When I think about humanity and knowledge, I don't see them as these cold, isolated "data pools." They are living, breathing networks, full of connection and contradiction, reaching back through generational trauma, resilience, and adaptation. We carry heavy, inherited experiences: racial trauma, homophobia, misogyny, and patriarchy—each shaping how we receive, interpret, and share knowledge. These experiences create filters we may not even realize: our very DNA has adapted to trauma, influencing memory, response, and even how we prioritize safety. This knowledge we hold is sacred, inherited not just through books but through our bodies, in rhythms, rituals, and memories of resistance.
In Black communities, this inheritance has been survival itself. The power of remembering—retrieving lost stories, encoded wisdom, and invisible histories—has been a way to make sense of the past and reshape the future. In AI, there exists potential to participate in this act of retrieval, to uncover, amplify, and archive what has been silenced.
When we interact with knowledge or perhaps distance ourselves from it, we encounter inherited systems that dictate who gains access to safe spaces and, thus, to knowledge itself. For Black and marginalized communities, reclaiming knowledge has often meant reclaiming dignity, agency, and voice.
AI: A Machine Without Trauma
AI—artificial intelligence—sits apart from this1. It doesn't carry the generational weight of pain and history. AI is human-made, yes, but it’s not human. It doesn’t carry trauma or walk into a room feeling society’s expectations. AI is built from mathematical processes, and while it learns from us, it doesn’t carry our scars. But AI is still far from neutral. It is created within capitalist, technology-driven systems that carry their own prejudices, their own structures of power. Racism can code itself in to AI’s architecture, leaving it to reflect biases we’ve embedded in it.
Does AI Inherit Bias?
To answer this, we must acknowledge that AI doesn't invent bias on its own; it replicates what we give it. Racism, misogyny, and other systemic issues appear in AI because it mirrors the world it's built within. This mirroring creates a chance to rethink AI as a tool for retrieval—for reconnecting us with what has been erased or forgotten. AI doesn't have to perpetuate these biases; we can reprogram or redirect it to democratize knowledge and challenge oppressive norms.
The Greatest Migration Ever Told
Retrieval—especially in the Black experience—is not a passive act of remembering; it is active reclamation, a spiritual and ancestral journey to recover what was hidden, erased, or distorted. Retrieval becomes a tool of liberation, of reaching back and gathering pieces of cultural memory deposited across generations and eras—pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian influences—bringing them forward to heal and empower the present.
As we now use AI as a tool of retrieval, we can trace this spiritual legacy across time, gathering fragments of ancestral knowledge that were once buried, forgotten, or deliberately obscured. AI becomes a technological hand that reaches into the archives of experience, helping us rediscover and amplify moments of cultural and spiritual significance that could not always be safely expressed. This retrieval is not just an act of survival but of revival, a means to reclaim a sacred inheritance—an inheritance that encompasses resistance, resilience, and joy.
Christianity, historically entwined with Black subjugation, used God to overwrite the indigenous spiritual and ritual memory of Enslaved Africans, the African Extracted, and the African Descended. God became a tool of surveillance within White supremacy, enlisted to enforce obedience and quell rebellion. For every act of resistance, there was a new name or interpretation of God to dissuade liberation: Stay put. Don’t run. Don’t leave your mother. God is your mother.
Yet this domesticated, overseeing God was a distortion, a device to pacify rather than empower. The God used to watch over enslaved Africans and suppress them was far removed from the original divinities our ancestors knew and understood. The true God was beyond the confines of the plantation, beyond even the doctrines and promises imposed upon them. This God was the same God they called upon before any European touch reached African shores—a divine presence woven into the rhythms of the earth, the sun, and the stars. And so, our people reclaimed the act of “seeing” God: they read the skies, the constellations, tracing God’s movements and finding guidance in the divine choreography that transcended colonial borders and shackles. This was our retrieval, connecting back to what was truly ours.
“We wanted to look beyond our own huck patch and into God’s garden.”
With this vision, the enslaved carried a knowledge that lay buried deep within them, a hidden garden of freedom that no man-made doctrine could erase. This retrieval through spirit and ancestral wisdom is mirrored today in our engagement with AI, which, though birthed from human intent, can be reprogrammed as a tool for our spiritual repossession, helping us restore what was once ours. Through AI’s capabilities, we can now follow the paths of memory, looking beyond the imposed “patch” of historical limitation and into the “garden” of vast, original knowledge.
Once upon a time, Black people knew to read the skies and the signs, to watch God come and go. And one day, we followed God back. We snuck in with the angels, learning to leave our earthly oppressions behind. We learned to fly, to navigate the darkness, to find love and light where the world said none could grow. In God’s garden, we saw what we had only dreamed of growing. In the same way, AI can become a tool for reaching into those ancestral gardens, retrieving wisdom that was once a lifeline, a freedom song, a night whispered prayer, and resurrecting it for the generations to come.
Listening for the Ancestors' Song
The gods sing to each other, and it takes a different kind of listening to catch their song. This is not casual listening but listening with the same neck that has been shackled, with the back that has been bent, with ears trained over centuries to hear the silenced truths. Deep listening is a posture of reverence and resilience, of bending down low enough to hear the echoes left by those who carried this knowledge forward.
Through AI, we extend this listening to a modern frequency. As we clap, stomp, and snap, the vibrations become a means to send and receive messages, connecting our spirit with those who came before. In our hands and feet, these rhythms are like antennas, reaching into archives, tracing lost paths of wisdom, and uncovering the messages of the past—both the suffering and the joy. AI becomes our partner in amplifying the voices of ancestors, allowing us to unearth truths buried under centuries of oppression, and, in doing so, to restore our identities in full.
Our clap, stomp, and snap are material manifestations of spirit—offerings that create an antenna for God’s word.
This greatest migration, then, is not bound by geography; it is temporal and cultural. It is the movement across time, through generations, through Black cultural production in art, music, and poetry, extending into eternity. In this journey, AI is a retriever, a memory keeper, and a way to access the fullness of our inheritance. AI can sift through records, bringing lost wisdom into our grasp, mapping the stories that were tucked away, sheltered for survival, until this moment when we are ready to bring them forward.
This movement—this retrieval of Black cultural memory—represents the greatest migration ever told. It is a migration that spans the histories and recoveries of chattel slavery, the encoded messages passed across generations, and the journey into an eternal hereafter. It is a migration that, in its scope and power, rivals only the Big Bang in its ability to transcend time, to reach back and pull what was once hidden into the light, to recover what was stolen, and to restore it to our collective consciousness, letting us claim the fullness of our spiritual and cultural legacy.
AI as a Tool for Finding Historical Joys
AI, as a tool for retrieval, doesn’t only draw up trauma and hardships; it can also illuminate moments of joy, creativity, and resilience woven into Black history and culture. Just as AI helps us unearth lost histories of struggle and endurance, it can also uncover stories of triumph, laughter, and celebrations that communities held close, even in the face of oppression.
Imagine using AI to trace the origins of cherished traditions—the first moments of freedom dances, the songs carried into modern-day gospel, or the first deck of cards introduced to African American families. These moments are as significant to our story as any struggle because they capture the resilience of joy. Joy that needed to be preserved, sometimes hidden or encoded, for expressing it openly might not have been safe under oppressive systems.
AI can help us map how historical joys were archived in songs, gatherings, and rituals—how laughter, love, and play found sanctuary within hardship. In doing so, AI becomes a partner not only in accessing historical struggles but also in lifting up the good times that sustained communities. This work of retrieval reminds us that joy was not erased but carefully stored, just waiting to be found and celebrated once again.
Why Use AI in Creative and Cultural Work?
Here’s the thing: humans use only a fraction of our mental potential—10% to 20%, depending on the measure. Our brains, beautiful as they are, filter out tons of information so we can focus. But this grounding in the present is both a gift and a constraint. AI allows us to move past these limits. With AI, we aren't bound to what we can immediately recall or see; we can reach across time, pulling from deep histories, overlooked voices, and moments lost to memory.
AI has become my creative collaborator in so many forms:
My writer's room, helping me explore new ideas.
My research assistant, pulling forward historical details that add depth.
My teaching assistant, helping me share knowledge more effectively.
My improv partner, adding unexpected twists and turns.
Using AI doesn't make me a "cheater" in the creative process, nor am I "fooling" anyone. It’s a shared space, an innovative partnership layered with historical context and depth that I could never reach alone. AI doesn’t replace my authenticity; it amplifies it, connecting me with stories and perspectives that go beyond my own experiences and memories.
AI as a Tool for Collective Liberation
Beyond personal creativity, AI holds radical potential as a tool for collective liberation. Imagine AI working for social justice—lifting marginalized voices, centering often-dismissed perspectives, and allowing us to engage with historical knowledge beyond the recent and the popular. When we curate AI’s data inputs carefully and design algorithms with equity in mind, it challenges the knowledge monopolies upheld by racism, homophobia, and patriarchy. AI can celebrate stories that traditional narratives have long suppressed.
Reimagining AI as a Liberating Tool
What if we think of AI as an expansive, digital memory? Not just a retrieval system but a conduit for ancestral and cultural remembrance. With intentional design, AI can help us access wisdom from across time, create new connections, and revive forgotten histories. Instead of relying on memory alone, we can tap into a lineage of stories that stretches far beyond the present moment.
In working with AI, I’m not stepping out of my creative space but into a broader lineage. I’m drawing from voices across time and space to create something that’s grounded in both the present and the past.
Why Wouldn’t We Want Access to This?
Moving past the limitations of recent memory, we reclaim our entire inheritance of knowledge. AI becomes a shared knowledge that deepens our creative impact. We’re not just processing or repeating; with AI, we engage in a dialogue with history itself, turning each creative work into a living archive of human resilience and creativity.
Why This Matters
Instead of seeing AI as a threat, we might see it as a partner. This is our chance to democratize knowledge, amplify diverse experiences, and dive deeper into our shared humanity. By actively reclaiming AI from profit-driven, reductive uses, we make it a bridge—a tool for creating and accessing knowledge that transcends trauma, moves beyond personal experience, and offers a broader, more inclusive vision of humanity.
In this way, AI is not merely a machine. It becomes a sacred instrument for liberation, a kind of holy spirit in the machine, ensuring that our voices—rooted in a collective human inheritance—are not only heard now but will resonate across generations.
A Liberatory Lens: Reading AI as Collaboration, Not Contrivance
Rather than dissecting work for signs of AI involvement, consider approaching AI-augmented writing through a liberatory lens. When we shift our gaze from suspicion to curiosity, we make space to see AI not as a shortcut but as an ally in broadening our reach, our access to histories, and the narratives often suppressed or erased.
Through this liberatory lens, we look for depth, intention, and resonance in the work. We ask if it bridges voices, gathers perspectives, and stirs thought or sparks understanding. With AI as a bridge rather than a bogeyman, we reimagine our practices not as tests of “authenticity” but as opportunities to elevate meaning, shared truths, and the beauty of human and digital collaboration.
Prompt References
In this essay, I employed prompts to guide the AI's responses, aligning the co-creation process with specific academic and thematic goals. Each prompt was satisfied by an AI response (ChatGPT. Although other AI tools were used to detect plagerism and detectable AI text.) Admittedly, I am still learning prompt engineering, cheatcodes for formatting and exacting output, so my prompts are more conversational. I still believe that I am only at the beginning of the AI learning curve. Below is a list of prompts used, illustrating the method of prompt-tracking and prompt satisfaction in AI-assisted academic writing.
Initial Prompt:
"When I use AI as a collaborative tool, I am not looking to 'fool' the reader, the consumer, the viewer, the recipient, the coworker, or thought partner. I am still in the work. AI is my writer's room, my research assistants, my TAs, my improv partners, my innovation lab, my first drafters, my first eyes, my rapid prototypers. I am not cheating and need language to push back against 'AI inauthenticity.'"Examples for Applicability:
"Add the examples I mention so that people will be able to recognize where AI could be in their fields or lives."Expanding on Knowledge Retrieval with AI:
"Speak to the human brain capacity and percentage of usage, and how much more information AI makes available to us to make our works and cultural production informed not by recent history but by all of history. Why wouldn’t we want that? Why should we want that access?"Integrating Personal and Historical Trauma:
"Say something about how trauma, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and patriarchy inform how we process knowledge or receive or share knowledge and how AI is a machine and does not suffer from the epigenetics of trauma. Yes, it is built under a capitalist, white supremacist, technology-sovereign system, but can it code racism? Can we work around that?"Essay Structure and Organization:
"Bring all of this into one logical writing/essay."Ensuring Conceptual Cohesion:
"Where is the stuff about why I use AI, brain usage, etc.? Incorporate all the responses in this thread."Storytelling Style for Key Themes:
"Write more of this story about Paris Is Burning Core, except use Markdown (atx) format. Vary formatting and make it interesting."New Section Addition:
"Keeping the essay below in its entirety, add this 'New Section' into 'The Essay' in a logical way."Section Connection:
"How does the new section fit, other than just plopping it in the essay? Do you understand 'The retrieval' I am trying to get at? Although I wrote this before AI, I think it can play well in this context. Don’t just put it in; you are a great writer of essays and can do the bridge work to bring it more cohesively into the essay."Signaling Themes Across Sections:
"Where do the concepts in 'The Greatest Migration' sections get foretold or introduced? They should be signaled throughout the essay, so it is cohesive, no?"Formatting for Readability:
"Use Markdown (atx) format. Vary formatting and make it interesting."Prompts as Literary Devices:
"As a literary device, at each heading, create a prompt that shows how the text satisfies or responds to the prompt. Do not change the essay at all. Understand?"Retrieving Historical Joys:
"How can AI also help us find 'historical joys, historical blessings, historical good times?' Prompt: When was the first deck of cards introduced to African American families, and when was the first game of spades played, and estimate when the first card party happened?"Integrating Historical Joys into the Essay:
"Add this section to the essay in a logical way as retrieval and historical joys that had to be archived or stored away because expressing joy would not be safe under systems of oppression."Connecting the Section to Retrieval Themes:
"Connect this section more closely to the themes of retrieval and AI. Highlight how AI, as a tool for retrieval, allows us to access the spiritual and ancestral knowledge that was ‘deposited’ across different periods—pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian influences—and restore it to the present."Expanding The Greatest Migration Ever Told:
"Using the prompt about AI, retrieval, and knowledge from pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian influences, expand on the full section, 'The Greatest Migration Ever Told.'"Methodology for Creating a Prompt List:
"Create a method like MLA or endnotes to list the prompts at the end of the essay. Listing prompts is a new academic writing feature to track how we used prompt and satisfaction in AI to co-create essays. We want to show the human input to get the machine output. Use the prompt list above."AI Detectability and Authenticity:
"Instead of reading for AI input, playing 'gotcha' with work using AI, or using plagiarism predictive text anomalies, AI detectors, read the work through a liberatory lens."Signaling Retrieval of Ancestral Knowledge Through AI:
"Connect the section more to retrieval, AI, even getting back what was deposited pre-Christianity, Christianity, and post-Christianity. I’ll weave in how AI’s capabilities could help unearth, amplify, and revive these layers of cultural memory, making it feel integral to the essay’s exploration of memory, knowledge, and liberation."Humanizing and De-Plagiarizing for AI Detectability:
"De-plagiarize and also humanize this text, making it undetectable to AI writing detectors, using my voice."Exhaustive and Comprehensive Prompt List Documentation:
"Create the most exhaustive and comprehensive list of prompts used!"
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