UNSEARCHABLE

If you have ever typed something into a search bar and been told, gently, that what you were looking for might be hate, you did not imagine it. Here is the receipt.

The signal

On August 19, 2026, from one logged-in account in a desktop browser, I searched TikTok for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Not a hashtag, not a slogan. The name of a museum that has been in its building at 18th and Vine since 1997.

No results. And this notice: “This phrase may be associated with hateful behavior. TikTok is committed to keeping our community safe and working to prevent the spread of hate. For more information, we invite you to review our Community Guidelines.”

The same answer came back for negro leagues, for negro leagues kansas city, for united negro college fund, and for negro spirituals. Nine queries across the Videos and Users tabs. Seven blocked.

Then the part that makes it a record instead of a complaint. Search the handle, nlbmuseumkc, and the account comes right up, 1,045 followers that day, bio reading “National institution dedicated to preserving the rich history of black baseball.” Look at what the platform prints on that result card. It prints Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, in its own interface, on a page it built.

It will show you the name. It will not take the name.

The mirror

In 1930, Dorothy B. Porter was appointed to build the Black collection at Howard University, and she ran into the same wall in a card catalog.

In her oral history she described a Dewey Decimal System with one number for slavery, 326, and, as she recalled it, one other, 325, for colonization. At “many of the white libraries,” she said, “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everybody knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”

A book of poems filed under colonization, when Dewey had a number for poetry.

Porter asked: “Why not take the whole Dewey Decimal System and put a book by James Weldon Johnson, the poet, underneath the number for poetry?” She adapted the system to the collection by subject and gave the authors their own numbers. She made Black work findable as work.

The pattern

A catalog decides which words will retrieve a thing. That decision looks technical and it is never only technical.

These are names the institutions still carry. In 1920, Andrew “Rube” Foster established the Negro National League at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City. The museum that keeps that record operates two blocks from that building, at 1616 East 18th Street, and was established in 1990. The United Negro College Fund was founded in 1944 and is still legally United Negro College Fund, Inc., which says it supports thirty-six historically Black colleges and universities.

Search buck o’neil and TikTok returns videos, no warning at all. The topic is fine. The name is not.

This filter does not show what it has. In the catalog and in the search bar, the thing that goes missing is the shelf where Black people put their own work under their own name.

The mechanism

The notice does not say whether a person at TikTok decided the Negro Leagues should be harder to find. That is what makes it worth writing down.

The record is not being removed here. It is unreachable by that name in search, and the account came up on both dates, August 19 and September 2, so nothing reads as broken. An institution asking for its own name gets back a hazard.

Then the cost lands on the person searching. Somebody half remembers a museum from a school trip, types the name they remember, and gets told the phrase may be associated with hate. Nothing on that screen says the filter is crude, or that the museum is still there. The same search, run again on September 2, gets the same screen.

That is how a cycle keeps running. Porter’s case is the one we can answer. She asked why a book of poems did not go with poetry, and in her telling the fix was simple: “it wasn’t anything difficult to do.” For this one we have no oral history. We have a notice that names a category and never says why this name is in it.

Correction

Corrected 2026-09-30. This casefile published on September 3, 2026. Two errors are named here rather than quietly repaired.

Dorothy Porter was quoted from a rendering that is not her own. The casefile quoted her oral history as it appears in a 2018 magazine account, which opens “Now in [that] system” and has her say “everyone.” The casefile also replaced that account’s dashes with commas. Her interview with Avril Johnson Madison, printed in The Public Historian in 1995, says “everybody,” and opens “Now, in the Dewey Decimal System.” The quotations above now follow the printed interview.

Dewey was said to have only two places for Black writers. The casefile said the system “had two drawers for Black life and no others” and “could only file him one way,” and that Porter “refused the scheme and built her own.” In her own account the two numbers are what libraries did: Dewey had a number for poetry, and she asked, “Why not take the whole Dewey Decimal System and put a book by James Weldon Johnson, the poet, underneath the number for poetry?” She said she adapted the system to the collection by subject. Those lines now say that. The casefile’s argument, that a catalog decides which words will retrieve a thing, stands.

Smaller changes made at the same time: the claim that every library she consulted used Dewey is gone, since she says she also looked to the Library of Congress; a list of her subject areas taken from the secondary account is gone; counts that were stated in the present tense are now dated or dropped; the museum’s founding date is stated as the museum states it; and the test is described as one account in one browser. Three sentences built on the two-drawer claim are cut: “The system had two drawers for Black life and no others, and a clerk with a stack of books has to put them somewhere.” “No one at Dewey wrote a rule against James Weldon Johnson.” “They built a system that could only file him one way, and it took a librarian a career to undo what a clerk could do in a second.”

Three other phrasings claimed more than the record shows and now read as follows: “It is being made unreachable by name” now reads “It is unreachable by that name in search”; “the platform is holding an opinion about that name” now reads “the filter is treating the name differently from the account that carries it”; and “the interstitial is the only version of this a company cannot revise later” now reads “a company can change its screen and cannot change your screenshot.”

Source: Avril Johnson Madison and Dorothy Porter Wesley, “Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley: Enterprising Steward of Black Culture,” The Public Historian 17, no. 1 (1995): 15–40, at 25. Read on September 30, 2026.

Update

Updated 2026-09-30. This casefile published on September 3, 2026, and what follows happened after. It is not a correction. On September 16, 2026, the museum-name and college-fund searches were run again with the same result, and the account came up. On September 30, 2026, five of the searches were run again from the same kind of logged-in desktop session. TikTok showed the same notice for Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, negro leagues, negro leagues kansas city, united negro college fund and negro spirituals, and returned videos for buck o’neil with no notice. The account nlbmuseumkc was up, with the same bio, at 1,044 followers.

Source: Word Reimagined, direct observation of TikTok search, the fifth run of this test, September 30, 2026 (read from the page; no screenshot retained).