Side Note: I verbally proposed this project, along with a couple other ideas, to The Schomburg Center’s director and the director of library services this past summer and they seemed very interested in this particular idea. They were interested in having me create a platform for open communication between the institutions and people as a means of keeping the museum/library programing fresh and nuanced, relevant and contemporary.

I have also reached out to the Dominican Studies Institute (DSI) for support and guidance. I hope to hear from them soon. This institution would be a great starting point for research and collaboration. The staff there are well connected to academics, researchers, students, and cultural institutions on the island.

I decided to put aside my original project idea. Without first traveling to a specific town or region in the Spanish speaking Caribbean and finding out more about their book and publishing culture, it is almost impossible to know how to move forward. I think I will keep this idea and most likely go back to it in the near future. I do like the career-focused aspect of it for The Schomburg, but I rather take a chance at something more academic to present and add to this institution’s digital archive than I would proposing the creation of a job and not have it flourish.

For this proposal, I generated an abstract, background, theoretical framework and started thinking about the best methods for achieving this anthropological/sociological project with a simple online website and digital component.

ABSTRACT

Dominican national identity has been a topic of much interest to theorists investigating and analyzing race and ethnicity, nationalism, culture, heritage, and history. Since the official end of the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo-era dictatorship in 1961, Museum curators thereafter have participated in efforts to display and consequently (re)define Dominican national identity. These attempts have often betrayed the island’s history and negated or omitted the dominant influence and presence of their island’s African cultural heritage. This has only served to divide the nation already plagued with issues across lines of race, color, class, and gender and have further marginalized the more vulnerable populations: the racially and ethnically black and mixed-raced, rural and laboring class, women and queer/sexual minorities, and folks at the intersections of these identities. How can one add to current efforts to bridge a gap and offer a platform for these issues, especially during the twenty-first century era of online mass information and transnational communication?

In this project, I seek to investigate this institutional legacy of strategic exclusion and the contemporary challenges and solutions to these issues by proposing a participatory strategy for displaying the experiences, stories and world views of marginalized Dominican citizens, thus creating a radically nuanced definition of Dominican identity—a “New Dominican” that challenges popularly upheld beliefs of a unified national identity and brings to light the real and on-the-ground social and cultural beliefs, experiences and dreams of a people in communication with each other and commenting on the definitions of their identity both outside and within themselves. I hope to do this by bridging the communication gap between both the Dominican Republic and the United States, between Museums and Dominican citizens. I will rely on a participatory theoretical framework to suggest that museums consider the mutual benefits of collaboration that includes the lived experiences and creativity of the public, both native citizens and the diaspora abroad. My research method includes interviewing museum-goers and museum representatives as well as using social media to assess and access the knowledge and interest already present in this transformative effort. I hope to create a website to archive this process and attempt at collaboration that is people-centered and can be used by institutions to include and consider when redefining their own physical platforms for exhibiting its national and more inclusive and participatory culture and identity. I may also consider creating a digital map to visualize the general locations of the collaborators. I hope to do this to note the geographic region of people so that the national museums get a sense of where the collaborators are located and what kinds of issues and creativity is shaped by their locations. For example, my hometown of Las Hermanas Mirabales in the Dominican Republic is where the assassination of the Mirabales sisters occurred, an event that helped unite the nation during the Trujillo dictatorship. This small town is famous for the sisters but also for its critical politics and anti-governmental authority. The art that surrounds the town, the literature the circulates the neighborhoods and the general politics of its people is party a direct result of the history there. The town of Samaná is also an interesting location on the island with a specific history that shapes the culture and art there. After the emancipation of slaves in America, hundreds of African-Americans moved to that specific town in the Dominican Republic. The culture and history that comes from that region is very rich in politics, Black pride, American Black culture, American slavery, English language and migration. There are dozens of other regions on the island that have equally rich histories. Mapping these regions would be a visually important aspect for the website.

BACKGROUND

Dominican national identity has been historically defined by the conditions plaguing the island-nation since colonial times. Post-colonial definitions have been strategically established by the political and ruling elites as racially white, ethnically indigenous, culturally Hispanic, and Christian (Torres-Saillant, 2000). This narrative of Dominicanidad, Dominican national identity, has been both promoted and contested in the country’s museum and cultural heritage sites (Candelario 2007; Nadal 2013). More specifically, I want to know how and why the national Museo del Hombre Dominicano (MHD) has promoted an ahistorical account of the nation’s past and what are the consequences of erasing and miseducating its people about their culturally dominant African heritage.

Is the national museum’s current state of being in a place of “sunken abandonment” indicative of the consequences of a people ignored and overlooked? Is it representative of a government no longer interested in investing in museums as cultural and education institutions? Also, are the current museum practices effective in delivering the message that they seek to project? If so, how can the citizens and diaspora both add to this effort? Currently, and as of today, 12/15/2021, the MHD museum is closed and has not received funding since 2005. The national heritage is at stake here. But there are other museums that have taken the place as the nation’s heritage site.

I am also interested in analyzing how the Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana (MMRD) challenges the narratives of Dominicanidad by highlighting a history of struggle against tyranny by memorializing its revolutionary heroes. What does this display of revolutionary heroes do to the formation of a political, class and racial identity in Dominicans? Is this museum displaying and mentioning the nation’s African heritage to unite political and class struggles with the past and current realities of racism on the island? Are these efforts doing enough to unite Dominicans and allow for their active participation as museumgoers and re-definers what it means to be Dominican?

• 

• 

Considering the island’s colonial history, foreign occupations, fascist dictatorship and the scramble for a new national identity thereafter, I will conduct a mixed-method approach using interviews, social media engagement and encouraging communication and addition to an online platform for collaborating on this effort. For the historical analysis portion of my research, I will access the national archives and both museums’ archives at their physical space and online platforms. I will interview the current museums’ administrators as well as both of the museums’ online social media administrators. I will also interview administrators of Dominican-run social media platforms that address and are in constant conversation about Dominican related issues around identity, culture, and heritage. My social media interview subjects will be chosen based on their active interest in the race, class and gendered dynamics present in Dominican Republic’s national museums, the MHD and MRD. I am looking to ask open-ended questions about the interviewees’ thoughts about the museum’s history and displays. This portion will be done on a website I will create in order to have a continuous/permanent platform and forum for these discussions. I will also ask about possibility of Dominican natives and the diaspora about participating in a transnational effort to communicate and collaborate with museum curators in redesigning and, by extension, reanimating interests in museums on the island. I hope to gather enough convincing responses to propose to the museum administration an alternative vision and strategic plan for the future of both the museum and, by extension, Dominicanidad. The website I will be creating will serve as evidence of the engagement, of the people in the diaspora and the island, necessary to express to the museums how much interest its citizens have in adding to the museum’s archives and exhibitions as well as serve as a location for the free and open expression of national identity. My process is “anything-goes” and I hope that the nation’s leaders in culture and heritage are able to consider this participatory process as beneficial to a greater cultural revolution in identity.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

I will be implementing the following frameworks for researching my topic, analyzing my data and offering an alternative perspective on how to engage for the future of museums in the Dominican Republic. I will draw from the overarching theories of museums studies and its criticism of the displays of cultural heritage and historical legacies. I will also draw more specifically, from the theories of participatory museum strategies (Simon 2011) that attempt to revise and transform how museum-goers and the public can and should interact with museums and the mutual benefits that arise from this. This audience-centered theoretical approach proposes techniques for cultural institutions to invite visitor participation while promoting institutional goals; community engagement is relevant in a world of increasing social media participation opportunities, making museums more dynamic, relevant, and essential places. The three fundamental theories underpinning this praxis are:

1. The idea of the audience-centered institution that is as relevant, useful, and accessible as a shopping mall or train station. An online presence for this here would serve as the most accessible platform.

2. The idea that visitors construct their own meaning from cultural experiences and the experiences of others shared on the website. Online conservation with other Dominicans would also influence collaborators.

3. The idea that users’ voices can inform and invigorate both project design, public facing programs and online communication forums (Simon, ii).

Finally. Participant cultural institutions, such as museums and the new and ever growing online/digital/virtual museums, are a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. These places help “create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other: share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they made during their visit; connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors’ conversations and creations focus on the evidence, objects, and ideas most important to the institution in question” (Simon iii). These techniques are not a way to replace traditional cultural institutions, but as practical ways to enhance them. As history museums are becoming less and less popular in the face of digital and virtual experiences, especially now during the Covid pandemic and in the age of Zoom University, they will have to eventually change and cater to the museum-goers’ ever and rapidly changing interests and locations of experiences.

10.29.21

What is Python? What can you do with it? Why is it so popular? Why can it do that other programs can’t?

Python is world fastest growing programming language and it is not reserved for the software engineers and video game developers, as I thought. Kids are also taking part in learning this new language. When I first became interested and asked about it, someone told me that kids nursery rhymes spoke in this language, or more like we can program this language to speak children’s’ songs. For example, if you took the only changing words to the song “Old McDonald Had a Farm” this would be this language of coding. Changing what sound goes with what animal is mentioned is this language. Mind blown! This was my introduction to this language and it helped me understand the basics and imagine the depth of its possibilities.

Of course many other disciplines use this language. Folks working on visualization and data analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning, automation, etc. Automation is one of the largest uses of Python amongst non-software developers. A great way to understand this is by imagining the redundancy of coping files, naming them, uploading them to a server, this can all be written on Python to automate this process. Of course this sounds great, but I quickly realized the real negative effects of this on the job market and human labor. The machines, by way of human coding, are taking over! These borings tasks, which are real people’s jobs, can be done by computers. That’s a scary thing. But it is where we are headed. The uncritical notion that python, coding, this new computer language, etc just “makes life easier” is concerning.

I participated in the October 29th workshop on Python and found out a lot more about it. A few of the things that i learned was that programming is a lonely journey. It is self-directed and driven by self-interest. Running the script, which we downloaded, was what the instructor told us was going to apparently be the hardest part about the workshop. We followed the basics downloading the script, opening the software and uploading files. We learned that MAC and PC/Windows are very different and that this makes the teaching of these softwares difficult for instructors. Our instructor had to show us for to open and upload files from each since our workshop was split.

In terms of the actual code, we learned some basics about editing simple text in the built-in program and that the different colors is only for simplification. Our instructor was very encouraging. Ja. He kept throwing these phrases that seemed kinda meta. “Face what you don’t understand and make meaning out of it.” I thought it a great touch to this complicated language learning process. I think instructors know that it is very easy to just give up on something so simple–too simple–that it becomes too tidious and doesn’t seem like it has many rewards, specially if all your are doing it coding and not really taking the project or job outside of that realm.

My take aways were as follows: What is the big deal about Python?

1. You can solve complex problems faster and with fewer steps. For example, C# and Javascript, other competing software programs, use longer code or more complex language to do the same thing. Python just makes things easier by being smaller/taking up less space.

C++: str.Substring(0, 3)

Javascript: str.substr(0, 3)

Python: str[0:3]

2. Python is also a “High Level” language so we don’t have to worry about complex tasks, like managing memory.

3. It’s “Cross-Platform” which means that we can run it on Mac, PC, etc,

4. It is the most popular so there is huge community to tap into

5. It is huge! and old. Almost 20 years old. So there is a lot of stuff that’s already happened to it and that people have created with it. This is very useful for beginners. It’s also great that anything you can do with Python is transferable knowledge for other programs. So, starting with Python before finding out what your job, career, or project demands is never a bad decision. Employers mostly look for Python knowledge as a basis for getting hired.

I am not sure Python or any of this language appeals to me just yet but I am glad I participated and learned its most basic functions. I now have an idea of what it means and how it can be used.

A semester before finally taking this course, I remember asking a good friend of mine to explain in “ABC terms” what Digital Humanities is and if she thought I’d enjoy it. She absolutely agreed that I would enjoy it, but had trouble telling me what it was all about. So she reminded me of a conversation we had many years ago. She said the following, “Michell, remember when we were on the L train a few years back and you brought up the changing racial demographics in the city? You were disgusted and angry that white people started creeping into your childhood neighborhoods. Streets that even your mom warned you about walking late at night were now safe spaces for white people who just got here. Neighborhoods that she said were “dangerous” for you to walk through were filled with frolicking, carefree white people. You made me aware of something so in my face yet so invisible to me. This was about 7-8 years ago, so it’s different and even worse now. But you colored this observation for me. You said “Buyong, look at the demographic at this stop. Broadway Junction, where I was raised. See, there is 1 white person, queer presenting, woman/femme, and the dirty hipster artist type. Lets touch base in a few stop. I swear they just keep appearing like out of nowhere and Black and Brown folk start disappearing. Watch!” And I watched. And we touched base again at Lorimer st, then Myrtle ave, and Marcy Ave. Then the City stops. And we realized that the closer we get to the City, the more white people got on the train and Black and Brown people got off. From almost 100% Black and Brown folk in Broadway Junction to nearly 80-90% white people by the time we got off on the last stop at 14th st. That right there, what you did, out of anger and critical observation, that is Digital Humanities in your head. If you took down this data and put it on a map and digitized it, that is what Digital Humanities tries to be. The tech will be hard to learn and it gets way too unnecessarily complicated sometimes, but what you have is the passion and the curiosity enough to start to create wild and dope, interesting and eye-opening visuals of how you think and what is already out there.” I was sold! Of course the tech part is the hardest for me, and it doesn’t help that I have major learning disabilities, (but the issue lies more in the teaching and not so much my learning, I’ve realized) but I took a chance and enrolled. And I do have to say that this experience helps me see things differently and has made me realize that anything I see, think and want to do can and should always have a digital component to it. I have realized that everything can be digitized and that mapping at the intersection of race, class and place, is something I am very interested in.

I attended the Nov, 17th Introduction to GIS Workshop because I wanted to get an idea of how far and deep mapping can take me and my daily sociological ideas, realizations and understandings of the world, how we experience it and how our experience of it can be visually represented and thus validated. While in the workshop, I kept thinking of the experience above. We were asked to what would we need to make a map like the one below, and i started imagining how interesting it would be to map this color-demographic-train experience.

In order to know how close we are to the nearest subway station, we would need the location of NYC streets, the location of the subway stations and zone unit we need to classify as well as the location we choose to focus on. I felt that this example was a bit confusing and not interesting, so my mind drifted to things that I found more interesting. I imagined my above example, focusing on one train line, the L train, and mapping the number and color/race of people in each stop. There would be graphs and dots and all the things necessary to create a map and input the data.

For the workshop, we were to learn how spatial data is formatted, how to locate this data and how to combine spatial data into a map. We downloaded QGIS and got to learning. I thought it very interesting that int he tech/digital world, how we see things may seem and are very complicated, but we can take things apart or separate them and see them as isolated points. Such as the image below. I thought seeing things this was was very interesting. We don’t see the world this way, but we experience these breaks simultaneously and they in tern experience us and our affect unto them the same way.

Above, we clearly see an example of what GIS (Geographic Information Systems) helps visualize; a framework for capturing and analyzing spatial and geographic data. On a graph, this type of spatial data has at least two dimensions/axis, X and Y and sometimes a Z. How these dimension are mapped or formed are by whats called vector and raster data. A Vector is a collection of points into coordinates and can be grouped together as features. A Raster is a collection of cells, each with its own value system. Both of these dimensions show the same thing, essentially, but in different ways. It depends on what and how you are trying to convey and I guess it’s up to the researcher to chose which best represents their data. An example of how these representation are similar is below:

The workshop was helpful, but I kind of got lost after this example. Mostly because I am a visual learner and learn best with various examples before moving on. The fact that we stuck to this one example made it hard for me to grasp the magnitude of it all. We got into specifics about cells and their various sizes and their visuals, lower to higher resolution, file size changer etc.

The map projections were interesting. It would have been very interesting if we explored critically the strategically racist map projections made to convince us that Africa is smaller than what it actually is and Greenland being represented as bigger. Or that Europe is actually a lot smaller than what we are used to imagining and how this informs our ideas of value and power. I would have loved that critical lens even on a short workshop because that is what draws people into this complex and visually beautiful digital world of the humanities. Seeing contradictions, breaks and cracks.

Finally, seeing the NYC Roads on a map, isolated from everything else, and using color to create boundaries or layers was very interesting. I could honestly think of so many projects to do with these tech tools. I had to part before we could get into the work time, but I enjoyed this workshop and hope to continue learning on my own. I can see myself creating cool projects to help my family and friends understand how I see the world and how my vision can turn into a digital/visual new type of language to understand issues in the humanities.

This past summer, I was awarded a fellowship that allowed me to dig into the archives of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. There, I was able to utilize their physical and digital collections to build a syllabus for an Introduction to Caribbean Studies course that is currently being taught at CUNY Graduate Center. I was surrounded by old, yellow-tinted newspapers, texts in foreign languages, children’s books, comics, zines, and paper clippings that seemed important to someone once. This experience got me thinking about the history of this specialized library/museum. Much has been written about the origin of The Schomburg. Its future is constantly being built. I was interested in that question of longevity and relevance in an ever-changing world as well as the ephemerality of artists’ and writers’ work. I was also interested in the stories that never get told; the stories that never reach you and I, and why; I was interested in the people and the stories that are not considered interesting or smart enough to be told. I was interested in knowledge and people made lost, invisible, insignificant and irrelevant to whatever it is their government and academic institutions are doing and we are doing here. I was and am interested in stories untold and how to better connect them to us as a means of finding likeness and meaning in the things deemed mundane.

Another point on my interest have to do with my journey creating this Intro to Caribbean Studies syllabus. The journey was not easy but I landed on an idea being proposed in several readings that I hope to also contribute to. In my Dominican Republic and Haiti week, I came across a text that advocated for the uplift and exposure to alternative narratives about both nations’ relations to each other that was not based on academics, politicians or sensationalism. It challenged readers in the diaspora to find people, texts, and narratives that do not contribute to the hate and antagonism that is popular about these nations’ relations to each other. The point was that there are stories that we are not hearing or listening to because we aren’t asking the right people or the right questions. My proposal hopes to do this by finding people and their art and writing that is not popular, known, published; archives founds on the street, by people who are local and native to those areas and whose lives as as interesting and relevant and complex as any other and who should be heard and considered when deciding what is worthy and what is not. This, I think, is what really gets me going. And potentially having institutional support and interest in this project can make this a reality. Luckily, the Schomburg has already expressed interest but wanted a detailed plan first. This is the beginnings of that plan…

I imagined that items just arrived or were constantly being sent over digitally and simply added to the Schomburg’s archives. Of course, nothing is that simple, especially in a world almost aggressively transitioning from the texts and physical to the digital and meta and abstract. I wonder what we are losing and who are we invisibilizing further through this transition. I imagine books and archives that would never get found or taken seriously. I fear that the historical inequality that comes with the lack of resources and access will end up not only burying deeper the knowledge, information, ideas, perspectives, hopes and wishes of many folks, but also depriving us of all the genius and complexities that can be found in “undiscovered” writings and archives.

I am interested in collecting and archiving texts from Black Caribbean and Latin American folks (the African descendant citizens of the Global South) writing about, well, anything. I will use this proposal to propose to the Schomburg the creation of a job there as traveler, collector, and digital contributor as well as communication liaison between un-published and un-popular writers and The Schomburg Center. To keep this project simple, for now, I will focus on one Caribbean nation, one town, one language (Spanish) and not dive too deep into politics of identity and the publishing industry and dynamics. My focus for now would be Black-identified, Spanish speaking people from Puerto Rico’s largely Afro-descendant neighborhood of Loíza.

I am interested in visiting this town and finding out its literary culture. I would locate the libraries, museums, book shops, etc to identify spaces of institutional literary culture that I do not want to focus on. I would be looking instead for spaces outside of institutions that foster a culture of writing and reading. I will not only look online in social media platforms, but also roam the streets in search of book fairs and writing materials.

I came to this idea in Bogota, Colombia. I was very intrigued at the culture of reading that seemed so normalized and popular there. After touring the cultural centers and art institutions in the downtown area, where I also ran into a book fair with popular and published books, I stumbled into a busy street that was populated with fruit stands, toys and art displayed on carpets and blankets on the ground, and tons of books mounted on tables and spread out on the street sidewalks. I also saw many people reading these books. Many of these books seemed to be self-made manuscripts, zines and local newspapers as well as recipe books and children’s drawings. There seemed to be this localized, unofficial and un-“discovered” nature to these texts. They were all physical and there was no digital archives anywhere. This sparked my idea to elevate these books, these writers, by helping to digitize them. My interest and experiences at The Schomburg helped me narrow down my focus to Black writers writing about Black folks, for Black folks and on Blackness in general.

I wanted to feel like a contributor to The Schomburg’s collections and help bring physical books and manuscripts to their library/museum. I also wanted to write short LibGuides (Library Guides) about each item found and publish on their website.Digitally, I would be interested in creating a website where I will do multiple things. I would want to map the locations of non-institutionally represented book fairs and writers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean using a platform and software similar to ArchiveGrid. I would populate the map with the location, found material, artist bio and writing/art and contact information. The platform will also have a LibGuide section that contains summaries of the texts and where to locate and purchase them.

Part of my portfolio to present to The Schomburg director would contain grants applied to, soon to apply to and any institutional support I have confirmed. Much of this portfolio will have to contain access to funds in order to be able to cover travel, room and board, compensating people for their time, purchasing books for collection and my living expenses. I would like to receive at least $2,000 from CUNY Graduate Center as part of my Capstone Project so that I can travel and collect these items. I will not only execute this project, but also write about my experiences navigating this interest. That will hopefully be enough to receive my Masters. Before graduating, I would have applied to multiple grants and reached out to other institutions that would be interested in helping fund this project. I have Latino and Black cultural centers, museums, academic institutions and intersectional centers that would be interested in collecting and archiving Black and Spanish language books from the Global South.

Eventually, I would want to write about my experiences navigating this project and issue that I anticipate will garner some interest. Issue concerning me now but will eventually have to have their own space and conversations are as follows: identity politics; what Blackness is and what Black isn’t; who gets to be Black and write the Black experience; Latino and Blackness, the legacy of Black people and culture in Latin America; Language access and limitations; representation and justice; publishing industry, race and class, etc.

My initial interest for this Text Analysis project was about Critical Race Theory (CRT). I was specifically interest in the language being used in bills passed against it. My main questions were 1. What is the language being used and how is it based on fear? What do these texts tell us about people’s understanding of what CRT is? What other issues come up that I did not anticipate? I had other interests in exploring, but this would require plenty of time and more technical skills to develop. For instance. I would be interested in exploring bills passed vs those proposed and not passed and if there is there a difference in language used. Liberal vs. Conservative media text analysis of how these bills and issues are being spoken about and the language used therein. How these bills vary state to state or if there is a concrete understanding of what in the world is actually happening here. It would also be interesting to see the developments of these bills through time.

What is the heck is CRT and what are these bills all about anyways?

Texas is just one of a handful of states that have approved legislation against the teaching of Critical Race Theory in grades K-12. Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that prescribes how Texas teachers can talk about current events, American history, and racism in the classroom. Other State lawmakers and education policymakers throughout the country have joined in the efforts to make this a nation-wide ongoing debate over how to teach this not-so-complicated to communicate history and truth about of race and racism, but also sexism, equality, and justice.

Critical Race Theory vs. “Critical Race Theory”

CRT is an academic term that dives into how race and racism have impacted social and local structures in the US. A nearly 40-year-old concept, its core idea is that racism isn’t merely the product of individual, interpersonal bias, or prejudice. It asserts that race is a social construct made systematic and embedded in legal systems and policies. It’s as American as…well nothing else, really. Apples are not even indigenous to North America unless you fancy a sour apple pie.

The basic tenets of CRT emerged out of a legal analysis framework of the late 70’s and early 80’s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, to name a few. An example where CRT was important was in tackling the issue of redlining, where government officials in the 30’s literally drew lines around areas deemed high financial risks. Often, race was the only factor influencing who was allowed to generate wealth and who was doomed to generational poverty. Banks refused, and were not allowed, to offer mortgages to Black people within lines drawn. These violent acts still haunt us today. Policies of the past haunt many of us today!

CRT has also influenced other intellectual fields concerned with issues within the humanities, social sciences and teaching like political power, social organization and language.

But CRT is being misunderstood by conservatives, almost exclusively, and it seems to be on purpose (assuming conscious and high-level intelligent strategy used). This academic term is being misused and conflated with issues and topics of inequality, anti-racism and social justice. Instead of helping to analyze abstract and almost meta ideas about how society is structured and its implication, it is being used to speak about liberal challenge to American ideals of group identity, nationality, pride, and unity. CRT is now cited as the basis of all efforts around diversity and inclusion. Topics around sexism, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ history and justice, the holocaust, eugenics etc, are also being lumped into these arguments. Insecurities around anti-government trust and policies as well as conspiracy theories are also included.

Over this past year, GOP leaders have decried teaching of CRT in public schools. The frenzy started when Trump banned federal employees from participating in trainings discussing “CRT” and white privilege, calling it propaganda, adding it to his conservative bucket of things anti-American. Since then, it has been downhill spiral into a nonsensical frenzy. It’s truly just sad and depressing.

I googled bills passed and came across a couple of sites that have compiled a list of and mapped states and their status concerning CRT. I used the most up-to-date article from EdWeek.org, which also provided links to each bill and their current standing. I choose to focus on bills passed. A larger project would contain all the bills, passed or not, for an even more in-depth analysis on the language used around banning CRT in classrooms.

Title: Map: Where Critical Race Theory is Under Attack

Source: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

Initial thoughts:

I realized that this was going to be a tough project from the start. I did not expect the ridiculous legal jargon and bill text aesthetic to be so annoying, distracting, and ugly. Too many roman numerals, tons of parenthesis, and way too much wording for simple ideas and phrases. Seemed like it was rule following over clear communication. But, alas, I needed to stick with it.

I thought of leaving all the other legal clutter because it just exemplifies how non-inclusive legal jargon is. This gets into issues of access, privilege, class, race, and racism. But that analysis will take a larger project to address in full.

The image above did little to highlight the core concerns in the anti-CRT bills.

I was not surprised that key words dominated the texts. Throughout the bills analyzed, the “protected” identity and life-style words were the most frequent. That makes sense considering that the bills tended to repeat these multiple times throughout the text, for some reason.

I decided to clean the texts of these words to better represent the core words and language used in the bills. Of course, these terms are core, but it seemed more like lip service (or text service) than real deep analysis on any—typical legalese performance. Thought my focus here is on race and identity, I though deleting these words from the text would highlight more unexpected or typically expected terms and ideas. I just went with it.

Of course I could have cleaned this up a bit more, but even after doing lots of deleting and inputing words into the StopWords section, i thought it interesting to leave the other clutter. A larger project would be cleaner, I’m sure. But, the above image shows me that after cleaning these legally required and performative key words, the larger sized and prevalence of terms like “inherently,” “school,” “individual,” “people,” in relation to the smaller terms of “racist,” “adverse,” “oppressive,” consciously,” seems interesting to me. I wouldn’t want to REACH and make outlandish sounding assumptions, yet, but it seems like the typical conservative focus on individualism rings loud enough to understand that what is being challenged by this bill is the default identity based on nationalistic pride and privilege of being just an American, which has historically been about a type of equality that does not center difference but focuses on assimilation.

In the context of an anti-CRT bill, the most used phrase here was “”discrimination in public workplaces and education.” This worries me because it just shows that criticality around the meanings and real life consequences of institutional and systematic racism is being flipped to mark white people, workers and students, as the victims. This is concerning because what this highlights is a lack of critical and deep understanding, an almost inability to abstractly and meta-ly, understand the world.

Another interesting highlight is the context in which the word “individual” is used. Above, we can clearly see that it was followed by the phrase like “discrimination against” which signals to me that the focus on the individual being discriminated against is more interpersonal than systemic. In other words, this New Hampshire anti-CRT bill, maybe unconsciously, acknowledges that white students and white workers are not being systematically discriminated against by another group of people. The focus is on interpersonal issues. Of course bills do not have examples to support their demands, but I wonder if those would be individual claims of “racist” discrimination versus a strategic and systemic and generational discrimination. I am sure that if I analyzed texts by systematically and historically discriminated folks, the issues would be more about a deliberate strategy to exclude and oppress than simply an issue of individual prejudice. Great food for thought here.

I decided to also upload the Texas bill, since that seems to be where most of the conversation is happening. Before cleaning the text of these protected identity terms, I uploaded it and found the text interesting. Instead of a complete ban on anything related to race and the American story of racism, what is the issue with the Texas bill, and most bills “banning” CRT is not so much the absence of an honest history, but about showing “the other side” of these issues. Meaning that speaking about the horrors of slavery will have to include how beneficial, if not necessary it was to the creation of this nation and how intelligent racists were for thinking of this idea. The image below shows the Texas text exactly:

As you can see, the limitation are, as mentioned earlier, on how “CRT” is to be taught, which is still a massive issue. The holocaust was horrible, but now teachers will have to explain and not be critical of the “justifying” reasonings for it. Women fought for rights! Right on! But they were also happy and they did it because they wanted equality because we all deserve it and white men aren’t inherently bad. These conversations sounds really scary to have with impressionable children developing their sense of right and wrong and learning, hopefully, to be empathetic and not developing sociopathic behaviors.

• 

• 

I think for a future and more prolonged project, I would only insert the lines in the bills that explicitly state the language to be used and not used by teachers, the specific demands and the examples of texts recommended. I do wonder if conducting distant readings of these bills is even effective. I found myself wanting to read the bills and just take the words that I saw interesting. This project did not necessarily justify what I was looking for. I think I would concentrate on popular phrases next time and have sections where I would note if a phrase or words were being (mis)used and misrepresented.

I did find myself enjoying, and reading into, this project. I think more time and energy spent on this will be more fruitful. I look forward to incorporating distant reading and text analysis in future projects. What a great way to see the bigger picture.

DH seems like a young discipline. Not in that it hasn’t existed for decades but in that it is now being interrogated and institutionalized in ways it hasn’t before. What interests me most about DH is that for such a young discipline, it is grappling with centuries of criticism while it produces materials and scholarship. DH feel like a very self-conscious discipline. As a new(ish) field still carving out its values and purpose, it is inheriting centuries of criticism and self-reflection done by all other disciplines throughout history. This is good! Being self-conscious, or conscious of its self, does not mean that it is filled with insecure and anxious scholars but rather with people who are forced to interrogate themselves and their world-views, their perspectives, their creations, intentions and their impact in ways that haven’t been done so early before. As Spiro, in “This is Why We Fight:’ Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” tell us, DH occupies a place where it is “publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active, 24-7 life online” (Spiro, 2012).

Another interesting avenue to explore are the flaws in DH: a lack of attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; a preference for research-driven projects over pedagogical ones; an absence of political commitment; an inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners; an inability to address texts under copyright; and an institutional concentration in well-funded research universities (Gold, 2012). The issues in DH scholarship are not new. These are seemingly ancient problems that any and all scholarship have and will have to deal with. The fact that Digital Humanist are making conscious efforts to interrogate these so early in their development and institutionalization means that, though it will take longer to get to a place where DH will be taken by all academies as also a purely academic discipline, and thus guaranteeing a seat at the tenue table of security and freedom for scholars and builders in institutions, it will no doubt be a richer discipline.

Beginning with learning about, unlearning from and transforming (or decolonizing) the harsh systems in place that limit the lives of people and rob the potential genius of people systematically trapped in under-resourced, marginalized and actively oppressed and disenfranchised communities, addressing these specific communities and focusing on justice, equity and access to DH will inevitably benefit the field like is hasn’t any other before. DH is an experiment in what intentionality can look like in our current world, exactly as it is. DH has much work ahead of itself and much more benefits to deserve.

• To what extent do these sites/projects reflect issues discussed in our readings?

An example of the intentionality of digital humanist to be self-reflective and dedicated to transparency is present in The Early Caribbean Digital Archive site’s description of itself and the materials within. “The materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans, but the ECDA aims to use digital tools to “remix” the archive and foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world.” The “about” section clearly outlines the goals, which are not only to make more accessible the literary history of the Caribbean, but also to implore users–“both scholars of the Caribbean as well as students–to understand the colonial nature of the archive and to use the digital archive as a site of revision and remix for exploring ways to decolonize the archive” (ECDA). This collaborative, transparent and experimental aspect of the digital archives reflects the intentionality of inclusion and openness value of exchange.

(Apologies for the super tardy first blog post. I am still handling the post-storm issues. I shall be fully back on track by next week.)