the history of technology, the resistance of archives, and

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

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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 session 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 technology, 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 conclude, is becoming a core concern for a growing number of scholars working 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 technology "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 number 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 articles 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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Historians of technology stand at a moment when a vast discrepancy exists between what we would like to be doing and what we are accomplishing. We can, in the fashion of the books that have appeared, make the argument that historians must regard race as inextricably linked to the history 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 gender 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 archives 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 technological 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 feature 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 contributions 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 people 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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Arguably, the very success of historical scholarship on gender and technology 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 experience.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 technological 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 mythology." 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 narratives 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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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 mention whiteness as the goal they seek to create through technological systems, even as those systems, in action, always protect white positions of power. This makes sense. Given that technology, as I have previously defined 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 masculine 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 produced 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 foundational - 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 always 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, production, 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 innovation 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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work as a means of exploring strategies for using historical records in alternative 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 rhetorically to explore the relationship between technology and whites. The other case explores how race can be found in narratives of technological innovation, even when it is not openly discussed. Specifically, the consumers who have used artificial sweetener since its popular introduction in the 1950s have been predominantly white, and we cannot see the significance of this situation unless we reinsert these products into their cultural context and draw race out. Ultimately, my goal is less to argue that these are perfect examples in subject matter or method- ology, and more to offer initial forays into a "stretched" archive on race and

technology. Hopefully, my conclusions provide fodder for debate and en- courage others to undertake some stretching of their own.

X-rays and the Language of Whiteness

In 1904, as many as fifteen newspapers across the country reported that numerous black patients had undergone repeated exposure to X-rays (sometimes combined with radium) in order to whiten black skin. In some

cases, the skin was fully whitened, these reports suggested, leaving it "creamy white" as a result. In at least three experimental laboratories, the journalists explained, white professionals using new X-ray technology had recruited willing African-American patients who were having their skin pigment permanently lightened even as the story was being written.

Having found newspaper accounts in two archival collections, I reported this story verbatim in my first book, The Body Electric. I returned to this story

again, but in a very modified form, in a 2006 article published in Technology

and Culture.27 The reason for the changes reach back to that 2004 SHOT panel I mentioned earlier, at which Evelynn Hammonds served as commen- tator. My intent in the 2004 paper was merely to retract what I had learned was significant misinformation about the original journalistic accounts. I did not, at that time, know whether these experiments had actually occurred or whether they had been successful: much more work, I argued, needed to be undertaken to understand how racial fears played into the early development of X-rays and radium. Hammonds, in her comment, explained that it was my job to tell this story. It was not enough to point to the evidence and say that this was really interesting stuff, but that someone who works on race should

figure out what it meant. As a historian of technology, I should be able to tell that history. She pointed me toward several books on late-nineteenth-century racial categorization and segregation policy and I got to work.

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27. 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).

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I quickly came up against that obstacle mentioned earlier - the "problem of sources."28 My archival records were not sufficient to support an argument about the dynamics of race in early X-ray technology. I learned that one of the reported "experiment sites" was bogus: at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Henry Pancoast was, in fact, treating keloids rather than attempting to whiten skin. Two other experiment sites actually appeared to have existed, but I had no way of discovering who the patients were, what brought them to the X-ray, or what had happened to them. No records existed in archives, nor did any accounts provide names or demo-

graphic details. In addition, I could not discover how these articles were read, or even if they had been read. It was difficult to try to integrate these stories into other narratives of X-rays. It seemed that they provided neither

sufficient information about patients to analyze African Americans and X-

ray technology nor sufficient information about practitioners to rethink how X-rays were used during the period.

The archives held limited sources on the black actors and actual tech-

nological impacts. Yet there were ample stories wherein white journalists talked about technology and race. In the end, it was this realization that helped me to see that I had, in fact, two types of evidence that enabled a story of race to be told: first, the patterns in journalistic accounts of "whitening" experiments, and second, the context of race in the early twentieth century. Significantly, here race would mean whiteness. This approach moved away from my comfort zones - material analysis, stories of inventors, advertising materials, and archival records of engagement - and toward close attention to words; it was an approach that required me to create connections that I could not prove and to imagine environments I could not re-create.

Instead of seeking to identify the African-American subjects of the experiments or to understand the technology used, I looked at how the journalistic accounts described the patients, process, and results. Skin was often described as "creamy white" and results as "freakish." The first description was curious, because Pancoast reported that the result of keloid treatments was, in fact, gray skin, not white. The discrepancy suggests that creamy white made a better story. And such phrasing seemed more likely by considering as well the cultural context of the period: X-rays were a highly praised, new technology widely understood to have mysterious pow- ers - so could they not make a white that was more attractive than natural white? At the same time, the fantasy of bleaching black skin whiter than white made the experiments particularly troubling.

28. 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.

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If we look carefully at the early construction of X-ray "power," particu-

larly among nonexpert whites, much of it involved questions about visibility. In newspapers (in some cases, the very same ones that covered the story of black whitening), cartoons featured men wearing X-ray glasses and see- ing through women's clothes, revealing fat and thin bodies that were iden- tical in skeletal form. Within this context, it becomes more understandable

that many whites might be threatened by reports that X-rays were effectively removing black pigment from skin. Certainly the broader context of technology and racial visibility suggests such a conclusion.

In 1904, the nation was intensively debating racial definitions: legisla- tures sought to define black as a particular percentage of ancestry; W. E. B. Du Bois discussed the increasing numbers of "passers" at length; Plessy v. Ferguson determined that "separate was equal," thereby enforcing segregation of public spaces and causing public fixations on visible racial differences. A recipe for white panic was set when the particular fantastical qual- ities of X-rays appeared against those events. X-rays were not just any technology; as several historians have documented, they were deemed mir- acle forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People spec- ulated that society could expect human energy to increase and inner "truths" to be revealed. A story that revealed one of these truths to be the technological mutability of skin color, the obvious marker of racial origins, could hardly be ignored - or, apparently, questioned.

This context likely explains the repeated assertions that such "white" blacks would be "freaks." A strange compilation of evidence was used in this regard: they were freaks because they went against God's plan and masked their inferior blackness behind whiteness; and they were freaks because, more often than not, the technologies stopped working during the experiments, one through fire, one because the technician discontinued his work. Read as a single narrative, such assertions expressed both a profound fear that technology might prove that blacks were equal to whites and a clear pleasure in noting that the technologies, while capable of creating creamy perfection, somehow knew how not to complete the work that challenged the racial order. When I wrote the article, I had not realized the importance of the oft- repeated tale of Thomas Eldridge's Philadelphia experiment laboratory being shut down, mid-treatment, when it was destroyed by fire. Few accounts that mentioned Eldridge failed to tell this story and to include the result: that "unhappy negroes" were forced to remain permanently half- white. Thus readers could regard this story as a morality tale akin to that of Icarus, who crashed to the earth on melted wings because he flew too close to the sun. By subverting God's rules, or (white) man's technological rules, African Americans eventually would find themselves rendered inferior - indeed, permanently maimed.

Ultimately, the whitening story gained traction because race was at the forefront for many laypeople when they assessed the impact of new tech-

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nologies at the turn of the twentieth century. This was an extreme example,

admittedly; but I would argue that concerns over the impact of a new technology on one's perceived status are not limited to the case of X-rays. Any system that promised to expand the capacities of some humans over others in the early twentieth century would have been assessed by white producers and consumers, at least in part, by its ability to operate in a culturally acceptable manner.

This process is essentially rhetorical. Subjects would not discuss white privilege or an investment in inequalities of knowledge or access; instead, one finds them assessing the positive and negative effects of new technologies or the appropriate application of new possibilities. Leo Marx referred to this behavior as the second product of technology, the "mythology" we fashion around new technologies that establish our place in the world.29 This hidden archive on race and technology sits in plain view.

Sweetener and the Context of Whiteness

In the summer of 2008, 1 uncovered archival materials on female entre-

preneurs in the canning, magazine, and diet-club industries, and from those documents I drafted several chapters of what I was coming to regard as a balanced book. Men and women created sweeteners together, I be- lieved, and in so doing relied upon each others' varied expertise and con- tacts in order to transform waste products and adulterants into valuable, even healthful (they argued), ingredients.

Only after I sent my manuscript for initial review was I reminded that I had not been writing about women - my subjects were white women. I had failed to apply the lesson previously learned about technological innovation and consumption as a racialized process. Because race was never mentioned in any sources, I had not seen it. At the urging of the reviewers, I determined to write race into the manuscript even though I did not, technically, possess the sources. I had to rely again upon context. By situat- ing my white subjects within their eras, I was able to reach some tentative conclusions about how artificial sweeteners evoked a sense of privilege and

specialness for users, and how it may have shaped a particular worldview that accentuated perceived racial differences. This insight allowed me to argue that the whiteness of this technology contributed to disparities in consumer practices and social positions.

I should say at the outset that the archival evidence does not exist to support these claims, yet this interpretation seems justified. Other historians of technology have shown that racialized thinking motivates the production and consumption of new technologies, and that technologies have

29. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), 226.

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disparate impacts because of race and ethnic differences (among others).30 But the jump from the general observation to its application in the case of artificial sweeteners forces us to confront the problem of archives that stub-

bornly resist articulating issues of race. Their sources have to be shaken, leading me to take up the challenge posed by Pursell: to look more at context and impact than at actors and objects. In this case, answering his de- ceptively simple questions - What do [technologies] do? What do they mean? - led me to acknowledge the presence of race.31

The case study for what artificial sweeteners "do" takes us to the 1950s, when women first purchased cyclamates and saccharin in pill and powder form to experiment with what they called at the time "de-calorization," or the removal of sugar calories from prepared foods and desserts. A variety of sources covered this subject, including mass-circulation women's magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, contemporary cookbooks, and informational packets (including recipes) provided by "diet" food producers and the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured these chemicals. One might assume, by reviewing the rhetoric of male sweetener producers or women's magazine writers, that cyclamates and saccharin were primarily tools for women to lose weight, to focus on their appearance, and to attract men. These things were all true from a producer's point of view; yet taking seriously what women told one another about actually using these substances reveals two other ways in which sweeteners were "tools": first, they enabled women to experiment directly with a chemical, thereby professionalizing the domestic work of food production in home kitchens and distancing themselves from sugar "labor"; and second, being hidden in foods, they were tools for women who wanted to "fool" their husbands and children into cutting calories and thereby exert control over the household's health, which they might not otherwise articulate.

Recipe books from the 1950s suggest that women did not casually achieve a cyclamate-sweetened dish. Advice varied concerning how much cyclamate, in either tablet or liquid form, women needed to use. In 1958, Poppy Cannon's Unforbidden Sweets, for example, recommended two tea- spoons of Sucaryl (cyclamate) solution to make "sugarless boiled custard," and three tablespoons of "Sucaryl solution" for a "sugarless chiffon cake." Ruth West's Stop Dieting! Start Losing! - published just two years earlier - had used tablet measurements in all its recipes. Her mildly sweetened dishes, such as apple Betty, required ten tablets of cyclamate, while highly sweetened dishes such as cranberry sauce required forty. According to Cannon, women who wanted to save money could buy tablets and find that "it's very easy to make the liquid form yourself." Dissolving forty-eight

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30. 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).

31. Pursell, "Introduction" (n. 2 above), xiii.

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tablets in a cupful of hot water allowed cooks to measure out one teaspoon of liquid for the equivalent of one teaspoon of sugar. But Cannon acknowl- edged that variations existed between batches, and also between the tablets of competing pharmaceutical companies. As a result, "it is impossible to say that so much of the sweetener is equal to so much sugar," she warned readers. The only guarantee of success was trial-and-error tasting of the results.32

White women who used artificial sweetener were encouraged, through these cookbooks and later marketing materials, to see themselves as creative cooks taking advantage of the modern tools of science to bring health to their families. "America's traditional recipes were not handed down from The Mount," explained artificial sweetener-advocate West. "They were compounded, not in laboratories by white-coated technicians, but by ordi- nary women in gingham aprons with no help but that of their taste buds and imaginations." Both their direct experiences and the cookbooks' rhetoric encouraged white women to regard themselves as innovators, akin to chemists. This departed from the traditional linkage of sugar to domestic service and brown-skinned plantation labor. Modern women not only re- moved a few calories, but also connected the laboratory and pantry to protect American (read white American) food. "We need this kind of creative cook to modernize and de-calorize the old anachronistic recipes [by] using the de-calorized new ingredients food chemists have perfected for us," West asserted.33 It was, according to Myra Waldo, author of the famous Slender- ella Cook Book, nothing short of "an entirely new concept." Saccharin and cyclamates emerged in this era as technological tools for those smart and modern enough to use them. Diet food could thus be "interesting and palatable" and freely indulged.34

Such evidence contributed to my assertion, in an early draft of this chapter in my book, that the most important cultural lesson to be derived from women's early experimentation with artificial sweeteners was this: "Women were able to exert control over their families and experiment with science in the domestic sphere at a formative moment in modern American life through their use of artificial sweetener." But that was accurate only for white women. In fact, artificial sweeteners were not marketed to women of

color in any sustained fashion until the 1980s. Even today, such marketing remains less prevalent than that aimed at white consumers. Artificial sweetener advertisements for Tab, Diet Pepsi, and low-calorie desserts became regular features in publications such as McCalVs and Ladies' Home Journal during the 1970s but were notably absent from Ebony, the beauty magazine aimed at black women. Sweetener advertisements appear, in fact, to have

32. Poppy Cannon, Unforbidden Sweets (New York, 1958), 21, 56, 107.

33. Ruth West, Stop Dieting! Start Losing! (New York, 1956), 12. 34. Myra Waldo, The Slenderella Cook Book (New York, 1957), 15.

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favored blondes.35 Not until 1984, when Pepsi, Coke, and Diet Coke shifted to diverse "product promoters" in order to expand market share were black and Latina women routinely depicted in diet-soda ads in mainstream publications. Ebony featured its first diet-soda advertisements in 1983; Diet Coke's "Just for the taste of it" campaign to this market ran off and on until at least 1987.36

Considering the patterns of African-American culture, one assumes that few black women would have embraced the message of sweeteners articulated in 1950s cookbooks or later marketing materials: namely, that ingesting chemicals produced by scientists in a laboratory could improve physical health. Wartime technology had benefited all Americans, and firms like DuPont eagerly touted their part in the victory through much of the 1950s (e.g., "better living through chemistry"). But the segregation of Afri- can Americans during the war, combined with the lack of recognition for African-American soldiers after it, meant that whites and blacks hardly benefited equally from the march of science. Indeed, by the 1950s, black Americans specifically (and Americans of color, generally) had ample evidence that science and technology could easily do more harm than good. A long list of examples included colonial land policies that had transferred Native American lands to whites, because of the former's "inferior" techni-

cal knowledge; systems of racial segregation upheld by nineteenth-century pseudosciences like phrenology, which declared whites to be intellectually superior to other races; and medical professionals who used African Ameri- cans as guinea pigs in experiments designed to further scientific knowledge by putting their bodies in peril.37 Against this background, the presentation

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35. 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.

36. 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 enlist- ment of black celebrities to sell Coke and Diet Coke, 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. See, for example, Flip and Géraldine Wilson with Diet Seven-Up in McCalVs, March 1981, 69; Bill Cosby promoting Jell-O Instant Pudding in the Los Angeles Times, 9 June 1985, AJ67; and Famous Amos pitching chocolate soda in the New York Times, 3 November 1985, 73.

37. 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 prac-

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of artificial sweeteners as agents of scientific progress and tools for "modern de-calorization" may have encouraged nonwhite consumers to view such products with suspicion.

African-American ideas about healthy foods have provided further dis- incentives to the adoption of sugar substitutes. African-American cookbooks produced recently suggest that, even fifty years after the emergence of artificially sweetened foods, African-American women rarely use artificial sweeteners, even in "light" or "diet" cooking. One of the authors in the 1994 collection Body and Soul: The Black Women s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being acknowledges African-American women's desire to be thin, citing an Essence readers' poll that found 71 percent of respon- dents were "terrified of being overweight." Yet she specifically recommended against using artificial sweeteners in order to shed pounds, because they "are made of chemicals that may be dangerous."38 Another guidebook for black women written four years earlier and republished in the same year

suggests that the key to weight loss for African Americans is to "get back to our more natural ways" by substituting homemade chicken stock for ham hocks in seasoning cabbage and replacing salt with a "squeeze of lemon."39 Patti LaBelle, in her 2004 cookbook Lite Cuisine, also advocates healthful

food - specifically, recipes from the African- American culinary heritage - over low-calorie substitutions. "Usually, when people are feeling stressed out they want a pill," she explains, "but honey, give me a pot."40 And while LaBelle probably was alluding to anti-anxiety pills rather than sweeteners, her statement indicates little common ground with the early cyclamate kitchen chemists. Religious beliefs also may have dissuaded prospective artificial-sweetener users. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, which, rela-

tice, where reproductive health services have frequently been inferior and at times dam- aging for women of color. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wild/Tuskegee J>tudy_of_Untreat ed_Syphilis_in_the_Negro_Male (accessed 27 May 2010). 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); Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African- American Experience (n. 1 above); and Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1997). For more on African-American women and reproductive science, see Dorothy E. Rob- erts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, 1997).

38. Linda Villarosa, ed., Body and Soul: The Black Women s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being (New York, 1994), 51, 309.

39. Jessica B. Harris, "Celebrating Our Cuisine," in The Black Women s Health Book (Seattle, 1994), 305-9. 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.

40. LaBelle, quoted in Kimberly Nettles, Saving Soul Food, Gastronomica: Ine Journal of Food and Culture 7, no. 3 (2007): 111; see also Wilbert Jones, The New Soul

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tive to the total population, has long attracted more African- American than white members, has historically urged members to avoid processed foods as part of their religious practice. The church disparaged artificial sweeteners specifically, in recent years featuring anti-aspartame activists on church websites and in small group discussions.41

Returning to the question of what technologies do and what they mean, sweeteners have provided white users with a great degree of control, con- centrated in a chemical affiliated with white-coat chemists and modern

progress. Yet African Americans have not shared this experience. For white women in the 1950s, these calorie-removing tools elevated the importance of kitchen cooks by rendering them professionals in charge of family health. During the 1960s and through the early 1980s launch of Nutra- Sweet, the rise of mass-marketed diet products moved this control from the kitchen to the grocery cart. Sugar substitutes, through diet foods, enabled consumers to (theoretically) reconcile competing mantras of modern life: unfettered consumption and thinness. During the 1970s and 1980s, artificial-sweetener consumers became activists: more than a million of them

wrote to the FDA, Congress, and even to the president in 1977 to demand aspartame's continued availability. And, from the mid-1980s to the present, thousands of other former consumers have authored books and partici- pated in web forums urging others to recognize aspartame in particular as a dangerous substance.

This wider view enables us to understand artificial sweeteners in a more

nuanced light: they were technologies of calorie reduction, as well as epistemologies for understanding appropriate consumption and consumer rights.

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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."

41. 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]); another was Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World, directed by Cori Brackett and J. T. Waldron (2006). See also Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (Bloomington, Ind., 2007), esp. 146-49, 164. For information on the York Vespers film series, see http://www.yorksdachurch.org/arti cle.php?id=23 (accessed 5 July 2009). There seems to be a correlation between the ethnicity of parishioners in the SDA and the church's stance on sweeteners; as of May 2010, all SDA churches that mention on their websites that artificial sweeteners are harmful

had predominantly black congregations. See Berean in Los Angeles (http://berean29.ad ventistchurchconnect.org/article.php?id=32); East New York in Brooklyn (http://east newyork.org/health.asp?ResID=107&id=71&offsetl5); and New Dimension, also in Brooklyn (http://www.newdimensionsda.org). Another African- American SDA congre- gation mentions on its website that its youth choir has sung for anti-aspartame activist Russell Blaylock (http://dallascitytemple.org/ministries_music_total.htm). (All websites accessed 25 May 2010.)

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As the latter, sweeteners can be regarded as affording structural advantages similar to, if more quotidian than, Lipsitz's other "possessive investments."42

It is possible, in fact, that consumers' continued exposure, over decades, to diet-product marketing has ultimately made thinness itself (in the midst of abundance) a chief "investment" of whiteness. Much of this argument, of course, lies beyond what the historical record can prove or disprove; such scenes, however, enable us to observe what artificial sweeteners may have done and meanings they may have created that would otherwise remain concealed from view. This makes them essential to stage.

Conclusion

The history of technology has come a long way over the past two decades. Scholars have authored multiple volumes that attest to the importance of race in technology's history. This foundational scholarship illumi- nates the gains associated with meticulously combing archives, and locating alternative archives, for the ways in which people of color have influenced the innovation, production, and consumption of technologies in the United States. The remaining challenges include making that key shift similarly undertaken so fruitfully by those engaged in the study of gender: we must take as a mantra that white people have race. And we have to assume, unless

proven otherwise, that constructing and protecting whiteness has been, if not a core pursuit, then certainly a by-product in the specific technological histories that have charted the course of individuals within and beyond the United States.

To get from here to there, we need new conferences and new collections that explore the archives, methods, and approaches that can help bring these histories to the forefront of the field. Such studies may mean paying

more attention to the impact of class among technologists and their advocates; it may mean exploring the nuances of language surrounding new (and old) technologies; it may mean looking more closely at the process of technological transfer within the United States, and between this country and other nations; and it may mean considering the impact of technologies and technological ways of thinking on nonwhite individuals as constitutive of the technological "product" and innovation "process" themselves. To this end, one imagines new volumes with titles like "Technology and the White- American Experience(s)" and "Technologies of Sameness" on the shelves next to those that have already made African-American histories of technology essential to the field.

Yet we also must be careful not to mistake words for action. It is one

thing to know what we should do, and quite another to commit to making the changes required to do it. Creating scholarly studies of technology and

42. Lipsitz (n. 20 above).

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whiteness requires us first to re-create ourselves: we have to learn to approach the archive with race in mind, and with a capacious sense of race as a cultural construct of belonging and nonbelonging that permeates every aspect of life within the United States. As such, we must assume that race is a factor in play in all histories, whether we look at innovation, production, dissemination, or consumption - unless we can prove that it is not. Putting race into plain view in the history of technology requires more than a stated

commitment, a well-intentioned designated panel or two at our conferences, or even a new volume on whiteness and technologies; it requires a strong, ongoing commitment to view the history of technology and the subjects that comprise it through new eyes. This is the commitment required to fully reveal those "rewarding new directions" that Bruce Sinclair intuited several years ago. By drawing out possibilities and working creatively within the cultural contexts of history, historians of technology can begin to produce the imperfect, unfinished, and essential work on race and technology that remains to be done.

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the history of technology, the resistance of archives, and

Documents