Grammarly’s New Suggestions

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Hadzimuratovic also sent me a list of 11 resources the company had used when researching these changes: guides produced by organizations like the Underground Railroad Education Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, and the NAACP. The suggestions Grammarly provided are, so to speak, in the air—you can find support for every one of them in these resources. So why did the many historians of slavery who replied to Mitchell’s thread agree that the company had misstepped?

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This is what happens when experts in a complicated subject matter see their work translated into normative prescriptions. First, on freedom seeker. As Mitchell pointed out in her tweets, “Not everyone who fled was seeking ‘freedom,’ ” and “running away is not the only way to ‘seek freedom.’ ” There is a growing body of academic work on how some enslaved people in the United States who could not run away altogether for whatever reason stayed and “sought freedom” in other ways: negotiation, temporary absences, smaller (and less permanent and risky) acts of resistance. (Historian Daina Ramey Berry wrote about enslaved people’s negotiations around freedom here, in an essay referring to, and synthesizing, some of this work.)

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