Capital, State Power, and Racialization in 18th Century Information Systems

• In Event: Technology and/in Racial Formations

Abstract

It is now commonplace to identify Thomas Jefferson as a key figure in the installation of democracy and human rights on the basis of the universalization of the white, propertied, male subject, and the concomitant rationalization of the enslavement, displacement, and killing of Black and Indigenous peoples. Less understood is the extent to which Jefferson created and installed racialized code in information technologies using categories, formulas, and data collection techniques. His plantation and factory were grounds for developing management practices based on an emerging prison reform movement, his vision for the young republic, and prevailing discourses about laws of nature and nations. Jefferson invented, modified, and tested surveillance techniques, geographic information systems, and knowledge organization practices on his property (L. Stanton 2012; T. Epperson 2000). I will argue that his home at Monticello was a crucial site at which capital, state power, and racialization converged in information communication technologies. This analysis provides historical context for the algorithms, metadata, surveillance, and location services that collect and distribute information about people of colour in the present. Jefferson formulated and codified categories for race and indigeneity in catalogues, memoranda, ledgers, policy documents, architectural drawings, and maps. Information systems were instrumental to the codification of race in the 18th century. I draw a lineage between the information management techniques upon which slavery and removal relied and the surveillance, data collection, and policing that monitor, displace, and kill Black and Indigenous people in the present (see M. Alexander 2010; S. Browne 2015).

Author

• Melissa Adler, Western University