November 19, 2025 • 46 mins
As we head into the holidays, many of us will encounter old memories and create new ones. You may spend time recounting stories from your childhood, learning a new line dance, or even taking orders in the kitchen on how to make a family recipe. Memory-keeping has long been a practice for humans across the globe, but for Black people, those traditions look different. And in the age of technology, the way memories are created, stored, and used introduce a new set of questions around who gets to call them their own.
This week we're joined by Dr. Tonia Sutherland. Currently a professor and dean at UCLA, she’s dedicated her research to unpacking the uniqueness of Black memory work. And in her book, ‘Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife,’ she digs into how technology, history, and data longevity affect how we practice archivism, and how those practices impact our digital afterlives.
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The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly
conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small
decisions we can make to become the best possible versions
of ourselves. I'm your host, doctor Joy hard and Bradford,
a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or
(00:32):
to find a therapist in your area, visit our website
at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you
love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is
not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with
a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much
(00:57):
for joining us for session four thirty eight of the
Therapy for Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our
conversation after word from our sponsors. As we head into
the holidays, many of us will encounter old memories and
(01:17):
create new ones. You may spend time recounting stories from
your childhood, learning a new line dance, or even taking
orders in the kitchen on how to make a family recipe.
Memory keeping has long been a practice for humans across
the globe, but for Black people, though, traditions look different,
and in the age of technology, the way memories are created, stored,
(01:38):
and used introduce a new set of questions around who
gets to call them their own. Today, I'm excited to
be joined by doctor Tanya Sutherland, currently a professor and
dean at UCLA. She has dedicated her research to unpacking
the uniqueness of black memory work, and in her book
Resurrecting the Black Body Race and the Digital Afterlife, she
(01:59):
digs into how technology, history and data longevity affect how
we practice arkavism and how those practices impact our digital afterlives.
If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please
share with us on social media using the hashtag TVG
in session, or join us over in our patreons to
talk more about the episode. You can join us at
(02:21):
community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot com. Here's our conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us today, doctor Sutherland.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
It is an absolute pleasure to be here, and it's Tanya. Please.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Oh, Tanya, got it? Got it? So I wonder if
you can start by just giving us a definition of
your work. So what do you mean when you talk
about black memory work in black digital afterlives? Wow?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Thank you? What an important question and a perfect place
to begin when we talk about digital afterlives. We're really
talking about the data that's collected by us for us
about us. That includes anything from our social media, to
our email, to our communications such as text messages, instant messages, right,
(03:14):
all of this content that we're producing in our own
personal lives, and then actual data bits and bytes. When
you take a photograph, the metadata from that gets collected
on your phone, So if you have an iPhone, right,
that information then goes to Apple. They're collecting that data
and that metadata. They're collecting the time of the photograph,
(03:36):
the location of the photograph, some information, some other information
about the image itself, and increasingly with the use of AI,
that includes some maybe sort of description about what might
appear in the image. This is sort of a new
added layer of what is being collected and noted. And
(03:58):
then when you pass away, the question becomes what is
done with all of this data? And so in many
ways we have what I have termed digital afterlife, where
all of this data and our digital detritis lives on
after we do, and we have very little say in
terms of what is done with that data, how it's used,
(04:20):
how it might be manipulated. There are, as we know
now digital resurrection, and other kinds of digital immortality practices.
All of these things get tied up in what we
mean when we say a digital afterlife. When I talk
about Black Memory Work, I'm looking at all of the
potential harms that can be served up by a digital afterlife,
(04:43):
and I'm looking to Black memory work, which really describes
a long history, robust history of practices within black communities,
diasporic communities across the globe that are about preserved memory
in ways that make sense to us, and in some ways,
(05:08):
I think about Black Memory Work as a corrective or
as an alternative path to a digital after life, something
more intentional, right, something that we craft for ourselves.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Can you talk about like what inspired you and like
what interested you in this work and how it inspired
the writing of your book.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I had been thinking about this in some way, shape
or form since my childhood. I was distressed as a
child to see the Save the Children campaign. Do you
remember this? On television commercials for Evening TV. There would
be pictures of ostensibly starving children, and they would show
(05:49):
it was always black children. They always had very distended bellies.
What we would now probably refer to colloquially as poverty, porn. Right,
we were looking at black babies in distress, and as
a child, I remember being struck by how it only
ever was kids who looked like me, and it didn't
(06:10):
make sense to me. As a child, I didn't have
a language or reference points really to understand what I
was seeing, or to make sense of it, or even
to sort of contend with it. And then when Hurricane
Katrina happened, I was immediately taken back to those pictures,
to those commercials, to those ads, to that entire ad campaign,
(06:33):
and I thought, we are seeing dead people who look
like me on television once again, now on the internet
as well, in the overflowing waters of Lake pontchitran Right,
we are once again looking at images of black people's
bodies and distress, deceased, and it's being presented to us
(06:55):
as something that we should taken again any real context.
We aren't given tools with which to process what we're seeing.
And I thought, there's got to be a reason that
it's always people who look like me, and that reason
can't just be racism. What else is at play here?
(07:15):
And so that sort of became the center of the
inquiry for my book Resurrecting Black Body, which is about
race and the digital afterlife and really explores these questions
in depth.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
And what are some of the most common practices of
black memory work that we may not even realize that
we're practicing.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Oh my gosh, I love this question. So we are
very creative when I say we right now, I'm talking
about the Black Memory Collective, which is a small community
based organization that I'm the founder and director of. And
when we talk about black memory work, the kinds of
practices that we first started talking about and seeing, we're
(07:54):
things like quilts, right it was we understand memory to
be braid in someone's hair as a root to freedom.
We understand black memory work to be quilting. We understand
black memory work in a way that other people might
not recognize it. Other people might call someone a hoarder,
(08:15):
for example. And that's not to say that there aren't
issues around hoarding, but it is to say that when
you have been dispossessed of your physical belongings repeatedly over generations,
there's something to that holding on to things. Right, that
is about a memory process, a memory ritual, a memory practice. Right,
(08:38):
If you're not out here hoarding or braiding hair or quilting.
Don't think you're not doing black memory work. Certainly for
our photographs and the things that we might find in
the boxes under our beds, that's black memory work. And
then in an even more expansive way, we are finding
that the way that folks show up for one another
(09:00):
in community is also about a memory practice or a
memory ritual. It's about building memory and that memory then
gets held in community. And I think that's a lot
of it right, just the ways that we are showing
up in community and asking one another to hold things
for ourselves, for our communities, all of that, all of
(09:21):
that counts as block memory.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
You know, as you're talking to me, I'm thinking about
this large black leather purse that my grandmother had that
had all of these photos, and every time I would
go home for like holidays, like I'm going straight to
this purse to like ask my aunts and uncles like
tell me about this picture? Who was this? And really
wanting to like understand like why there were these collection
(09:44):
of photos. It also makes me think about how important
it was to my grandmother that anytime she went to
a funeral, she had to have a program, right. And
then would come back from the funeral and like put
it in the back of her bible. Right, And so
it feels like as a culture, like as a community,
it feels like we have been doing this black memory
where even if we weren't calling it it.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That's exactly right, that's exactly right. It's in our art.
It's literally woven into the fabrics of our culture. Yeah,
So what are some of the I love it. I
just yeah, like you have to go on a big
black bag full of black memory.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, I need to figure out where that person is
so that that doesn't get like displaced, and like you know,
we always kind of have an eye on where that
is and who has ownership with it.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So what are some of.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
The differences between black memory practices and maybe more widespread
like western archival practices.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Thank you so much for asking us question. So, in
a brick and mortar archives, what you will find is
that there are papers, and those papers go in boxes,
and those boxes go on shelves, and there are processes
through which things may cross the arkable threshold or enter
the archives. There are high level descriptive practices, high level
(10:58):
discovery practices, high level access practices that really are about
ensuring the longevity of those materials and the condition of
them in that very specific way. And for the most part,
the brick and mortar archives that exist in the United
States were created to document the dominant culture. Right the
(11:22):
ways that we tend to show up in those archives
is in newspapers, in databases of runaway slave ads. The
institutions that hold those archives have not traditionally made it
their agenda, their goal, or their policy to document black life.
(11:45):
And if they do, what they're documenting is the same
the children campaign and the bodies in like Pontitrain, they're
documenting trauma, death, and disposition. Black memory worked the exact
opposite of that. It starts with us, It starts from
the bottom. It holds us. It is generative, It shifts,
(12:07):
It doesn't have to stay static. There's no demand that
it be accessible broadly, widely accessible. In so many ways,
they are side by side practices that almost have nothing
to do with one another. Right because the goals aren't
the same, the practices and the policies aren't the same,
(12:29):
they can speak to one another, they could influence one another, certainly.
Black memory workers who call themselves such often are trained
as archivists. So they come with the knowledge of how
to preserve materials. What they're doing with that knowledge isn't
just preserving materials putting them in a box on a
shelf and saying, hey, come and visit my brick and
(12:51):
mortar archives, to visit your stuff. They're saying, I know
how to preserve this. Let me show you, let me
teach you, let me help you. And so it's also
a knowledge practice in a way, and a generational one
in a different way than institutional brick and mortar archives
like the National Archives or even the Library of Congress,
(13:13):
or I mean even your local repository or university archives
may hold. They are set about to do sort of
different things.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
And what do you feel like is the goal of
a black memory work? Then it's a different goal, like
you said, than archiving.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, I think what I've observed, what I've heard people say,
is that we need to preserve our memory. No one
else is doing that for us, and we're going to
do it in a way that is intentionally black, and
so that shows up differently, right, We show up differently
in intentionally black spaces. The work is done differently in
(13:52):
intentionally black spaces, and I want to be really clear
that not everyone who is a black memory worker, right, yea,
and your grandmother is a black memory worker, that bag
that's black memory work. So it doesn't matter that she
didn't have a master's degree in library and information studies
or science, right. I assume she did bond anyway, though
(14:14):
neither of my grandmothers did either, and I would absolutely
call both of them black memory workers. I think the
purpose and the goal for us is about preservation of memory.
It's also about preservation of cultural heritage, and there's a
certain protective layer I want to say for future generations
that's very intentional. There too.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
More from our conversation after the break And so is it, Tanya,
a more personal kind of like, Okay, it is for
my family to preserve the history of our family, not
necessarily for me to learn about your family, because that's
(14:55):
kind of what it feels like. It's like, oh, with archiving,
like you can go visit like a library, a museum
and like learn more. This feels like it is a
more personal thing maybe for your community. Well definitely your
direct family, but maybe also your community that is still
like close to the family.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Absolutely, I would say that's true. And I would also
say that in terms of concentric circles or community and
how we build and how we live and work with
one another, there are many sort of points of possible
or potential interaction with other people's historical memories. Right. I
know that ancestry has become a very popular site. I
(15:35):
have my own issues with it, but part of what
it's done is to help people who otherwise couldn't even
make those family connections be able to make those family connections.
So I think Black memory work serves a similar function
as well, inasmuch as you know, you're telling a story
and you mentioned a name, and the next thing you know,
(15:55):
it's oh, I have a picture of him, and it's
through its storytelling is also a really key element of
Black memory work. As we are telling each other one
another's stories, as we're telling our own family stories, as
we all of those things that we hold in collective,
I think makes it more communal, more community based and
(16:16):
community oriented. And also, if there is a desire to
do long term preservation work that requires resources, and it's
generally going to be easier to do that in community. Right, So, if,
for example, one of the things that the Black memory
collective in Los Angeles is talking about doing is building
(16:39):
a repository of sorts, perhaps a digital repository to hold photographs,
to hold recipes. We're still talking with the broader community
about who would want to participate, who should hold and
steward it, what an ingest process would look like. And
then it starts to really feel like we're having the
conversation about a brick and mortar archives. Right it shifts.
(17:03):
It doesn't stop being black memory work, but it takes
on sort of the patna of traditional artical space.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
So in your work you also talk about Black memory
work being restorative and healing. Can you talk about what ways, like,
what does that look like for black memory work to
actually heal.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
There's a member of our collective who is very interested
in birth stories and part of the so when I
said storytelling, narrative is a really important part of Black
memory work because it isn't in part about telling our stories,
preserving those stories for the future and for our children,
our grandchildren, our descendants are communities more broadly, and so Dominique,
(17:47):
I don't think she would mind me naming her is
doing really beautiful work around talking with people who have
difficult birth stories and recording those stories for that person
so that they can have something to hold. Right So
in some instances, they may not have a child to hold,
(18:07):
but they now have a story that they can hold
that has been told to someone who is holding it
in care and in community with them. And I think
there's something very healing and restorative about that kind of practice.
And we think about all of that as Black Memory work.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
You know, telling you you started off by given some
very powerfil examples of like things in your personal experience
that have shaped your interest in doing this work. So
you talked about the State of the Children campaign as
well as Hurricane Katrina, And I'm wondering, you know, you're
talking about that as like as told to us, right
like these messages and stories that we saw, But what
you're talking about with Black Memory work is us owning
(18:46):
this process. I wonder what does it look like for
something like Hurricane Katrina, or even I'm thinking about the pandemic,
right like, how traumatic that was for so many of us,
and how many of us lost loved ones and lost
experiences and all kinds of things. What does it look
like in Black Memory works a whole space for both
the joy of black life, but also the more people
(19:07):
parts of it.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
That's something that I think about a lot. I taught
a course in the fall of twenty twenty four, yes,
in the fall of twenty twenty four on black memory work,
and there's not much written about it in the professional literature,
certainly not in information studies, and so I'm casting about
a little bit looking for materials for my students to read,
(19:31):
and about halfway through the quarter they came to me
and they said, Professor Sutherland, this is beautiful and we're
really enjoying this class. But if we had one note
for you, more joy, Please more joy, because it was
a lot easier to find representations or examples of how
we are actually holding space for one another in tragedy
(19:54):
and in trauma than it was to find things written
about how we are holding one another in joy. So
I'm really glad that you asked that question, because with
COVID so much loss, there are a lot of community based,
grassroots level projects to document people's experiences with COVID. I
(20:17):
can't say the same thing was true with Katrina in
the same way, but it certainly is true now with COVID.
There are oral history projects all kinds of things that
are sort of attuned to that kind of pain. I
think where we are maybe not doing as good a
job is and finding those moments of celebration and lifting
(20:38):
those up. Part of black memory work is teaching the
kids how to play spades, right, Like, we got to
know how to play dominoes. If we don't know, then
we're only bringing the bad stuff with us through the generations.
So I know y'all want a gate keep, but teach
the kids, keep them maybies how to play spades and dominoes.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Okay, So what I do you're seeing, Tanya, is that
I got to break out my hula hoop and teach
the babies how to do the hula hoop.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Need double dutch? Yeah, I want to see there waiting, Okay,
you want to see that's right? Yeah. You know, many
years ago, there was a project in Trinidad that was
now I'm not going to remember exactly what it was called,
but it was something. It was a cultural memory project,
and the idea was sort of sort of this living museum.
(21:28):
What a beautiful notion. They had a storyteller who was
there to tell the stories of Afro Trinidadians and the Caribbean,
there was hopscotch and they would teach anybody who didn't
know how to play how to play. And I thought that,
right this, we need more of this, We need more
living museums, so to speak, more of that energy anyway,
(21:49):
if not formulation.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love it. So I
think lots of people who are enjoying our conversation, will
you know hear this and like feel like it's beautiful
and be very inspired and then feel like, oh my gosh,
where do I start? Right? Like what does it look
like for me to have my own personal family kind
of black memory work? So what would you suggest to
them for how to get started?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I would say, look to your people, right, what are
you collecting? Because we're all collecting something, even if we're
not really aware of it. So stop and take a
beat and are what is it your collect Is it shoes? Honey,
I'm not mad at you. Just ask yourself what is it? Right?
Because the shoes are important. All God's children need traveling shoes. Right,
(22:31):
ask yourself what you're collecting, and then look and see
talk to your people what are they collecting. My mother
is a tremendously hard working person. And a really brilliant cook.
I don't know that she would tell you that she
is a collector of recipes or that she is the
keeper of our family culinary traditions. I don't know that
(22:56):
she would see that in herself, but I see it
very clearly something I want to make sure gets preserved, respected, held, Right,
those are the kinds of things I would practice. My dad,
for example, is a lover of music and has a
tremendous record and other music collection. I don't think if
you asked my dad you know what he collects, that
(23:18):
he would say music. And he probably wouldn't even consider
himself the music officionado. He just likes music. But those
are the family stories, right. He comes from a line
of musicians, and he's probably not thinking about the history
of his own family as being important to his love
of music, right. I think we start there. We really
(23:41):
start by looking inward and looking outward and having conversations
with the people closest to us, and then we go
a little bit further out talk to my cousins, I
talk to my aunties, and then at the same time, right,
once you feel like you have the capacity for it,
start talking to other people in your community, start talking
(24:02):
to people at church, or you know, trying to think
of where else people gather. These days, we've become so dispersed.
Ask people when you're playing cards, ask people at wherever
it is at the cookout. The cookout is actually the
perfect place to have this conversation, to start this conversation.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, as we are kind of moving quickly into the
holiday season, it feels like a good time to think
about you know, so for example, and the things you've shared, right, Like,
would it be an opportunity maybe for you to record
your dad talking about a couple of his favorite albums,
or to record mom as she's preparing for the holiday
dishes as a way of kind of getting started with
some of these conversations.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Absolutely, absolutely get your phone out. Don't just record mom
doing what she's doing, but learn it with your hands too. Right,
There's something really important and important aspect of black memory
work is the cultural transmission. And cultural transmission is fancy
speak for handed down from generation to generation, and by
(25:00):
that we mean like physically it's a practice that has
been transmitted from one generation to the next. So I
learned how to roll out a roty dough from my
anti intrinidad. I now have that memory in my muscle.
I have muscle memory of how to do that. I
can teach my son how to roll out a rote.
So if I had just had a video of Anti
(25:21):
doing it, Anti and Iurene doing it, maybe maybe I
could still teach my son. Maybe. But having that muscle
memory is really important, which is why I'm saying I
want to see the kids with their hands in there
waiting to jump it for double dutch. Right, the recordings.
We can take all of the preservation practices to heart
and utilize them, and digital things vanish. Sometimes those things
(25:47):
get lost. It's a lot harder to lose something if
you know it in your body.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
So this feels like a perfect intersection of where we
started in talking about black memory work and then digital afterlife, right,
because when we're talking about is these videos that kind
of live beyond us. And I'm sure as we know
that there are all kinds of like ethical considerations around,
like digital archives and who has a permission to share?
Can you talk about like some of the ethical considerations,
(26:13):
especially when we're thinking about digital afterlives.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yes, I start from a place of concern and care
when it comes to any kind of digital recording. I
don't often allow myself to be recorded in fact, because
if there is no digital video of me, then there
can't be an aid fake of me saying some stuff
I would never say, doing some stuff I would never do,
(26:39):
and then having that be one hundred years from now
what my descendants are looking back on and thinking, Oh,
that was Tanya. So that's what we don't want. That's
sort of the core of the ethical concern is that
our images and likenesses, which we already know are typically
taken in moments of trauma and despair. Those are the
(27:02):
images that are then held kept. That's the about us
and sort of on our behalves, not bias and for
us approach. And there are ethical concerns that one can
raise and think through in terms of access and sharing,
(27:23):
and I have a lot of thoughts about that. I
think we should be thinking about what is appropriate access,
but who determines what is appropriate right? I think that
should be done at the community level, whoever the community
is that's being affected or influenced or included in whatever
the digital project is. Also, I'm thinking about Frederick Douglass.
(27:45):
Frederick Douglas was big on the photograph and the potential
what it could do for us. He did not think
that this was a technology, that photography was a technology
that should be to convince white people that black folks
had value. He didn't think the photograph should be necessary,
(28:07):
that any kind of technology could in fact demonstrate the
value of a black life to somebody who didn't want
to see it. So imagine in the year twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty three, somewhere in there, when I got on
Beyonce's Internet and I saw a photograph of Frederick Douglass
that had been reanimated through Ancestry or one of those companies,
(28:31):
and he's shaking his head back and forth, back and forth,
and I thought, everything I know about this man from
the words that came out of his mouth, he would
hate this and would not stand behind it at all.
And for me, that's where the ethical issues start. If
we have no agency and no ability to say what
is going to be done with those materials, and we
(28:52):
know that there is a long history of using our
images in nefarious ways that end up harming us, doing
further harm, then that's for me, the first ethical flag.
That's where we have to start. We have to start
with people having a certain amount of agency and being
able to say yes I want to do that or
no I don't. It's got to be a consent based model, absolutely,
(29:16):
is the first thing I think. And then I think
we have to be really careful. You know, I said
the thing about gatekeeping earlier in kind of a joking way,
but there are real needs for gatekeeping, and it's because
we are collecting materials for beautiful reasons and not nefarious ones,
and we don't want to open ourselves up to further attack.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
More from our conversation after the break, I guess that's
my next question, what you telling you? Because you've already
talked about like how dispersed we all are, right, Like,
you know, the cookout largely doesn't exist all the time,
(29:57):
maybe as it did kind of historically, And so many
of the ways that we are creating community and talking
with one another about these kinds of things is online.
And so what does it look like to gatekeep when
so many of these conversations in ways that we are
kind of practicing black memory work kind of happen in public.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, it's a really really important point. And the thing
that immediately occurred to me as you were. As you
were speaking, is all of the times that I have
seen a mean pop up on the Internet and then
a whole bunch of people, non malanated people rushing in
to be like, explain it to me, explain it to
(30:38):
me and get it, Like I don't get it. I
have seen gatekeeping happening there in a way that I'm like,
that's right, you know exactly what to do. You understood
the assignment. Your people are like, I'm not going to
tell you that it's actually not your business, so it's
saus business. And I have been very impressed actually with
our ability to find ourselves and commune online. Black Twitter,
(31:02):
while it was a thing, was a very it was open.
It's not like you couldn't follow some accounts and find
your way into black Twitter. But if you didn't have
a guide of some kind, if you didn't know where
to start, black Twitter might as well have been a
locked room in a castle somewhere, Like you could not
(31:24):
find us queens. We weren't available like that. And even
though we were right there saying the stuff that we
were saying in public on a very open public platform.
So I think that we've always found ways were very
creative wokes. And it's one of the things that's actually
impressed me most about studying the way that black people
(31:46):
kind of move on the internet is that somehow the
way that we are in real life, of course gets
echoed and we understand the assignment.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yeah, yeah, you know, you bringing up leg Twitter just
unlocked all of these memories for me, because you're right,
it was not like a place to go. You did
have to know kind of like who you needed to
follow and like the stories and like the things that
we would revisit year after year. Like it was very
much that if you know, you know kind of thing
and thinking about you know, I think how difficult it
(32:20):
was for people when ownership of Twitter changed, right, and
so then it very much felt like not a safe
place or as safe as it could be for black
folks to kind of congregate, and you know, just rise
in bots and trolling, and so it very much feels
like that was a place where there were so many,
i think rich cultural conversations about like just what it
means to be black right now and now that doesn't
(32:43):
exist in the same way, and so you know, like
can you help me talk through like what does it
mean for us? To together in a place, like a
black Twitter that is not owned by us, right that
we have no control over and like became so meaningful
for so many people, and then for it to kind
of be disbanded, it would that means in terms of
like black memory.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Work, what a lesson to have learned, right that when
you don't control your own spaces, they can be taken
from you, even no matter how much time, energy, effort,
labor has been invested into that space. And seeing what
has become of Twitter, it's not even a place that
(33:25):
you want to hang out or be. So I'm watching
the development of Black Sky with great interest because I
think that a fair number of black Twitter users, at
least those in academic circles, migrated over to Blue Sky.
There's a Black Sky that has been very intentionally developed
(33:47):
to kind of combat that very thing. What happens if
Blue Sky goes down. We don't want to lose our space.
So I'm watching the development of Black Sky with great interest.
So noticing that we are finding ourselves, you know, we
are finding community in similar ways on Instagram and TikTok.
(34:08):
But Instagram, you know, much like Facebook and Twitter is,
it's not what it once was right. You can't have
the same kind of community that you might have once
been able to build. And so we're seeing this actually
happen over and over and over again. And the lesson
is that we have to build it, right. We have
(34:29):
to build our own thing if we want to have
our own thing and have it remain And the remaining
part has to be really intentional. It just really has
to be. We can't build a black sky. And this
is no shade to the black sky creators. I don't
know what their intentions are, but we can't build a
black sky and then allow it to ask everybody to
(34:53):
come and be part of that and then be like, oh, yeah,
actually it's a firefest.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
We're not going to do that in our own communities
to each other because everybody else has is yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
So some amount of fortifying self fortifying, I think is
really important in digital spaces as well. So all of
the black creators, all of the black entrepreneurs, all of
the black tech folks out there, get yourselves together. Let's
be in conversation and make sure that we are building
things in a way that will allow them to last.
(35:27):
Now that being said, I also want to say that
not everything is made to last forever, and that there
is real value in allowing a process of forgetting. There's
value in that process of letting go right, And so
(35:47):
I think we need to be really careful too, that
we're not trying to hold onto something just for the
sake of holding on to it.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, that feels important. So you mentioned one of the
examples you use was like thinking, well, Okay, I don't
want myself to kind of be video because twenty years
from now, I don't want some random AI video of
me doing a thing that I never did to show up.
What does it look like for us to have agency
in this process? Because it feels like this stuff is
like growing exponentially, like much quicker than like legislation can
(36:15):
keep up with it, and you know, all of the things.
Not that legislation is ever you know, like the be
all in all for us anyway, but it very much
feels like there's very little regulation and we are not
keeping at pace with like the way AI is growing.
So what kinds of things can we do to like
protect ourselves and to be thinking about like how to
retain our agency and constant as technology continues to you know, expand.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, You're absolutely right that the law can't keep up. Certainly,
the legislation is nowhere near the pace of technological development,
and the folks who are working in that space have
been sounding alarm bells for a long hot minute. I'm
thinking of people like olandro Nelson, Ruhap, Benjamin Sofia and Obole, myself,
(36:58):
Andre brockunding bells and sounding bells. And I think that
what's challenging is that everybody wants to play, right. Everybody
wants to play with the technology. Everybody wants to know
how chat GPT works. And I don't think there's enough
information that folks don't have enough information to know that
there are potential downline effects or concerns. Right, if you
(37:23):
aren't a person who's watching black Mirror, you see chat
GPT as something that can just help you do X,
Y or Z right. It can help you get a
recipe together. I'm wanting to trust it to do that,
but it can help you do all kinds of things. Right,
It's a product, it's being sold. What's not being told
to people is that all of the back end data
(37:45):
collection is doesn't make a large language model a responsible
tool for your health, your wellness your anything right, and
looking to these digital tools like that is in the
long run, going to be deleterious. These are the alarm
(38:06):
bells that people keep trying to raise. So I would say,
I know it's really easy for me to say do
your homework. But when I say do your homework, I'm
not saying like, you need to read my book. Please
do read my book. I'm not saying that you need
to go out and read a bunch of academic books.
I'm not saying that you need to go read a
bunch of academic articles. I'm not even saying that. And
(38:28):
I would encourage you to try to read the terms
of service, but they write them in such a way
they don't want you to read them. Right. When I
say do your homework, talk to people again. Talk to people.
Talk to people about their experiences. Ask the person that
you know that is closest to these technologies or closest
to this as their life's work. Or do you know
(38:49):
someone who is in tech. Do you know someone who
knows a little thing or two about coding? Ask them, Hey,
what do you think about this technology? Do you think
I should be taking any steps to protect myself if
I'm using TikTok in particular, because every technology is going
to be different and have different concerns, right that come
(39:12):
with it. For me, it's not actually possible to craft
a life in which I'm never going to be recorded.
That doesn't mean that I'm not making more intentional offline choices, right,
And so there's balance there too, Understanding that we are
not going to be able to keep up with the
(39:33):
pace of how the technology is developing. It's not going
to be legislated rapidly enough in a way that's going
to protect us. What steps can we take? Understand how
the technology works, Understand who owns the technology, Understand what
they are gaining by giving you something that looks free.
(39:57):
They are gathering your data, they're pack they're reselling it.
You are the product, right. TikTok isn't the product. YouTube
isn't the product. It is a little bit, but you
are the product, right. Your data is extraordinarily valuable. So
perhaps the first question is how much of myself do
(40:21):
I want to give up? It's a hard one, but
it is a compromise, and it is one that you're
making every time you use these technologies. How much of
myself do I want to give up? How much information
do I want to share? How much of my data
do I want them to have? Right? And yes, if
you know somebody that works in any of these industries,
(40:41):
ask them, ask them. Is there something I should be
concerned about here?
Speaker 1 (40:45):
I'm curious, Tanya, because you said you taught a class
I think last year, what kinds of conversations are young
people having about consent in like all of these, right,
because I think you know, you'd often think about young
people as being very eager. It's a kind of be
on top of technolog advances, but I would imagine there's
also some pushback and thinking through like Okay, what do
I want this to mean in twenty years from now?
(41:07):
So I'm just curious, like, what kinds of insights thechae.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Maybe as a part of the clay is, Yeah, that's
a great question. Teach an undergraduate class called Information and
Power where we really go into a lot of these questions.
And then I taught that black Memory work class. And
it's interesting because they kind of sit at opposite ends
of an intellectual spectrum. Right again, where the information and
(41:31):
power is content more like the digital afterlife conversation that
we're having, where we talk about things like consent, we
talk about data collection, we talk about surveillance, and every time,
without fail, these students are learning something which that's not
(41:51):
just a credit to me as a professor. I'm not
patting myself on the back. What I'm saying is that
they didn't know. They didn't know which they to be
worried about or concerned about, and the class gives them
an opportunity to think about how they want to engage.
And I always assign in this Information and Power class
(42:13):
a forty eight hour offline assignment where they have to
go for forty eight hours and they're not allowed to
use their student ID. They're not allowed to use their phones,
no digital technologies. You can use electricity, listen to your recirl,
put your records on. Okay, I love it. But what
you can't do is call an uber or a lift.
(42:35):
You can't use your ID to your student ID to
get into your dorm or into the dining hall. And
it doesn't take more than forty eight hours for people
to realize how much of their lives is absolutely controlled
and determined by outside forces that are run by technology
(42:59):
companies like I couldn't do this. I couldn't do that.
I couldn't do this. I couldn't do that. I basically
had to sit at home for forty eight hours have
people like have my roommate bring me food. I just
didn't realize. I just didn't see it. And I think
once you see it, it's hard to unsee it.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Sounds like a powerful little example and a real uh
ipposunity for many of us to practice, like what would
even be like for it twenty four hours to like
not engage with any of your devices like.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
That, Yes, that's right, and to really observe, well, what
can I do and what can't I do? Right? Where
can I go? Can I get on the subway? Can
I take the bus? Do I have to have my
phone to pay my bills?
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (43:43):
It's a lot of things that are touched by technologies
in ways that we can't opt out right, And so
I think what tends to happen is this is the
moment for people and everyone who's listening. I would encourage
you to take this moment for yourself and just say
how much how much again? How much of myself do
(44:04):
I want to give up? How much of my time?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
You know?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Understanding that I can't completely opt out. I can't say no,
I don't I don't want to have to use my
phone ever, it's not really practical in our modern society.
But that doesn't mean that you have to be posting
every single thought that you have or a Brazilian selfies, right, like,
(44:29):
maybe there's room in there for moderation, for thoughtfulness, for consideration,
for taking a bit of a step back and reevaluating.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
It has been so wonderful to learn so much more
about your works, Tanya. I really appreciate you spending the
same time with us today. Please let us know where
we can stay connected with you and learn more about
the work that you're doing. Do you have a website
as well as any social media handles you'd like to share?
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Thank you, doctor Joy, Thank you so much. This has
been a delight. My website is at Tanyasutherland dot com.
You can find links to my socials there, but you
can pretty much find me either at Tanya Sutherland or
at Tanya dot Sutherland depending on the platform.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
And the name of the book and where can we
find it.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
The name of the book is Resurrecting the Black Body
Race and the Digital Afterlife, and you can find it
anywhere that books are sold. You can order it directly
through the University of California Press website. You can get
it on Amazon, or please try your local bookshop.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Beautiful. We'll be sure to include all of that in
our show notes. Thank you so.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Much, Thank you so much, what a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Absolutely thank you, Tanya. I'm so glad doctor Sutherland was
able to join us for today's conversation. To learn more
about her and her work, be sure to visit the
show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com plash Session
four thirty eight, and don't forget to text two of
your girls right now and tell them to check out
(45:55):
the episode. Did you know that you could leave us
a voicemail with your questions or suggestions for the podcast.
If you have movies or books you'd like us to review,
drop us a message at Memo dot fm slash Therapy
for Black Girls and let us know what's on your mind.
We just might feature it on the podcast. If you're
looking for a therapist in your area, visit our therapist
(46:15):
directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory. Don't
forget to follow us over on Instagram at Therapy for
Black Girls and come on over and join us in
our Patreon for exclusive updates, behind the scenes content, and
much more. You can join us at community dot therapy
for blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Aleise
Ellis Indichubu and Tyree Rush. Editing was done by Dennison Bradford.
(46:40):
Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all
real soon. Take good care,
Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly
conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small
decisions we can make to become the best possible versions
of ourselves. I'm your host, doctor Joy hard and Bradford,
a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or
(00:32):
to find a therapist in your area, visit our website
at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you
love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is
not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with
a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much
(00:57):
for joining us for session four thirty eight of the
Therapy for Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our
conversation after word from our sponsors. As we head into
the holidays, many of us will encounter old memories and
(01:17):
create new ones. You may spend time recounting stories from
your childhood, learning a new line dance, or even taking
orders in the kitchen on how to make a family recipe.
Memory keeping has long been a practice for humans across
the globe, but for Black people, though, traditions look different,
and in the age of technology, the way memories are created, stored,
(01:38):
and used introduce a new set of questions around who
gets to call them their own. Today, I'm excited to
be joined by doctor Tanya Sutherland, currently a professor and
dean at UCLA. She has dedicated her research to unpacking
the uniqueness of black memory work, and in her book
Resurrecting the Black Body Race and the Digital Afterlife, she
(01:59):
digs into how technology, history and data longevity affect how
we practice arkavism and how those practices impact our digital afterlives.
If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please
share with us on social media using the hashtag TVG
in session, or join us over in our patreons to
talk more about the episode. You can join us at
(02:21):
community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot com. Here's our conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us today, doctor Sutherland.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
It is an absolute pleasure to be here, and it's Tanya. Please.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Oh, Tanya, got it? Got it? So I wonder if
you can start by just giving us a definition of
your work. So what do you mean when you talk
about black memory work in black digital afterlives? Wow?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Thank you? What an important question and a perfect place
to begin when we talk about digital afterlives. We're really
talking about the data that's collected by us for us
about us. That includes anything from our social media, to
our email, to our communications such as text messages, instant messages, right,
(03:14):
all of this content that we're producing in our own
personal lives, and then actual data bits and bytes. When
you take a photograph, the metadata from that gets collected
on your phone, So if you have an iPhone, right,
that information then goes to Apple. They're collecting that data
and that metadata. They're collecting the time of the photograph,
(03:36):
the location of the photograph, some information, some other information
about the image itself, and increasingly with the use of AI,
that includes some maybe sort of description about what might
appear in the image. This is sort of a new
added layer of what is being collected and noted. And
(03:58):
then when you pass away, the question becomes what is
done with all of this data? And so in many
ways we have what I have termed digital afterlife, where
all of this data and our digital detritis lives on
after we do, and we have very little say in
terms of what is done with that data, how it's used,
(04:20):
how it might be manipulated. There are, as we know
now digital resurrection, and other kinds of digital immortality practices.
All of these things get tied up in what we
mean when we say a digital afterlife. When I talk
about Black Memory Work, I'm looking at all of the
potential harms that can be served up by a digital afterlife,
(04:43):
and I'm looking to Black memory work, which really describes
a long history, robust history of practices within black communities,
diasporic communities across the globe that are about preserved memory
in ways that make sense to us, and in some ways,
(05:08):
I think about Black Memory Work as a corrective or
as an alternative path to a digital after life, something
more intentional, right, something that we craft for ourselves.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Can you talk about like what inspired you and like
what interested you in this work and how it inspired
the writing of your book.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I had been thinking about this in some way, shape
or form since my childhood. I was distressed as a
child to see the Save the Children campaign. Do you
remember this? On television commercials for Evening TV. There would
be pictures of ostensibly starving children, and they would show
(05:49):
it was always black children. They always had very distended bellies.
What we would now probably refer to colloquially as poverty, porn. Right,
we were looking at black babies in distress, and as
a child, I remember being struck by how it only
ever was kids who looked like me, and it didn't
(06:10):
make sense to me. As a child, I didn't have
a language or reference points really to understand what I
was seeing, or to make sense of it, or even
to sort of contend with it. And then when Hurricane
Katrina happened, I was immediately taken back to those pictures,
to those commercials, to those ads, to that entire ad campaign,
(06:33):
and I thought, we are seeing dead people who look
like me on television once again, now on the internet
as well, in the overflowing waters of Lake pontchitran Right,
we are once again looking at images of black people's
bodies and distress, deceased, and it's being presented to us
(06:55):
as something that we should taken again any real context.
We aren't given tools with which to process what we're seeing.
And I thought, there's got to be a reason that
it's always people who look like me, and that reason
can't just be racism. What else is at play here?
(07:15):
And so that sort of became the center of the
inquiry for my book Resurrecting Black Body, which is about
race and the digital afterlife and really explores these questions
in depth.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
And what are some of the most common practices of
black memory work that we may not even realize that
we're practicing.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Oh my gosh, I love this question. So we are
very creative when I say we right now, I'm talking
about the Black Memory Collective, which is a small community
based organization that I'm the founder and director of. And
when we talk about black memory work, the kinds of
practices that we first started talking about and seeing, we're
(07:54):
things like quilts, right it was we understand memory to
be braid in someone's hair as a root to freedom.
We understand black memory work to be quilting. We understand
black memory work in a way that other people might
not recognize it. Other people might call someone a hoarder,
(08:15):
for example. And that's not to say that there aren't
issues around hoarding, but it is to say that when
you have been dispossessed of your physical belongings repeatedly over generations,
there's something to that holding on to things. Right, that
is about a memory process, a memory ritual, a memory practice. Right,
(08:38):
If you're not out here hoarding or braiding hair or quilting.
Don't think you're not doing black memory work. Certainly for
our photographs and the things that we might find in
the boxes under our beds, that's black memory work. And
then in an even more expansive way, we are finding
that the way that folks show up for one another
(09:00):
in community is also about a memory practice or a
memory ritual. It's about building memory and that memory then
gets held in community. And I think that's a lot
of it right, just the ways that we are showing
up in community and asking one another to hold things
for ourselves, for our communities, all of that, all of
(09:21):
that counts as block memory.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
You know, as you're talking to me, I'm thinking about
this large black leather purse that my grandmother had that
had all of these photos, and every time I would
go home for like holidays, like I'm going straight to
this purse to like ask my aunts and uncles like
tell me about this picture? Who was this? And really
wanting to like understand like why there were these collection
(09:44):
of photos. It also makes me think about how important
it was to my grandmother that anytime she went to
a funeral, she had to have a program, right. And
then would come back from the funeral and like put
it in the back of her bible. Right, And so
it feels like as a culture, like as a community,
it feels like we have been doing this black memory
where even if we weren't calling it it.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That's exactly right, that's exactly right. It's in our art.
It's literally woven into the fabrics of our culture. Yeah,
So what are some of the I love it. I
just yeah, like you have to go on a big
black bag full of black memory.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, I need to figure out where that person is
so that that doesn't get like displaced, and like you know,
we always kind of have an eye on where that
is and who has ownership with it.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So what are some of.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
The differences between black memory practices and maybe more widespread
like western archival practices.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Thank you so much for asking us question. So, in
a brick and mortar archives, what you will find is
that there are papers, and those papers go in boxes,
and those boxes go on shelves, and there are processes
through which things may cross the arkable threshold or enter
the archives. There are high level descriptive practices, high level
(10:58):
discovery practices, high level access practices that really are about
ensuring the longevity of those materials and the condition of
them in that very specific way. And for the most part,
the brick and mortar archives that exist in the United
States were created to document the dominant culture. Right the
(11:22):
ways that we tend to show up in those archives
is in newspapers, in databases of runaway slave ads. The
institutions that hold those archives have not traditionally made it
their agenda, their goal, or their policy to document black life.
(11:45):
And if they do, what they're documenting is the same
the children campaign and the bodies in like Pontitrain, they're
documenting trauma, death, and disposition. Black memory worked the exact
opposite of that. It starts with us, It starts from
the bottom. It holds us. It is generative, It shifts,
(12:07):
It doesn't have to stay static. There's no demand that
it be accessible broadly, widely accessible. In so many ways,
they are side by side practices that almost have nothing
to do with one another. Right because the goals aren't
the same, the practices and the policies aren't the same,
(12:29):
they can speak to one another, they could influence one another, certainly.
Black memory workers who call themselves such often are trained
as archivists. So they come with the knowledge of how
to preserve materials. What they're doing with that knowledge isn't
just preserving materials putting them in a box on a
shelf and saying, hey, come and visit my brick and
(12:51):
mortar archives, to visit your stuff. They're saying, I know
how to preserve this. Let me show you, let me
teach you, let me help you. And so it's also
a knowledge practice in a way, and a generational one
in a different way than institutional brick and mortar archives
like the National Archives or even the Library of Congress,
(13:13):
or I mean even your local repository or university archives
may hold. They are set about to do sort of
different things.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
And what do you feel like is the goal of
a black memory work? Then it's a different goal, like
you said, than archiving.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, I think what I've observed, what I've heard people say,
is that we need to preserve our memory. No one
else is doing that for us, and we're going to
do it in a way that is intentionally black, and
so that shows up differently, right, We show up differently
in intentionally black spaces. The work is done differently in
(13:52):
intentionally black spaces, and I want to be really clear
that not everyone who is a black memory worker, right, yea,
and your grandmother is a black memory worker, that bag
that's black memory work. So it doesn't matter that she
didn't have a master's degree in library and information studies
or science, right. I assume she did bond anyway, though
(14:14):
neither of my grandmothers did either, and I would absolutely
call both of them black memory workers. I think the
purpose and the goal for us is about preservation of memory.
It's also about preservation of cultural heritage, and there's a
certain protective layer I want to say for future generations
that's very intentional. There too.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
More from our conversation after the break And so is it, Tanya,
a more personal kind of like, Okay, it is for
my family to preserve the history of our family, not
necessarily for me to learn about your family, because that's
(14:55):
kind of what it feels like. It's like, oh, with archiving,
like you can go visit like a library, a museum
and like learn more. This feels like it is a
more personal thing maybe for your community. Well definitely your
direct family, but maybe also your community that is still
like close to the family.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Absolutely, I would say that's true. And I would also
say that in terms of concentric circles or community and
how we build and how we live and work with
one another, there are many sort of points of possible
or potential interaction with other people's historical memories. Right. I
know that ancestry has become a very popular site. I
(15:35):
have my own issues with it, but part of what
it's done is to help people who otherwise couldn't even
make those family connections be able to make those family connections.
So I think Black memory work serves a similar function
as well, inasmuch as you know, you're telling a story
and you mentioned a name, and the next thing you know,
(15:55):
it's oh, I have a picture of him, and it's
through its storytelling is also a really key element of
Black memory work. As we are telling each other one
another's stories, as we're telling our own family stories, as
we all of those things that we hold in collective,
I think makes it more communal, more community based and
(16:16):
community oriented. And also, if there is a desire to
do long term preservation work that requires resources, and it's
generally going to be easier to do that in community. Right, So, if,
for example, one of the things that the Black memory
collective in Los Angeles is talking about doing is building
(16:39):
a repository of sorts, perhaps a digital repository to hold photographs,
to hold recipes. We're still talking with the broader community
about who would want to participate, who should hold and
steward it, what an ingest process would look like. And
then it starts to really feel like we're having the
conversation about a brick and mortar archives. Right it shifts.
(17:03):
It doesn't stop being black memory work, but it takes
on sort of the patna of traditional artical space.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
So in your work you also talk about Black memory
work being restorative and healing. Can you talk about what ways, like,
what does that look like for black memory work to
actually heal.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
There's a member of our collective who is very interested
in birth stories and part of the so when I
said storytelling, narrative is a really important part of Black
memory work because it isn't in part about telling our stories,
preserving those stories for the future and for our children,
our grandchildren, our descendants are communities more broadly, and so Dominique,
(17:47):
I don't think she would mind me naming her is
doing really beautiful work around talking with people who have
difficult birth stories and recording those stories for that person
so that they can have something to hold. Right So
in some instances, they may not have a child to hold,
(18:07):
but they now have a story that they can hold
that has been told to someone who is holding it
in care and in community with them. And I think
there's something very healing and restorative about that kind of practice.
And we think about all of that as Black Memory work.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
You know, telling you you started off by given some
very powerfil examples of like things in your personal experience
that have shaped your interest in doing this work. So
you talked about the State of the Children campaign as
well as Hurricane Katrina, And I'm wondering, you know, you're
talking about that as like as told to us, right
like these messages and stories that we saw, But what
you're talking about with Black Memory work is us owning
(18:46):
this process. I wonder what does it look like for
something like Hurricane Katrina, or even I'm thinking about the pandemic,
right like, how traumatic that was for so many of us,
and how many of us lost loved ones and lost
experiences and all kinds of things. What does it look
like in Black Memory works a whole space for both
the joy of black life, but also the more people
(19:07):
parts of it.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
That's something that I think about a lot. I taught
a course in the fall of twenty twenty four, yes,
in the fall of twenty twenty four on black memory work,
and there's not much written about it in the professional literature,
certainly not in information studies, and so I'm casting about
a little bit looking for materials for my students to read,
(19:31):
and about halfway through the quarter they came to me
and they said, Professor Sutherland, this is beautiful and we're
really enjoying this class. But if we had one note
for you, more joy, Please more joy, because it was
a lot easier to find representations or examples of how
we are actually holding space for one another in tragedy
(19:54):
and in trauma than it was to find things written
about how we are holding one another in joy. So
I'm really glad that you asked that question, because with
COVID so much loss, there are a lot of community based,
grassroots level projects to document people's experiences with COVID. I
(20:17):
can't say the same thing was true with Katrina in
the same way, but it certainly is true now with COVID.
There are oral history projects all kinds of things that
are sort of attuned to that kind of pain. I
think where we are maybe not doing as good a
job is and finding those moments of celebration and lifting
(20:38):
those up. Part of black memory work is teaching the
kids how to play spades, right, Like, we got to
know how to play dominoes. If we don't know, then
we're only bringing the bad stuff with us through the generations.
So I know y'all want a gate keep, but teach
the kids, keep them maybies how to play spades and dominoes.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Okay, So what I do you're seeing, Tanya, is that
I got to break out my hula hoop and teach
the babies how to do the hula hoop.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Need double dutch? Yeah, I want to see there waiting, Okay,
you want to see that's right? Yeah. You know, many
years ago, there was a project in Trinidad that was
now I'm not going to remember exactly what it was called,
but it was something. It was a cultural memory project,
and the idea was sort of sort of this living museum.
(21:28):
What a beautiful notion. They had a storyteller who was
there to tell the stories of Afro Trinidadians and the Caribbean,
there was hopscotch and they would teach anybody who didn't
know how to play how to play. And I thought that,
right this, we need more of this, We need more
living museums, so to speak, more of that energy anyway,
(21:49):
if not formulation.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love it. So I
think lots of people who are enjoying our conversation, will
you know hear this and like feel like it's beautiful
and be very inspired and then feel like, oh my gosh,
where do I start? Right? Like what does it look
like for me to have my own personal family kind
of black memory work? So what would you suggest to
them for how to get started?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I would say, look to your people, right, what are
you collecting? Because we're all collecting something, even if we're
not really aware of it. So stop and take a
beat and are what is it your collect Is it shoes? Honey,
I'm not mad at you. Just ask yourself what is it? Right?
Because the shoes are important. All God's children need traveling shoes. Right,
(22:31):
ask yourself what you're collecting, and then look and see
talk to your people what are they collecting. My mother
is a tremendously hard working person. And a really brilliant cook.
I don't know that she would tell you that she
is a collector of recipes or that she is the
keeper of our family culinary traditions. I don't know that
(22:56):
she would see that in herself, but I see it
very clearly something I want to make sure gets preserved, respected, held, Right,
those are the kinds of things I would practice. My dad,
for example, is a lover of music and has a
tremendous record and other music collection. I don't think if
you asked my dad you know what he collects, that
(23:18):
he would say music. And he probably wouldn't even consider
himself the music officionado. He just likes music. But those
are the family stories, right. He comes from a line
of musicians, and he's probably not thinking about the history
of his own family as being important to his love
of music, right. I think we start there. We really
(23:41):
start by looking inward and looking outward and having conversations
with the people closest to us, and then we go
a little bit further out talk to my cousins, I
talk to my aunties, and then at the same time, right,
once you feel like you have the capacity for it,
start talking to other people in your community, start talking
(24:02):
to people at church, or you know, trying to think
of where else people gather. These days, we've become so dispersed.
Ask people when you're playing cards, ask people at wherever
it is at the cookout. The cookout is actually the
perfect place to have this conversation, to start this conversation.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, as we are kind of moving quickly into the
holiday season, it feels like a good time to think
about you know, so for example, and the things you've shared, right, Like,
would it be an opportunity maybe for you to record
your dad talking about a couple of his favorite albums,
or to record mom as she's preparing for the holiday
dishes as a way of kind of getting started with
some of these conversations.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Absolutely, absolutely get your phone out. Don't just record mom
doing what she's doing, but learn it with your hands too. Right,
There's something really important and important aspect of black memory
work is the cultural transmission. And cultural transmission is fancy
speak for handed down from generation to generation, and by
(25:00):
that we mean like physically it's a practice that has
been transmitted from one generation to the next. So I
learned how to roll out a roty dough from my
anti intrinidad. I now have that memory in my muscle.
I have muscle memory of how to do that. I
can teach my son how to roll out a rote.
So if I had just had a video of Anti
(25:21):
doing it, Anti and Iurene doing it, maybe maybe I
could still teach my son. Maybe. But having that muscle
memory is really important, which is why I'm saying I
want to see the kids with their hands in there
waiting to jump it for double dutch. Right, the recordings.
We can take all of the preservation practices to heart
and utilize them, and digital things vanish. Sometimes those things
(25:47):
get lost. It's a lot harder to lose something if
you know it in your body.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
So this feels like a perfect intersection of where we
started in talking about black memory work and then digital afterlife, right,
because when we're talking about is these videos that kind
of live beyond us. And I'm sure as we know
that there are all kinds of like ethical considerations around,
like digital archives and who has a permission to share?
Can you talk about like some of the ethical considerations,
(26:13):
especially when we're thinking about digital afterlives.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yes, I start from a place of concern and care
when it comes to any kind of digital recording. I
don't often allow myself to be recorded in fact, because
if there is no digital video of me, then there
can't be an aid fake of me saying some stuff
I would never say, doing some stuff I would never do,
(26:39):
and then having that be one hundred years from now
what my descendants are looking back on and thinking, Oh,
that was Tanya. So that's what we don't want. That's
sort of the core of the ethical concern is that
our images and likenesses, which we already know are typically
taken in moments of trauma and despair. Those are the
(27:02):
images that are then held kept. That's the about us
and sort of on our behalves, not bias and for
us approach. And there are ethical concerns that one can
raise and think through in terms of access and sharing,
(27:23):
and I have a lot of thoughts about that. I
think we should be thinking about what is appropriate access,
but who determines what is appropriate right? I think that
should be done at the community level, whoever the community
is that's being affected or influenced or included in whatever
the digital project is. Also, I'm thinking about Frederick Douglass.
(27:45):
Frederick Douglas was big on the photograph and the potential
what it could do for us. He did not think
that this was a technology, that photography was a technology
that should be to convince white people that black folks
had value. He didn't think the photograph should be necessary,
(28:07):
that any kind of technology could in fact demonstrate the
value of a black life to somebody who didn't want
to see it. So imagine in the year twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty three, somewhere in there, when I got on
Beyonce's Internet and I saw a photograph of Frederick Douglass
that had been reanimated through Ancestry or one of those companies,
(28:31):
and he's shaking his head back and forth, back and forth,
and I thought, everything I know about this man from
the words that came out of his mouth, he would
hate this and would not stand behind it at all.
And for me, that's where the ethical issues start. If
we have no agency and no ability to say what
is going to be done with those materials, and we
(28:52):
know that there is a long history of using our
images in nefarious ways that end up harming us, doing
further harm, then that's for me, the first ethical flag.
That's where we have to start. We have to start
with people having a certain amount of agency and being
able to say yes I want to do that or
no I don't. It's got to be a consent based model, absolutely,
(29:16):
is the first thing I think. And then I think
we have to be really careful. You know, I said
the thing about gatekeeping earlier in kind of a joking way,
but there are real needs for gatekeeping, and it's because
we are collecting materials for beautiful reasons and not nefarious ones,
and we don't want to open ourselves up to further attack.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
More from our conversation after the break, I guess that's
my next question, what you telling you? Because you've already
talked about like how dispersed we all are, right, Like,
you know, the cookout largely doesn't exist all the time,
(29:57):
maybe as it did kind of historically, And so many
of the ways that we are creating community and talking
with one another about these kinds of things is online.
And so what does it look like to gatekeep when
so many of these conversations in ways that we are
kind of practicing black memory work kind of happen in public.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, it's a really really important point. And the thing
that immediately occurred to me as you were. As you
were speaking, is all of the times that I have
seen a mean pop up on the Internet and then
a whole bunch of people, non malanated people rushing in
to be like, explain it to me, explain it to
(30:38):
me and get it, Like I don't get it. I
have seen gatekeeping happening there in a way that I'm like,
that's right, you know exactly what to do. You understood
the assignment. Your people are like, I'm not going to
tell you that it's actually not your business, so it's
saus business. And I have been very impressed actually with
our ability to find ourselves and commune online. Black Twitter,
(31:02):
while it was a thing, was a very it was open.
It's not like you couldn't follow some accounts and find
your way into black Twitter. But if you didn't have
a guide of some kind, if you didn't know where
to start, black Twitter might as well have been a
locked room in a castle somewhere, Like you could not
(31:24):
find us queens. We weren't available like that. And even
though we were right there saying the stuff that we
were saying in public on a very open public platform.
So I think that we've always found ways were very
creative wokes. And it's one of the things that's actually
impressed me most about studying the way that black people
(31:46):
kind of move on the internet is that somehow the
way that we are in real life, of course gets
echoed and we understand the assignment.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yeah, yeah, you know, you bringing up leg Twitter just
unlocked all of these memories for me, because you're right,
it was not like a place to go. You did
have to know kind of like who you needed to
follow and like the stories and like the things that
we would revisit year after year. Like it was very
much that if you know, you know kind of thing
and thinking about you know, I think how difficult it
(32:20):
was for people when ownership of Twitter changed, right, and
so then it very much felt like not a safe
place or as safe as it could be for black
folks to kind of congregate, and you know, just rise
in bots and trolling, and so it very much feels
like that was a place where there were so many,
i think rich cultural conversations about like just what it
means to be black right now and now that doesn't
(32:43):
exist in the same way, and so you know, like
can you help me talk through like what does it
mean for us? To together in a place, like a
black Twitter that is not owned by us, right that
we have no control over and like became so meaningful
for so many people, and then for it to kind
of be disbanded, it would that means in terms of
like black memory.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Work, what a lesson to have learned, right that when
you don't control your own spaces, they can be taken
from you, even no matter how much time, energy, effort,
labor has been invested into that space. And seeing what
has become of Twitter, it's not even a place that
(33:25):
you want to hang out or be. So I'm watching
the development of Black Sky with great interest because I
think that a fair number of black Twitter users, at
least those in academic circles, migrated over to Blue Sky.
There's a Black Sky that has been very intentionally developed
(33:47):
to kind of combat that very thing. What happens if
Blue Sky goes down. We don't want to lose our space.
So I'm watching the development of Black Sky with great interest.
So noticing that we are finding ourselves, you know, we
are finding community in similar ways on Instagram and TikTok.
(34:08):
But Instagram, you know, much like Facebook and Twitter is,
it's not what it once was right. You can't have
the same kind of community that you might have once
been able to build. And so we're seeing this actually
happen over and over and over again. And the lesson
is that we have to build it, right. We have
(34:29):
to build our own thing if we want to have
our own thing and have it remain And the remaining
part has to be really intentional. It just really has
to be. We can't build a black sky. And this
is no shade to the black sky creators. I don't
know what their intentions are, but we can't build a
black sky and then allow it to ask everybody to
(34:53):
come and be part of that and then be like, oh, yeah,
actually it's a firefest.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
We're not going to do that in our own communities
to each other because everybody else has is yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
So some amount of fortifying self fortifying, I think is
really important in digital spaces as well. So all of
the black creators, all of the black entrepreneurs, all of
the black tech folks out there, get yourselves together. Let's
be in conversation and make sure that we are building
things in a way that will allow them to last.
(35:27):
Now that being said, I also want to say that
not everything is made to last forever, and that there
is real value in allowing a process of forgetting. There's
value in that process of letting go right, And so
(35:47):
I think we need to be really careful too, that
we're not trying to hold onto something just for the
sake of holding on to it.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, that feels important. So you mentioned one of the
examples you use was like thinking, well, Okay, I don't
want myself to kind of be video because twenty years
from now, I don't want some random AI video of
me doing a thing that I never did to show up.
What does it look like for us to have agency
in this process? Because it feels like this stuff is
like growing exponentially, like much quicker than like legislation can
(36:15):
keep up with it, and you know, all of the things.
Not that legislation is ever you know, like the be
all in all for us anyway, but it very much
feels like there's very little regulation and we are not
keeping at pace with like the way AI is growing.
So what kinds of things can we do to like
protect ourselves and to be thinking about like how to
retain our agency and constant as technology continues to you know, expand.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, You're absolutely right that the law can't keep up. Certainly,
the legislation is nowhere near the pace of technological development,
and the folks who are working in that space have
been sounding alarm bells for a long hot minute. I'm
thinking of people like olandro Nelson, Ruhap, Benjamin Sofia and Obole, myself,
(36:58):
Andre brockunding bells and sounding bells. And I think that
what's challenging is that everybody wants to play, right. Everybody
wants to play with the technology. Everybody wants to know
how chat GPT works. And I don't think there's enough
information that folks don't have enough information to know that
there are potential downline effects or concerns. Right, if you
(37:23):
aren't a person who's watching black Mirror, you see chat
GPT as something that can just help you do X,
Y or Z right. It can help you get a
recipe together. I'm wanting to trust it to do that,
but it can help you do all kinds of things. Right,
It's a product, it's being sold. What's not being told
to people is that all of the back end data
(37:45):
collection is doesn't make a large language model a responsible
tool for your health, your wellness your anything right, and
looking to these digital tools like that is in the
long run, going to be deleterious. These are the alarm
(38:06):
bells that people keep trying to raise. So I would say,
I know it's really easy for me to say do
your homework. But when I say do your homework, I'm
not saying like, you need to read my book. Please
do read my book. I'm not saying that you need
to go out and read a bunch of academic books.
I'm not saying that you need to go read a
bunch of academic articles. I'm not even saying that. And
(38:28):
I would encourage you to try to read the terms
of service, but they write them in such a way
they don't want you to read them. Right. When I
say do your homework, talk to people again. Talk to people.
Talk to people about their experiences. Ask the person that
you know that is closest to these technologies or closest
to this as their life's work. Or do you know
(38:49):
someone who is in tech. Do you know someone who
knows a little thing or two about coding? Ask them, Hey,
what do you think about this technology? Do you think
I should be taking any steps to protect myself if
I'm using TikTok in particular, because every technology is going
to be different and have different concerns, right that come
(39:12):
with it. For me, it's not actually possible to craft
a life in which I'm never going to be recorded.
That doesn't mean that I'm not making more intentional offline choices, right,
And so there's balance there too, Understanding that we are
not going to be able to keep up with the
(39:33):
pace of how the technology is developing. It's not going
to be legislated rapidly enough in a way that's going
to protect us. What steps can we take? Understand how
the technology works, Understand who owns the technology, Understand what
they are gaining by giving you something that looks free.
(39:57):
They are gathering your data, they're pack they're reselling it.
You are the product, right. TikTok isn't the product. YouTube
isn't the product. It is a little bit, but you
are the product, right. Your data is extraordinarily valuable. So
perhaps the first question is how much of myself do
(40:21):
I want to give up? It's a hard one, but
it is a compromise, and it is one that you're
making every time you use these technologies. How much of
myself do I want to give up? How much information
do I want to share? How much of my data
do I want them to have? Right? And yes, if
you know somebody that works in any of these industries,
(40:41):
ask them, ask them. Is there something I should be
concerned about here?
Speaker 1 (40:45):
I'm curious, Tanya, because you said you taught a class
I think last year, what kinds of conversations are young
people having about consent in like all of these, right,
because I think you know, you'd often think about young
people as being very eager. It's a kind of be
on top of technolog advances, but I would imagine there's
also some pushback and thinking through like Okay, what do
I want this to mean in twenty years from now?
(41:07):
So I'm just curious, like, what kinds of insights thechae.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Maybe as a part of the clay is, Yeah, that's
a great question. Teach an undergraduate class called Information and
Power where we really go into a lot of these questions.
And then I taught that black Memory work class. And
it's interesting because they kind of sit at opposite ends
of an intellectual spectrum. Right again, where the information and
(41:31):
power is content more like the digital afterlife conversation that
we're having, where we talk about things like consent, we
talk about data collection, we talk about surveillance, and every time,
without fail, these students are learning something which that's not
(41:51):
just a credit to me as a professor. I'm not
patting myself on the back. What I'm saying is that
they didn't know. They didn't know which they to be
worried about or concerned about, and the class gives them
an opportunity to think about how they want to engage.
And I always assign in this Information and Power class
(42:13):
a forty eight hour offline assignment where they have to
go for forty eight hours and they're not allowed to
use their student ID. They're not allowed to use their phones,
no digital technologies. You can use electricity, listen to your recirl,
put your records on. Okay, I love it. But what
you can't do is call an uber or a lift.
(42:35):
You can't use your ID to your student ID to
get into your dorm or into the dining hall. And
it doesn't take more than forty eight hours for people
to realize how much of their lives is absolutely controlled
and determined by outside forces that are run by technology
(42:59):
companies like I couldn't do this. I couldn't do that.
I couldn't do this. I couldn't do that. I basically
had to sit at home for forty eight hours have
people like have my roommate bring me food. I just
didn't realize. I just didn't see it. And I think
once you see it, it's hard to unsee it.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Sounds like a powerful little example and a real uh
ipposunity for many of us to practice, like what would
even be like for it twenty four hours to like
not engage with any of your devices like.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
That, Yes, that's right, and to really observe, well, what
can I do and what can't I do? Right? Where
can I go? Can I get on the subway? Can
I take the bus? Do I have to have my
phone to pay my bills?
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (43:43):
It's a lot of things that are touched by technologies
in ways that we can't opt out right, And so
I think what tends to happen is this is the
moment for people and everyone who's listening. I would encourage
you to take this moment for yourself and just say
how much how much again? How much of myself do
(44:04):
I want to give up? How much of my time?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
You know?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Understanding that I can't completely opt out. I can't say no,
I don't I don't want to have to use my
phone ever, it's not really practical in our modern society.
But that doesn't mean that you have to be posting
every single thought that you have or a Brazilian selfies, right, like,
(44:29):
maybe there's room in there for moderation, for thoughtfulness, for consideration,
for taking a bit of a step back and reevaluating.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
It has been so wonderful to learn so much more
about your works, Tanya. I really appreciate you spending the
same time with us today. Please let us know where
we can stay connected with you and learn more about
the work that you're doing. Do you have a website
as well as any social media handles you'd like to share?
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Thank you, doctor Joy, Thank you so much. This has
been a delight. My website is at Tanyasutherland dot com.
You can find links to my socials there, but you
can pretty much find me either at Tanya Sutherland or
at Tanya dot Sutherland depending on the platform.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
And the name of the book and where can we
find it.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
The name of the book is Resurrecting the Black Body
Race and the Digital Afterlife, and you can find it
anywhere that books are sold. You can order it directly
through the University of California Press website. You can get
it on Amazon, or please try your local bookshop.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Beautiful. We'll be sure to include all of that in
our show notes. Thank you so.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Much, Thank you so much, what a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Absolutely thank you, Tanya. I'm so glad doctor Sutherland was
able to join us for today's conversation. To learn more
about her and her work, be sure to visit the
show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com plash Session
four thirty eight, and don't forget to text two of
your girls right now and tell them to check out
(45:55):
the episode. Did you know that you could leave us
a voicemail with your questions or suggestions for the podcast.
If you have movies or books you'd like us to review,
drop us a message at Memo dot fm slash Therapy
for Black Girls and let us know what's on your mind.
We just might feature it on the podcast. If you're
looking for a therapist in your area, visit our therapist
(46:15):
directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory. Don't
forget to follow us over on Instagram at Therapy for
Black Girls and come on over and join us in
our Patreon for exclusive updates, behind the scenes content, and
much more. You can join us at community dot therapy
for blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Aleise
Ellis Indichubu and Tyree Rush. Editing was done by Dennison Bradford.
(46:40):
Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all
real soon. Take good care,
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