Sold Down River seeks to be a project that engages with our source materials, history, our communities and one another with respect and careful attention to the dignity of people, both now and in the past. As such, we are very cognizant that the language used by enslavers was purposefully dehumanizing and infantilizing and that the process of organizing and researching in these records can either intentionally or unintentionally duplicate the dehumanization of enslaved persons. To counteract that, we have developed a few ethics of work and interaction that push back against racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination:
Use of AI: Artificial intelligence can be a very useful tool to organize large amounts of information. In this project, AI was used to help sort and encode some of the information collected into the relational database. However, as more information has been released about the environmental and economic impact of using Chat GTP and other AI systems, the project team has decided to severely limit the use of AI due to the outsized environmental impact of the datacenters for AI programs on marginalized communities, many of which were founded by individuals trafficked in the domestic slave trade and their descendants.
Language use: we use the term enslaved as an adjective not a noun. The people whose names appear in this database are first men, women and children. When ethnic or racial descriptive terms are used (i.e. negro, mulatto), we reproduce them only as a description of appearance, never as a noun.
Ethics of care for one another: This is a project born out of a public library, a Montessori high school, and a public HBCU. All of the people who have worked on this project are embedded in the work of telling histories that are complex and grounded in ethics of social justice and truth and reconciliation. We acknowledge that we are all on journeys to examine and improve on our own internalized notions of race, gender, sexuality and difference and to grow as individuals and scholars. As such we strive to treat one another with respect and care and hold space for one another to process the deeply traumatic histories that are contained within the project and in our communities. The project also strives to teach students and researchers how to do this kind of work and to grapple with the emotional and spiritual impact of reading accounts of human trafficking and abuse.
Financial ethics: This project is funded by grants from governmental and non-profit organizations. As part of our process, we intentionally pay interns and contractors a living wage for their work. The Principal Investigators, who are full-time, tenured college faculty and city employees receive the smallest share of grant funding, paying either for release time to work on the project or summer stipends to cover child-care and transportation costs.
Decision making: Decisions about major changes, boundaries, team members and funding are made through conversation and consensus. This project is jointly owned and managed by the members of the team.
Intellectual Property and Attributions: The individual authors of each essay published on the website are identified and they retain copyright of their work. The information collected by the team from the primary sources remains in the public domain; however, to safeguard and recognize the extraordinary amount of labor that went into creating the database, copies of the full database will only be available via written request that is approved by a majority of the team. Users are welcome to search the database using the query forms and may use the information for educational, scholarly or personal use with proper attribution to the project. We will not charge anyone to access the information contained in the database nor will we sell the database to any outside party.
Community Care: We are deeply aware that the information in the database and project has the potential to be harmful as well as incredibly valuable and useful. We will never seek to find the descendants of the individuals whose names appear in this database, although we are committed to supporting people who are searching for their own family stories. We also strive to present the information in the database about people’s lives and experiences with as much context as we are able to provide to help our communities grapple with this difficult history and through that process work towards a more just, equitable and inclusive future.