence on his own decision to become a scientist. My grandfather died long before I was born – hence my mother’s sketchy memory of his cousins. The sisters lived into the early years of the 21st century, so it’s possible that members of our branch of the family could have gotten to know them. I don’t know how we became disconnected from grandfather’s family. Now that we have this history, I think about how it might help my younger cousins think more expansively about their own life possibilities.

The meaning of all this

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston’s character Nanny says, “Us colored people is branches without roots, and that makes things come round in queer ways.” Rootlessness is endemic in this postmodern age. Journalists trained in such disciplines as African American Studies and emerging practices of community-centered journalism and restorative narrative are equipped to collaborate with communities as they seek to forge individual and collective understandings of the past that permit constructive visions of the future. My next projects will be devoted to understanding what that might look like in practice.

Notes

  1. See W.E.B. Du Bois’ recollections of his student days at Harvard and his short story, Of the Coming of John, Harold Cruse’s contentious Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and its critics, Jill Nelson’s Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, Nell Painter’s Regrets, Pamela Newkirk’s Within the Veil, Amy Alexander’s Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist’s Story of Reporting and Reinvention and the admirable collection,Presumed Incompetent for examples of the ongoing salience of this issue in both journalism and the academy.)

The George Zimmerman Trial: Resources for Educators

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As I write this, Americans are processing the meaning of the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the former Sanford, Florida neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February, 2012.  Because of the high-profile agitation that led to Zimmerman’s initial arrest and the subsequent gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial on cable TV, the case has become the latest vehicle for our national non-conversation about race and justice. With the possibility of federal civil rights charges  and a wrongful death lawsuit looming against Zimmerman, along with the promise from Zimmerman’s attorney that he will sue NBC for errors in its coverage of the case, it’s likely that we will still be talking about this matter for some time.

No doubt, this case is on the minds of college professors and co-curricular programmers at campuses in the US and elsewhere. TCNJ’s Department of African American Studies, which I chair, held and online discussion of the case in April, 2012. Herewith, a few thoughts and resources that might be helpful in that effort. This is a first take; additions, corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Case Details and Aftermath

Historical and cultural analysis

Politcal historian Jelani Cobb, director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, penned a series of real-time reflections on the trial for the New Yorker that is concise, informed and provocative. His posts covered

  • the defense’s awkward opening with a knock-knock joke,
  • a compassionate take on the much-debated testimony of Martin’s friend, Rachel Jeantel;
  • questioning whether Trayvon Martin had a right to the “stand your ground defense,”
  • what the sympathy for George Zimmerman tells us about popular misconceptions about race and crime
  • how the Zimmerman trial reflects a growing American acceptance of racial profiling and surveillance
  • why so many African Americans see connections between Zimmerman’s acquittal and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till – and why the criticism that African Americans don’t care about black-on-black murder is wrong

Meanwhile, blogger Andrea Ayers-Deets says the case makes her aware of her “white invisibility cloak.” And The Root has African American views from multiple perspectives, including Ta-Nehesi Coates’ defense of the jury verdict. Susan Brooks Thiselthwaite offers a Christian theological perspective: “For Trayvon Martin, Is There No Justice?” Similarly, Michael Lerner offers a Jewish perspective in his essay, “Trayvon Martin and Tisha B’av: A Jewish Response.” Charles’ Pierce’s sharp irreverent series of posts for Esquire is called the Daily Trayvon. The Huffingtion Post has a dedicated Trayvon Martin section.

Related Cases

For legal scholars, the killing of Trayvon Martin is part of a larger set of cases related to “Stand Your Ground” laws that expand the traditional definition of self-defense and justifiable homicide. Below are links to several cases that have been cited in this context:

  • Jordan Davis – the 17-year-old was fatally shot while sitting in a car at a gas station by 45-year-old Michael Dunn, who complained about the loud music emanating from the car’s speakers. Dunn reportedly plans to invoke the Stand Your Ground defense when his trial begins in September.
  • Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for firing what she contended were “warning shots” to scare off an abusive ex-husband. No one was harmed in the incident.
  • CeCe McDonald  pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter in 2012 in a plea deal after surviving what her supporters maintain was a violent, transphobic attack.
  • Tremaine McMillen, a 14-year-old Miami boy who was wrestled to the ground, choked and arrested by Miami police who said he “clenched his fists” and gave them  “dehumanizing stares.” His family and supporters launched a petition in June asking that felony charges agaginst him be dismissed.

Stand Your Ground Laws, Racism and ALEC

  • Sociologist Lisa Wade reviews research findings that Stand Your Ground laws increase racial bias in cases of justifiable homicide. John Roman’s analysis includes data for white-on-white crimes (h/t Diane Bates.)
  • A June, 2012 Tampa Bay Times analysis of the application of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law found that white defendants were far more likely to be acquitted than black defendants, along with allowing, “drug dealers to avoid murder charges and gang members to walk free.”
  • The Center for Media and Democracy has been closely following the role played by the American Legislative Exchange Council in promoting “Stand Your Grownd” laws across the country as part of its ALEC Exposed project. According to CMD,  ALEC used the Florida law as a “template” for “model legislation” that has been enacted across the country.

Implicit Bias, Law and Public Policy

  • In the video embedded at the top of this post, Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion argues that our civil rights laws were designed to address conscious discrimination, but psychology and neuroscience are teaching us that bias operates far more frequently at an unconscious, implicit level. Thus, it is possible that both George Zimmerman’s claim that he held no racial animus against Trayvon Martin and his accusers’ claim that Zimmerman racially profiled the teenager can both be true. Jonathan Martin and Karen Feingold offer thoughts on Defusing Implicit Bias in this 2012 article in the UCLA Law Review that specifically notes the Zimmerman case.  Anti=racist educator Tim Wise also has a lot to say on the subject.

Related legal issues

Artistic responses

  • Anthony Branker and Word Play: Ballad for Trayvon Martin, from the album, Uppity
  • Watoto of the Nile, “Warning” (Dedication to Trayvon Martin)
  • Jasiri X.”Trayvon.”
  •  Art for Trayvon – Tumblr blog

    Portrait of Trayvon Martin
    By Sheppard Fairey
  • Editorial cartoons by Keith Knight, Daryl Cagle‘s cartoon blog



What Would WEB Du Bois Tell Henry Jenkins and Soulja Boy?

The Criteria for Negro Art in the Age of Computational Media

In June, 2008, I attended a presentation in which Henry Jenkins, then Director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, contemplated the lessons of Soulja Boy Tellem’s use of what he calls “participatory culture” to create a career as a hip-hop star. Jenkins described how teenager DeAndre Ramone Way (Soulja Boy)  built a fan base by posting the music and a home video of his song, “Crank Dat,” and encouraging listeners to remix it, make video responses to it, and share it freely. (The presentation video is only available to members of the New Media Consortium.)

The process illustrates Jenkins’ concept of “spreadable” culture — a term that he argues is more accurate than the  “viral”   model, since viruses proliferate by attacking their hosts, while “spreadable” culture invites voluntary participation. He showed examples of fan videos of “Crank Dat,” including produced by his MIT grad students. Then Jenkins paralleled Soulja Boy’s encouragement of artistic appropriation and the cultural borrowing employed by Herman Melville in crafting Moby Dick.

In his blog, Jenkins mused about Soulja Boy’s precocity:

I can’t decide what fascinates me the most about this story: the fact that this teenager broke into the front ranks of the entertainment industry by using tools and processes which in theory are accessible to every other person of his generation or the fact that he has recognized intuitively the value in spreading his content and engaging his audience as an active part of his promotional process.

Jenkins did not address the actual lyrical content of Soulja Boy’s music, and the actual ideas being packaged in the catchy beat and the playful dance steps. The content wasn’t the point of the presentation. The lyrics offer the kind of  puerile vulgarity one might expect from a boy who is trying to impress his peers with stories about his sexual prowess and toughness.  “Crank Dat” includes such lines as:

“Soulja boy off on this hoe…

“Then Superman that hoe…”

“I’m jocking on your bitch ass
And if we get the fighting
Then I’m cocking on your bitch ass…”

The lyrics reflect the cliches associated with the worst of hip-hop:  degrading women while  declaring dominance over other males by feminizing and threatening them.  When Soulja Boy released “Crank Dat,” he was a 16-year-old high school student, and the song was spread largely by other teenagers.  The character that Way portrays in the video is the stereotypical black male hip-hopper: hypersexual, prone to violence, gaudily attired. But the implausibility of the lyrics suggest that, like most amateur writers, Way is imitating what he has heard or gleaned from listening to others, not writing from life experience.

Jenkins showed videos of smiling teenagers and young adults bouncing on one foot, cranking their arms and lunging forward to make the “Superman” gesture.

In conversations with other conference participants, I seemed to have been the only person who was profoundly disturbed by the content that Way, AKA Soulja Boy, his minions, and ultimately, his record company were spreading. In part, I later learned, that was because many of my colleagues weren’t familiar with the lyrics. There was also the fact that “Crank Dat” was only another in a long list of songs, cartoons, games and other media content that they knew kids were exposed to, and it wasn’t the worst thing most kids would be exposed to. And after all, it’s not as if vulgar or even racially stereotypical music originated with remix culture.

I probably sounded like the scolds of the 1950s yelling about rock and roll, or the highbrows at the beginning of the 20th century inveighing against comic books and “pulp” novels. The Republic was still standing. I’m sure some thought I needed to smooth out that bunch in my panties and move on.

Or maybe not. The practice of analyzing form and distribution apart form content sits well within the tradition of media studies, going back to Marshall McLuhan’s declaration that “The Medium is the message,” and in rhetorical terms, “The medium is the massage.” However, I find Kathleen Welch persuasive when she argues that rhetorical analysis of both content and delivery is important to understanding the social justice implications of modern communications. If one follows the history of remixing trail of “Crank Dat,” one finds that its commercial success, facilitated by social media, led to the song being played in venues that would have been unimaginable in earlier times.

For example, a few months earlier, I had been sent a link to another performance of the song by a frustrated colleague and fellow member of the National Association of Black Journalists. It seemed that someone thought it would be fun to liven up a New York local morning traffic report with a performance of the song. The traffic reporter, Jill Nicolini, was part of the morning news “happy talk” format. A former Playboy bunny and occasional reality TV star, she routinely drafted men to dance with her after detailing the morning’s jams, delays, and alternate side-of-the-street parking rules. On this particular morning, she summoned Craig Treadway, the co-anchor, as her dance partner.


The Dancing Weather Girl – Watch more Funny Videos

The most telling moment for me was when Treadway broke into a tap dance.  What was Treadway’s shuffle? And what do we make of the black male crew member bunny-hopping in the background?

I don’t know Mr. Treadway, Nicolini or any of the other members of that newscast, and I have hesitated for more than a year about writing this post because I’m not trying to cast aspersions on him or any other cast member of the show. If this post does that, I apologize in advance.  They were doing their jobs, and perhaps they even had some fun. What I am trying to probe, as delicately as possible, is the meaning of the moment for journalistic norms in the age of remix culture.

Of course, the packaging of local television news as entertainment has been going on for a long time. A quarter-century ago, Neil Postman demonstrated the emerging parallels between the television news show and a television show designed as entertainment in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Entertainment (Penguin, 1985.):

“If you were the producer of a television news show for a commercial station, you would not have the option of defying television’s requirements…. You would try to make celebrities of your newscasters…. You would have a weatherman [sic] as comic relief, and a sportscaster who is a touch uncouth (as a way to relate to the beer-drinking common man.)  You would package the whole event as any producer might who is in the entertainment business.

“The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the world….” (p. 106)

I came of age professionally during the early 1980s, so as a news consumer and media professional, I understand the pecking order of news shows. The anchor might smile and exchange some banter, but the anchor stayed dignified. I wasn’t thrilled at Nicolini’s shtick, but I understood it for the reasons Postman described. What I wasn’t ready for was an anchorman to be drawn into the clowning. It is very likely that what stuck in my craw was the sight of Treadway, who probably had to endure a great deal to attain an anchor desk in a major market, pulled out of the role on which, traditionally, his credibility rested.

There is one sense in which the problem is entirely mine, because it represents a collapsing of norms my generation of media professionals can’t quite stomach. It has become clear in recent years that there is a great deal of skepticism about the kinds of conventions that journalists traditionally adopt, whether it be certain standards of decorum, or a studied modesty about stating their political views.  Even a growing number of journalists reject that last standard.

Then, too, there is the shifting calculus of racial symbolism to consider. Surely, the sight of a black man dancing alongside a young white female in 2008 does not mean what it meant in my childhood during the 1960s. In those days, such a sight was restricted to Shirley Temple movies. Treadway and Nicolini’s performance occurred the same year that a man with an African father and a wife descended from slaves won the White House.

It’s unlikely that WEB Du Bois would have approved of SouljaBoyTellem’s art, or much of hip-hop, for that matter. The pioneering scholar, editor and activist hoped that those African Americans who gained access to the instruments of culture making would infuse high culture with the gifts of Africa. For him that meant spirituals (delivered Jubilee-style, of course) the vibrancy of traditional African art and artisanship, the nuanced poesy of a Jessie Fauset or Countee Cullen, with the occasional swinging riff from the deceptively accessible Langston Hughes. In his definitive essay on aesthetics, The Criteria of Negro Art, he implored:

“If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful; — what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? Would you buy the most powerful of motor cars and outrace Cook County? Would you buy the most elaborate estate on the North Shore? Would you be a Rotarian or a Lion or a What-not of the very last degree? Would you wear the most striking clothes, give the richest dinners, and buy the longest press notices?

“Even as you visualize such ideals you know in your hearts that these are not the things you really want. You realize this sooner than the average white American because, pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that — but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America.”

Part of Jenkins’ point is that participatory media expands the ranks of the tastemakers beyond Hollywood elites, intellectuals, and activists. Jay Rosen has been saying similar things about the shift to participatory journalism in essays such as The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” But when the ethos from which these new media products emerge can be tainted by values that are corrosive, a critical perspective is necessary.

In her essay, “Learning the 5 Lessons of Youtube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don’t Believe the Hype,” Alexandra Juhasz makes the argument that corporate dominance of this major media sharing site has turned do-it-yourself culture into a tool for replicating ideas and values that are fundamentally anti-democratic. In particular, she and her students found that depictions of African Americans that reinforce vulgar race and gender stereotypes are more popular, and thus more prominently featured, than those promoting more positive images or cultural critique.

And this is part of my concern, even as I contribute to this participatory culture and teach students to do it as well. The uncritical replication of negative images of black males is particularly vexing, because it undermines the effort to transfer of positive values from one generation to the next. In some ways, the current environment is arguably more challenging than the pre-Civil rights era, because in those days, there were alternative, black-controlled civic institutions that promoted images that countered the stereotypes of the dominant culture.  Byron Hurt’s 2008 mini-documentary demonstrated Barack Obama’s rise exposed a deep-seated confusion and ambivalence about the possibilities of success, respect and power for black men in an era that is supposed to be “post-racial:”

I thought about this ambivalence as I watched clips from DeAndre Ramone Way’s videoblog, which has since been removed. He has been known to talk about his interests in art, education, and business along with his  “beefs” with other rappers, his jewelry and his cars.  Pop culture never was a good place for a complicated persona. When pop culture goes “spreadable,” what gets lost? Sometimes I’m afraid it’s the substance of a culture that we can’t afford to lose.

Why is the state allowed to define sex for the purpose of assigning rights?

This question has been simmering in the back of my mind for a long time.

As a result of covering stories related to LGBT rights, and particularly, debates over hate crimes (see the “small murders” section) and same-sex marriage, it occurred to me that laws that use sex as a criteria for assigning marriage rights require the state to define a person’s sex. I am using the word sex here as a matter of biology, as opposed to gender, which is a matter of cultural performance. However, not everyone has a clear sexual identity, especially at birth. Given the variation in human biological sex that exists in nature, it’s hard to see how the state can define who is a same-sex or opposite sex couple without violating the equal protection clause of the constitution, which requires that laws be applied equally to all.

Whose rights are affected by laws assigning marriage rights on the basis of sex? Transsexual people who have been medically diagnosed with gender identity disorder have the outward appearance of being one sex, but have brains wired for the opposite sex. Transsexual people may have same-sex or opposite sex orientations. There have been legal cases in which the marriages of transsexuals to people they view as their opposite-sex partners have been invalidated by judges who insisted that biological sex is fixed at birth, is revealed by external genitalia, and can’t be changed.

However, intersex people may be born with ambiguous genitalia, or may present as one sex at birth and find at puberty that they have the sexual anatomy of the opposite sex. Parents and doctors guess the gender with which the newborn is most likely to identify, and they don’t always get it right. If you have someone who appears to be female, or is classified as female at birth, and who is ultimately determined to be male, what gives the state the right to decide whom that person is allowed to marry? Should that not be a private decision?

I don’t think that taking the legal definition of sex out of the hands of the state would invalidate sex discrimination laws, or keep private organizations from having membership or hiring criteria based on sex. For example, the Catholic church can continue to insist that all priests be male based on they perceive a male to be, because they are a private organization. An employee can still sue for sex discrimination based on their self-identification as a member of a particular sex, their employer’s identification of them as a member of a particular sex. All I’m questioning is whether the state has the right to determine who is of a particular sex.

In my mind, none of this is related to moral beliefs anyone might have about homosexuality, transsexualism, or gay marriage. I’m simply asking whether this is something that belongs in the state’s purview?

I’m not a lawyer, so there is a very good chance I’m missing something. Any thoughts?