Racist by Design

I’ve found a few candid readings on race and technology that I would include on my syllabus for different types of courses. They could obviously be used in explicitly DH courses. They would also work well in any course with a tech and/or race or social justice focus. Here’s a brief annotated bibliography to give you a sense of them.

#transformDH. (2011).

This is a hashtag and a movement which has a life on various social media platforms, primarily a tumbler blog and twitter. #transformDH is self described as:

an academic guerrilla movement seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion.

For this course I would have students read the Tumbler and Twitter feeds for #transformDH, participate in conversations as they choose by commenting on the Tumbler or tweeting with the hashtag, responding to others’ tweets, etc. This interaction with the #tranformDH community would inform in-class discussions and reflections, perhaps inspire projects, etc.

Bailey, M. Z. (2011). All the Digital Humanists are White, All the Nerds are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1. Web.

The title of this article is an allusion to one of the most important books in black women’s studies–All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But some of us are Brave. In this piece, Bailey writes:

The ways in which identities inform both theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely overlooked. Those already marginalized in society and the academy can also find themselves in the liminal spaces of this field. By centering the lives of women, people of color, and disabled folks, the types of possible conversations in digital humanities shift. The move “from margin to center” offers the opportunity to engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital humanities as well as exposes structural limitations that are the inevitable result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity, and ablebodiness.

This specific piece might be more useful in a course that’s more explicitly or self-consciously a DH course. As Cordell argues in this week’s readings, students might not care about DH as a field, and this article is one of those DH-as-a-field pieces. However, I think it poses questions that I’d want my students thinking about (regardless of whether or not they want to think about them, and that’s another discussion entirely).

Eveleth, R. (2016). The Inherent Bias of Facial Recognition. Motherboard. Web.

This post explains how algorithms are biased because they reflect the assumptions and biases of their designers. Eveleth also addresses the lived reality of these biases by connecting the failure of algorithms for facial recognition to demoralizing experiences and even human rights violations involving actual people in real-world situations. Importantly, Eveleth also suggests solutions, which seem simple enough, but which of course are ignored because the designers and companies fail to acknowledge that there’s even a problem that needs solutions.

This article is important for thinking about systemic bias and systemic inequality in society more broadly and for technology more specifically.

Jeong, S. (2016). How to Make a Bot that isn’t Racist. Motherboard. Web.

This article (and the next) are in response to the recent Microsoft Twitter Bot scandal. Jeong focuses the piece on the fact that Microsoft failed to do even the most basic things to keep their bot from tweeting racist, nationalist, etc. things. Incorporating commentary from other well-known Twitter bot makers, Jeong essentially highlights that anti-racism requires intentionality. What all of these pieces speak to, I believe, is that not thinking about race is more likely to result in racist outcomes than proactively thinking about race and ways to be anti-racist. The absence of mal-intent (“But I’m not a racist!”) is simply not sufficient. To avoid perpetuating and being complicit in systemic and institutionalized racism, one has to be actively anti-racist. As the Twitter bot designers highlighted in Jeong’s post suggest, this requires making conscious, anticipatory design choices, even sometimes “sacrifices.” This perspective is basically the impetus for why I titled this post “Racist by Design.” Because in our society, which defaults to racism, failing to design anti-racist technology is essentially the same as designing racist technology, except that you get to hide behind the excuse of intentionality.

I like the fact that this is a post about recent and popular news. For students it takes the discussion and course work out of the theoretical realm and helps them see actual real-world results. This post would be extremely relevant in a design class to help demonstrate the level of consciousness and intentionality required for ethical design. And again, it’s a great piece to show how systemic bias often goes unchecked and the fact that counteracting systemic racism takes a lot more than just warm and fuzzy notions about ourselves as “colorblind.” It’s a practical look at Critical Race Theory.

Mead, D. (2016). Microsoft’s Tay Experiment was a Total Success. Motherboard. Web.

This is an obvious complement to the previous reading. Mead says early in the post:

These types of biases are not necessarily made with malice, but it’s no more excusable for tech to end up being exclusionary simply because its developers weren’t aware that they might have blind spots in the first place.

Mead goes on to ask:

What happens when, instead of tech being designed in the image of its designers, it ends up being reflective of each individual user? A truly distributed technology would learn its mores from all of us. Will we like what we see?

Mead’s questions ask us to do away with the utopian ideals we have about the internet being a space free of all the social ills of the material world. Mead’s post reminds us that the internet is populated by the same people who created the social ills in the material world. And we miss this fact at our own peril.