By Hannah Z. Morley
To move away from racially biased algorithms, conversations about blackness need to become a priority in all computing fields, UCLA information studies professor Safiya Umoja Noble told a UC Santa Barbara audience last week.
Noble, author of the book “Algorithms of Oppression,” said the use of past racial imagery in media still slips into everyday web applications (Apps) and into our current views of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). “Old media defines new media,” Noble said.
She spoke as part of an Anti-Blackness & Technology panel co-sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies Research and Multi-Cultural Center. Other panelists were African American studies professor Ruha Benjamin of Princeton University, André Brock a scholar of Black digital media at Georgia Tech, and Charlton Mcllwain a New York University media and communications professor.
Unlike most academic panels, this event began with music and laughter. Dancing in their respective Zoom boxes, these scholars of race and digital media radiated a palpable kinship. Azzedin Jackson, a UCSB graduate student in Material Sciences, moderated a discussion that focused on the objectification of black bodies in modern technology.
“This is the blackest panel on technology you’ll see this year,” said Brock of Georgia Tech, as the panelists introduced themselves to a virtual audience of more than 1500 people.
Each speaker gave a short presentation, detailing how their current research adds to a legacy of literature that includes abolitionists and other Black thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, that argues the success of modern technologies is reliant on the abuse of Black people.
Princeton’s Benjamin referred to the new “Jim Code,” in which computer programmers replicate racial biases in their coding when they fail to address pre-existing societal divisions, a play on words of the former “Jim Crow” laws of the southern United States.
The panelists agreed that innate biases are programmed into computer applications and rely on existing racial biases to function, such as labeling Black neighborhoods as “crime-ridden” without acknowledging the white-collar crimes common in white neighborhoods. Benjamin cited a “neighbors” app that allows people to self-report lost pets, crimes and other complaints in their local areas. Disparities in how neighbors define what crimes make a community "threatening" end up unfairly marking more Black communities than white communities as dangerous.
The first slide of Princeton University’s Ruha Benjamin’s presentation in a recent UC Santa Barbara forum on anti-Blackness in technology.
Photo by Hannah Z. Morley
Benjamin said that because many apps are coded within institutions built by and for white men, systemic biases are the natural “product” of these conditions and not merely an anomalous “bad apple” that can be easily pruned. “Black nightmares,” she said, “are the underbellies of elitist dreams.”
Mcllwain of NYU said that the way Black people have figured in the history of technology – both as creators and how they are represented – mirrors the history of how black bodies have been treated in the United States.
Mcllwain then described how influential Black computer scientists were in the 1990s in developing the internet as we know it today. However, as time passed, their ownership of popular web spaces dwindled. Now, on applications such as Twitter and TikTok, that were initially made popular by Black creators, white C.E.O.s are “profiting off of blackness,” according to Mcllwain.
Mcllwain also questioned the effectiveness of existing technology pondering whether “current or future technological tools” will allow the United States to outrun “the white supremacy” it faces today.
The panelists said that it’s not enough to merely add more Black programmers to what are systemically racist workforces. Instead, Silicon Valley should make Blackness the center of the conversation, to fight against the technology field’s anti-Black infrastructure.
Anti-Blackness in Technology panelists listen as NYU’s Charlton Mcllwain speaks, upper right. Photo by Hannah Z. Morley
Noble compared Big Tech to other racist industries such as Big Cotton and Big Tobacco. She has observed among her computer science students a lack of knowledge about and interest in the humanities and stressed the need to more broadly educate a new generation of programmers. “You have no business designing technology for society when you know nothing about society,” she said.
The session concluded with Brock expressing hope that these systemic issues can be confronted without the Black community losing itself to a “white suburban” version of utopia.
Brock said he wishes for a “messy future for all,” one in which young people of all races and economic backgrounds can make mistakes, fail, and not feel peer pressured to enter STEM or any other fields in order to “succeed.”
To find future events held by UCSB’s Center for Black Research and Multicultural Center please click the attached links.
Hannah Z. Morley is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Writing & Literature at the College of Creative Studies. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.