Within Our Gates: The Problem With Innovation & Invention
Episode two of HBO’s Lovecraft Country, a 2020–21 TV series that combined science fiction and Jim Crow segregation features Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem, “Whitey on the Moon”. Written in 1970, the poem was inspired by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who called the moon landing a “flying circus” that distracted Americans from problems at home. In other words, the space race, heralded as a global technological achievement, ignored systemic racism and economic injustice.
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)
When Gill Scott-Heron wrote his poem he did not know about Katherine Johnson, a Black American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first NASA spaceflights. In fact Johnson and other Black “human computers” Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were the hidden drivers or operators behind NASA’s machines.
By the time the 2018 film Hidden Figures was released to celebrate their achievements Mary Jackson (d. 2005) and Dorothy Vaughan (d. 2008) had transitioned. They never got their flowers in life. Some might argue that, for all their efforts, the work they did for NASA did not lead to social change for their people across the country. Their work and the decades before the 2018 film highlight a historical pattern of overlooking Black American (and women) innovators, inventors, and pioneers.
This history hits close to home because my mother, the late Sharon L. Gaskins worked as a computer programmer/analyst at a time when few Black women were seen in the field. My mother became a programmer a couple decades after Johnson/Jackson/Vaughan at NASA, and she worked in lesser known companies in Louisville, KY. After she retired early from her work few people in Louisville or beyond ever mentioned what she had done… and then came me and I’m a artist who uses computers.
I didn’t realized until much later, after high school graduation how unusual my mother was or how much her work had impacted my art. When my art teacher invited me to take her computer graphics class during my senior year (1987–88) I initially said no. I wanted to be an artist, not do what I saw my mother doing. With some prodding I enrolled in Mrs. Sidebottom’s first CG class. The work I did in her class led to a full ride at Pratt Institute where I majored in computer graphics. My studies became the foundation for what I’m doing now in the digital space and I’m not alone.
With the advent of generative AI (a subset of deep learning), more Black people, especially Black women have stepped into the spotlight, including Stephanie Dinkins, LaJuné McMillian, Valencia James and Vernelle Noel. I first met Stephanie and LaJuné in 2017 when we were part of a group art show in Long Island City, NY titled “We Have Always Lived in the Future.” The show featured a recorded conversation between Dinkins and the first social, AI humanoid robot BINA48. LaJuné’s installation explored virtual reality and immersive space. I collaborated with Visual Music System’s Bill Sebastian to explore VR, video projection mapping and sculpture.
In 2021 I collaborated with Valencia James and Vernelle Noel on a Mozilla Foundation-sponsored project that used Carnival and AI as a vehicle to create a space where Caribbean and Black communities could engage with, learn about, and interrogate AI. The project brought together generative AI, architecture, digital heritage, and art to create and feature AI-generated dancing sculptures, AI-generated Blue-Devils and Jab Jabs in the Carnival, and an app for visitors to create visual art through their own body’s movement and dance (see above).
“Whitey on the Moon” was written 20 years before Mae Jemison became the first Black American woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992. Sian Hayley “Leo” Proctor became the first female commercial spaceship pilot on the all-civilian Inspiration4 orbital spaceflight in 2021. In spite of these inroads, Black people (including Black women) are underrepresented in STEM fields. Researchers James Holly and Yolanda Comedy recently published a paper that uses Gil Scott-Heron’s poem to point out the disparities in the “invention ecosystem.”
The detrimental inconsistency between dominant White conceptions of invention and innovation versus those that primarily serve the needs of under-resourced communities, as well as the ongoing failure of our society to recognize and celebrate inventions by Blacks, has tremendous moral and intellectual consequences. — “Whitey on the Moon: Racism’s Maintenance of Inequity in Invention & Innovation”
In the essay the authors mention my work to highlight the innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked. They write that techno-vernacular creativity or TVC
[E]mbodies equity in both meaning-making and resource provision. Black youth may lack expensive technological objects, but they are rich in culture and resourcefulness.
I recently read There Ain’t No Diversity, Equity and Inclusion When it Comes to AI and engaged in a debate with a stranger about the author’s call for inclusion to engineers and others involved in training generative AI, “to put some bloody diversity into the robot’s output.” The stranger danced around the racism bit and tried to hone in on gender but I’m a Black woman: race and gender are intertwined. It would seem that the same historical omissions we saw with Hidden Figures are in play today (but of course). However, because of things like social media the hidden are able to surface and move themselves closer to the top or center of discourse.