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tools for commensality 🧿 (inquiline@assemblag.es)'s status on Monday, 01-Sep-2025 06:53:09 JST tools for commensality 🧿

Yo computer touchers: there's a history of Black invention and ingenuity you may or may not know about, *and* a history of Black inventors' ingenuity being denied at a systemic level
🧵

In conversation about 4 days ago from assemblag.es permalink
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  tools for commensality 🧿 (inquiline@assemblag.es)'s status on Monday, 01-Sep-2025 06:53:22 JST tools for commensality 🧿
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  Rayvon Fouché’s research in history of technology reveals that Black inventors were largely excluded from “shop” cultures and “school” cultures where white Americans honed their technical skills through informal apprenticeship or formal education, then finding routes into scientific and industrial cultures where credentialed invention occurred. Even when they invented, though, they were often gatekept out of receiving credit for innovation. 2/
  
  In conversation about 4 days ago permalink
  
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  tools for commensality 🧿 (inquiline@assemblag.es)'s status on Monday, 01-Sep-2025 06:53:29 JST tools for commensality 🧿
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  (CW antiBlack racism) 3/
  Here’s Fouché describing what happened when an enslaved Black person invented a piece of agricultural equipment:
  In conversation about 4 days ago permalink
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  1. In the technological realm, creativity by African Americans is regularly dismissed as cleverness, instead of being interpreted as smart, ingenious, or innovative. In 1858, when plantation owner Oscar J. E. Stuart attempted to patent the double cotton scraper that his slave Ned invented, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black firmly determined that “a machine invented by a slave, though it be new and useful, cannot, in the present state of the law, be patented. I may add that if such a patent was issued to the master, it would not protect him in the courts against persons who might infringe it.”?® The Patent Office made it abundantly clear that inventions by slaves were not worthy of patent protection. The implication was that slaves were not human beings and definitely not citizens. With this reasoning, it was inconceivable for the Patent Office to grant a Negro a patent.”” Even when American society began to accept the fact that African Americans did invent, black inventors were framed in a negative context. Some even went to the extent of denying that black people possessed American ingenuity. A white attorney expressed this perception by making the following comment in a patent rights battle involving a black inventor: “It is a well-known fact that the horse hay rake was first invented by a lazy negro [sic] who had a big hay field to rake and didn’t want to do it by hand.”
    https://cdn.hosted.spacebear.ee/sb-ab9b494dccbef43e454fccf9f07caa75/media_attachments/files/115/125/476/535/307/200/original/50204cd98060a37a.png
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  tools for commensality 🧿 (inquiline@assemblag.es)'s status on Monday, 01-Sep-2025 06:53:37 JST tools for commensality 🧿
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  Why am I talking about hay rakes on a decentralized #opensocialweb network? This history is at play in some of the arguments we’re seeing about #Fediverse #atproto #activitypub right now
  Whatever one thinks of Bluesky, *the* most innovative cultural and technical experimental space there right now is Blacksky; *and* it’s also the clearest example of decentralized possibility on the AT protocol. When people double down saying “AT isn’t decentralized”, they are denying that Blacksky exists. 4/
  
  In conversation about 4 days ago permalink

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