by Candace Sanders

To determine where we are, we often look at our surroundings for context clues. Sensory details are important factors within our spatial analysis to determine a sense of place. Locating ourselves is a psychological endeavor that requires us to not only perceive what exists, but also recall information gained from the course of living to contextualize what we are witnessing or sensing. We may discover that sight is not the only qualifier to determine where we are, and seeing is not the only way to confirm something is real. 

In a 1976 interview with Robert Septo of The Massachusetts Review, Ohio native and author Toni Morrison says: “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohioan or even a Lorainite. I never felt like a citizen. But I felt very strongly … a very strong sense of place, not in terms of the country or the state, but in terms of the details, the feeling, the mood of the community of the town.” She continues, “...my relationship to things … would be a little different from, say, my brother's or my father's or my sons'. … I do very intimate things ‘in place’: I am sort of rooted in it … being in a room looking out, or being in a world looking out, or living in a small, definite place.”

Black Ohioans have a particular way of “looking out” at the world and engaging with place. Our unique relationships to our environments are shaped by a psychological interiority we cultivate as a part of our living. Ohio is a place where yearning is paramount; where there is a wide breadth of physical and mental space to think, ponder, and consider. This is facilitated by the physical geographies of the land that many attribute to the Midwest—open fields, corn stalks, large bodies of water, each of which allows the mind to wander—but also in the gentle churn of our pace of living, versus the incessant thump that can be found in places such as New York City or Los Angeles. 

As a result, many of us develop deep inner lives full of imagination, and come to understand place through feeling. Place reveals itself as life interacts with our skin, breath, and souls and ranges in its conceptualization based on an individual and the quality and condition of their relationship to such things. 

Poet  Priscilla Jane Thompson was born in 1871 (or possibly 1878) in Rossmoyne, Ohio, a small neighborhood outside Cincinnati, and was the daughter of two formerly enslaved people who escaped to freedom. She describes Black Ohioan interiority in her poem, “THE INNER REALM”: 

There is a sphere, a secret sphere,

   Within each human's breast;

A sacred realm shut in from sight,

   Securely closed from outward light.

   Where faintly fall the sounds, repressed,

Upon the outward ear.

This secret sphere is the space where Black Ohioans find reprieve and filter the day’s external noise into a private space to dream, recharge, and alchemize their experiences.

Much like the interior space of the mind, the internet can also act as a private sphere where one can collect and parse their thoughts away from the noise of the offline world. From chat rooms, forums, Facebook groups, private dm’s, anonymous blogs and profiles, to disappearing messages on apps like Snapchat and individualized algorithms that feed us content on social media, there are a multitude of ways to concoct a secular, tailor-made online existence, despite its participation in a wider network. However, the definition of what it means to exist online vs. offline is not as separate as is often described. Whereas in the early 2000’s— the era of internet cafes, home computers, and computer classrooms—the internet was designated as a place to “go,” now, the internet is an extension of our lives that doesn’t have a start or end point.

Nathan Jurgeson, in his 2011 article “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality,” troubles the argument between separate online/offline realities, stating, “our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, ala The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic “first” and “second” self, but is instead an augmented self.”

Legacy Russell expands upon this in their 2020 book “Glitch Feminism,” noting, “...experimenting online does not keep us from our AFK [away from keyboard] selves, nor does it prevent us from cultivating meaningful and complex collaborative communities beyond our screens. Instead, the polar opposite: the production of these selves, the digital skins we develop and don online, help us understand who we are with greater nuance.”

Black Ohioans can understand this well. Ohio is often referred to as a place that is “everywhere” and “nowhere” simultaneously, characterizing us as people in a non-place, where projections about what constitutes “Ohio” behavior turn into memes and experiences that are invalidated, while also being highly popularized and circulated online. 

In “Interview with Contemporary Novelists” from 1986, Toni Morrison says this about place: “It is a feeling, it is a perception about the past, a matrix out of which one either does come or perceives one’s beginnings. … It has very little to do with its geography. … you get closer to the truth when you sometimes ignore the facts of the ‘place.’” 

As Black Ohioans, Ohio is where there is deep, intimate knowledge of community and place, but also somewhere that transcends traditional notions of geography. Our unique understanding of place acts as a metaphor for the internet, which carries its own designated, yet immaterial locales but is also physically distributed across data centers and fiber-optic network cables all over the globe. Black Ohioans in particular are encoded with an algorithm of Ohio, one that is versatile, adaptable, resilient, introspective, and also characterized by significant events like The Great Migration that hinge much of Black Ohioan culture in a transitional space between Southern roots and Northern expansion, and brings a distinct augmentation of theories of placemaking to our combined techno-physical reality.

To quote Marisa Parham, “‘Black lives hearken to the digital because Black diasporic existence is a digitizing experience. Transfer, migration, metonymy: the break and the remix persist as both witness and feature of the multiple and continual experiences of forced migration endemic to Afro-diasporic life in the Americas—the MiddlePassage, the auction block, the Great Migration—’the digital.’”

As a Black Ohio diasporan myself, the Ohio diaspora is a strong, informal network. We are encoded with an ancestral migratory technology that reverberates through our bodies as we find places outside of Ohio to call home. Everyone knows someone from Ohio, or if they don’t think they do, they’re probably wrong. 

If we separate the word technology from its digital context and distill it as a process—a series of actions—and method—a systematic order of behavior—we see the technology of Black people, particularly Black Ohioans, echoed across the actions we invoke online. 

In “Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures,” author Andre Brock states,
“ … Black folks’ “natural internet affinity” is as much about how they understand and employ digital artifacts and practices as it is about how Blackness is constituted within the material (and virtual) world of the internet itself.” He continues, “Black folk use the internet as a space to extol the joys and pains of everyday life—the hair tutorials, the dance videos, the tweetstorms, and more—using its capacity for multimedia expression and networked sociality to craft a digital practice that upends technocultural beliefs about how information, computers, and communication technologies should be used.”

Take for example Tenisha Godfrey, who, on August 28, 2022, filmed a now-viral Tik Tok ft. the iconic phrase “It's a chicken salad…” The Tik Tok, filmed at the East 81st Deli on Superior Ave in Cleveland, shows Tenisha standing at the deli counter behind a chicken salad with a fork in her hand. The video opens to her saying, “Y’all better come up here and get one of these.” The person behind the camera then asks, “What’s that?” and she responds with a finger curled up to her mouth, stating, “It’s a chicken salad…” and the rest is history. As of Oct 2024, the video has racked up more than 28 million views and has transformed the phrase “chicken salad” in the internet lexicon forever. Due to the instant viral success, the owner of the deli went from selling an average of 40 chicken salads a day to more than 300 a day. What we can glean from this is that it wasn’t simply the chicken salad that made the video go viral; rather, it was how Tenisha transformed the chicken salad with her pronunciation and the pose that accompanied it, captured in her own Ohioan way. As Black Ohioans, we are innovators and purveyors of communication and movement. We are well versed in the art of mobility through the way we talk, dance, sing, write, and love, and through these technologies of meaning-making, we impact the modes and operations of communication on the internet.

Toledo-born poet Mari Evans reflects on these recursive movements that encompass Black life in her poem, “Who Can Be Born Black?”:

Through this poem, Mari’s consciousness as a Black Ohioan informs a foundational tenet of Black Ohioan identity—communion. We gather through fish fries, potlucks, family reunions, backyard barbeques, baptisms, sports events, crafting circles, theater productions, poetry showcases, funerals, and dinner parties. By declaring the power of our communion, i.e. our merging as a people, Mari demonstrates that the vibrational, ecstatic power formed through our gathering creates an explosion of majesty that cannot be ignored. We cannot help but to agree with the refrain: who can be born black and not exult? To not do so would be a non-factor, an impossibility.

As Black midwesterners, we have been sidelined and overlooked in the national discourse, but now is the time for remedy. In 2019, Marisa Parham, through the article Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality, defines how the transmission of signals is bound to the speed of the technology that decodes them, noting, “... signal compression greatly increases the amount of information that can be transmitted, stored, or shared in any given permutation of the signal. Rather than playback being a matter of amplifying a reproduction, digital playback instead requires decompression and decoding, which also means that representational fidelity is tethered to computational speed, to how much detail from the original can be bloomed or recovered from the compressed signal.” 

The national discourse signals negative narratives about Ohio and narrow definitions of what identities constitute the Midwest. This information has been compressed and transmitted widely. But we don’t have to accept this. We can instead choose to decompress these ideas and decode the visible truths of our experiences that reflect the vibrancy found within Black life in the middle of America.

Shifting from the digital, Parham continues, “‘Compression,’ here described as a digital phenomenon, can also be expressed, however, as an experience of memory.’”

To deepen our understanding, we can look to Dayton-born poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poem, “The Old Apple Tree”, where he engages in the idea of compression, using his heartfelt literary precision to describe a memory: 

Dunbar revisits the tree in his memory, noting it as a site where dreaming, romance, and fantasy were incubated. As he remarks, “you perhaps would call it ugly … when you look …unadorned by memory’s glow.” Dunbar describes the tree as a catalyzing place in the glow of his memory, while others simply see it as an object without any significance. This way of configuring place recalls Toni Morrison’s “looking out”, and Priscilla Jane Thompson’s “secret sphere,” where in the interior space of the mind, Dunbar’s sense of place with the tree is shaped by his ascribed feelings and experiences that are more important than what it looks like or has been defined as by everyone else.

These three Black Ohio literary luminaries, encoded with Ohioan algorithms of feeling, introspection, and groundedness, are equipped with a wholehearted interiority that clues us in to our digital inheritance as Black Ohioans. Today, we still maintain distinct observations borne from the everyday, and translate them in our engagements with digital technologies, ultimately influencing and co-constituting a collective digital experience. Marisa Parham, quoting Sheila Chukwulozie, says, “‘Contemporary technologies produce particular movements—the swipe, the scroll, the full-body interaction with a device. These gestures, or organized forms of movement that respond to an interface, are new embodied habits.’” With every swipe, scroll, and tap, we are influencing the internet to become more like Ohio. 

Parham continues, “Each of these embodied actions produces a material trace, as participation in social media transmutes both the work of daily living and the mediation of that living into different kinds of distributable emotional, cognitive, and cultural capital. In a deeply and mutually constitutive process, people operate as both subjects and objects of those technologies, providing the content that constitutes social media’s feed—again, the physical acts that produce the algorithmic expression…”

To be a Black Ohioan is to contain the legacies that culminate us as data points in the algorithm of Ohio. But we are more than just an amalgamation of all who came before us and are still living through us. We are shapeshifters whose experiences within our Black Midwestern identities are marginal and central. Black Ohioans, through our unique relationship to place, bring a distinct perspective to the digital world. As online users’ engaging in the late 2020’s evolution of the internet, traces of our digital existence are scattered from years of use, across multiple email and social media accounts, different usernames, photos, comments, and likes, distributing our identities and conceptions of self alongside them. In this distribution, our Ohio encoded expressions, gestures, and insights are also spread across the internet landscape where we discourse, participate, and gather. Our legacy is one that makes us conducive and elusive, defined and undefined. We are, as they say, “the heart of it all.”

This essay was first published in the zine E-Merge: Artistic Intersections of the Black Midwest, created for WITH(IN).DIGITAL’s inaugural in-person event that occurred October 2024 in Cleveland, Ohio. Learn more about E-Merge here.