Who owns the order of Black memory? The person who brought it to the White institution
Archives shift power and ownership of Black history to the White institutions and collectors, rather than the Black individuals and communities who originally lived and created those memories.
archives are institutions defining documentary history: the things within the archive are the facts and the things without are suspect
This shows how archives have the power to determine what is considered true. If something is included in an archive, it is treated as fact, but if it is not archived, people may questions its legitimacy even if it is real.
Here is a photo of a baptism, in a river a few minutes walk from my family homestead, cataloged: date, unknown; individuals, unknown; creator, unknown
Shows that archives lose important contextual knowledge, even when the originating community knows exactly who and what is represented.
tell this storyas though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this atti-tude will from the first seriously curtail my audience
Shows how radical it was just to treat Black people as fully human in historical writing.
Despite the dangers, socialmedia became a tool for cultural critique, political dissent, and formingcommunities of chosen kin
While social media is a tool that enables community and expression, it is important to also acknowledge the possible harm that can be brought to Black users.
At the same time, the database in and of itself could not functionas a window into the everyday lives of Africans, who remained faceless,anonymous, disembodied
This is an important point to note, that quantitative data can reveal patterns, but not lived experience or subjective reality.
Spaces
I agree with this, and this limitation was exemplified by when I was going through a command line maze, but the directories used spaces instead of dashes or underscores, which initially led to a bit of friction in me figuring out how to proceed to the next terminal (I used quotes).
They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket
Students nowadays think of files as one searchable space rather than organized folders, which leads to later confusion in technical classes.