Response to “A Brief History of Industrial and Interaction Design” and “Black People Invented Everything”
I started by reading A Brief History of Industrial and Interaction Design and found myself thinking that this was a pretty standard history lesson. It looked similar to my history textbooks from high school and even most of the readings I had done in college — white man after white man after white man. In fact, I’ve been so conditioned to this narrative that I didn’t even question it. When I moved on to Black People Invented Everything, I found myself getting frustrated, angry and even embarrassed that I had been so okay with the first reading and had so quickly accepted that ‘this is the way things are’. Of course white men didn’t invent everything! But it’s the story we are told over and over and over again, and we are never taught to question it.
One section I found particularly poignant from Black People Invented Everything was “White people Invented the Patent Office”. The premise of this section was that since white people invented the idea of the patent, they also got (and for the most part continue to get) to decide who gets the patents. This meant that everyone who got patents was white, and so the cycle continued — white people only giving patents to other white people. This was a specific example of a pattern that’s been present throughout history for all minorities: because they aren’t the ones with power, they don’t get to make any decisions, and therefore continue to be under and misrepresented.
This idea was summed up well in the reading: “Why don’t more of us know this history? Partly because there’s a ton of history not being taught in most American schools, and partly because there’s a lot of history that’s simply been lost. In regards to the history of modern inventions, Black people in America were written out of the historical record!” The instance of patents is a perfect example of minorities getting written out of history — even when they were able to invent something (which already took overcoming the oppression placed on them by society), they were never able to receive credit for doing so, which means that many of these stories were simply lost.
But even the stories that weren’t lost aren’t often shared. Why? It goes back to the same problematic cycle. White men, still by far the most privileged in our society, are therefore still in control of the narrative. A white man writing a history book is most likely not going to go out of his way to research and dig up truths about the lesser known (although equally if not more important) minority players from history. Napoleon Bonaparte said, “History is the version of the past events that people have decided to agree upon” but as we’ve seen, white men are often the only one making those decisions. This has resulted in only their stories being told. What would history look like if we decided to include everyone’s voices equally?
