Abstract
For many years, the intersection of race and technology has been a personal, but not professional curiosity. I’d sigh every time a web form asked for my racial or ethnic identity, but wouldn’t let me express my Scandinavian/Asian identity. I’d chuckle every time someone on Twitter would call me White because the lighting in my headshot hid my colour. I’d bristle at discussions of racial representation in technology, with well-meaning people talking about the predominance of White and Asian people, but forgetting there are White/Asian people too, who are often excluded and othered by both groups. My personal experience of race was one of mild inconvenience.
But in the past few years, especially as I began to accept my transness, I started to notice more of the seams in my White-identified experience. It wasn’t just that web forms excluded my race, but my gender too. When I came out as a woman, strangers started dismissing my assertiveness as bitchiness. I battled a thousand databases and their keepers for the right to change my name. Transition had fragmented my technological experiences, revealing the exclusionary structures woven through our social hierarchies. I began to see, through my own eyes, that the bias against my womanhood, my transness, my sexuality, and my race were not separate social phenomena, but one: a bias towards White, straight, cisgender men.
One reason I knew this is because I’d presented as a White, straight, cisgender man for decades. I knew what it felt like to feel like the world was built for me. The world just was, and I was in it, and everything I seemed to want or aspire to seemed to be available to me. I didn’t look Asian enough to experience much racism except in hot childhood summers when I darkened, and I hid my femininity well enough that it only led to a bit of bullying as a child. And so the world was everything I wanted it to be: opportunity, an audience, and a playground for my ideas. Moving from cis to trans, hetero to homo, and man to woman broke all of that and made the world’s bias against me visible, in technology, in law, and in society.
Ruha Benjamin’s book Race After Technology attempts to make this bias visible, weaving a quilt of culture, media, experience, and research that covers the entirety of racial phenomena in technology. She shows, in ways I only understood subjectively, how the central bias in the origins of the United States has been built into nearly every structure imaginable and in ways that have never been more invisible.
While the book does not convey a central thesis explicitly, it does convey one. It begins by building upon a few key histories of race in America. The first, slavery, needs little discussion, as America’s original sin. After emancipation, slavery evolved into Jim Crow laws, which systematically denied nearly every human right to Black Americans, including voting, property, jobs, equal access to public services, and even their freedom, for crimes as simple loitering. After Jim Crow was dismantled by the Civil Rights movement came the New Jim Crow, where political leaders, no longer able to explicitly deny Black Americans rights, turned to implicitly denying them, through unequal policing, mandatory sentencing, and the war on drugs, robbing the freedom of one in three Black men. While Benjamin does not dwell on these histories, she invokes them, suggesting how America’s law and culture have always, at best, had anti-Black disregard, if not anti-Black disdain.
What Benjamin adds to this history is what she calls a New Jim Code. If slavery was total racism, Jim Crow was explicit legal racism and the New Jim Crow was implicit legal racism, and the New Jim Code is computational racism. Her argument is that in the same ways that racism has been encoded into law, it is now built into technology. Except: unlike the earlier forms of racism in our country, people write racism into code often unknowingly, because the people writing code are often cis hetero White men, ignorant of who they are excluding by mindlessly creating things that only serve themselves.
But Benjamin’s idea is much more subtle than just a critique of who codes. A key idea lurking in her tapestry is that the people who create technology follow a pattern of using stereotypes as a proxy for who we really are and how we’ll behave in the future. It’s the abstractions inherent to data and algorithms in which the racism lurks, erasing identity, erasing difference, and erasing agency. The book is therefore not a critique of programmers, but a critique of code itself, as a medium that inescapably stereotypes. In her words, The animating force of the New Jim Code is that tech designers encode judgements into technical systems but claim that the racist results of their designs are entirely exterior to the encoding process. Racism thus becomes doubled – magnified and buried under layers of digital denial. (p. 11)
The book is bursting with examples. In natural language, processing for Google Maps lurks an ignorance of Black history: Ironically, this problem of misrecognition actually reflects a solution to a difficult coding challenge. A computer’s ability to parse Roman numerals, interpreting an ‘X’ as ‘ten’, was a hard-won design achievement. That is, from a strictly technical standpoint, ‘Malcolm Ten Boulevard’ would garner cheers. (p. 79)
Crime prediction algorithms, when used to inform policing, create a tight loop of Black incarceration: If we consider that institutional racism in this country is an ongoing unnatural disaster, then crime prediction algorithms should more accurately be called crime production algorithms. (p. 83)
Photography, in all its attempts to capture reality, is calibrated for Whiteness: The ethnoracial makeup of the software design team, the test photo databases, and the larger population of users influence the algorithms’ capacity for recognition, though not in any straightforward sense. (p. 112)
These examples, and the hundreds of others in the book, are less about the specific injustices encoded into technology and more about the pervasiveness of White ignorance of difference. As Benjamin says in her introduction, So, are robots racist? Not if by ‘racism’ we only mean white hoods and racial slurs. Too often people assume that racism and other forms of bias must be triggered by an explicit intent to harm; for example, linguist John McWhorter argued in Time magazine that ‘[m]achines cannot, themselves be racists. Even equipped with artificial intelligence, they have neither brains nor intention’. But this assumes that self-conscious intention is what makes something racist. (p. 59)
Benjamin ends the book by observing that the New Jim Code emerges from four rhetorical moves:
Arguing that technology rises above subjectivity;
Arguing that personalization frees us from stereotyping;
Advocating for merit over prejudice;
Elevating prediction as a tool for social progress.
Of course, these ideas do more than fail to avoid racism – they encapsulate it, masking it from view, behind private enterprise, inside impenetrable algorithms: The power of the New Jim Code is that it allows racist habits and logics to enter through the backdoor of tech design, in which the humans who create the algorithms are hidden from view. (p. 160)
Benjamin ends the book with a review of critical justice–focused tools for abolishing these racist beliefs: an approach to design that prioritizes equity over efficiency, social good over market imperatives, justice audits of designs, and data usage guidelines to combat bias. She leaves with an approach: Justice, in this sense, is not a static value but an ongoing methodology that can and should be incorporated into tech design. For this reason, too, it is vital that people engaged in tech development partner with those who do important sociocultural work honing narrative tools through the arts, humanities, and social justice organizing. (p. 193)
You might be wondering why I started this reflection talking about myself. After all, much of what I’ve learned about injustice from being out about my gender, sexuality, and transness was not about race. How could Benjamin’s observations about race and technology possibly have anything to do with my own marginalization?
This is why Benjamin’s book is so powerful: while the dominant force behind injustice and exclusion in America is race, the methods of the New Jim Code also apply equally to these other facets of identity, and often simultaneously. For example, consider the injustice of not being able to change my name on prior publications with most academic publishers. This injustice, while it affects people who have changed their name for other reasons, harms transgender scholars most. Why are publishers so reluctant to allow name changes? Their rationale has little to do with trans rights. In fact, their arguments against allowing change align with Benjamin’s four rhetorical moves of the New Jim Code, with publishers arguing for (1) the ‘objectivity’ of the historical archive over the subjectivity of my gender; (2) the ‘personalization’ that allows me to indicate a preferred name in my profile, but still lets everyone else see my deadname; (3) debates about who ‘deserves’ to have their name respected and a fear of special treatment; and (4) the importance of bibliometrics for predicting scholarly merit. Thus, the tools of the New Jim Code are the same tools that oppress me, and Black liberation is my liberation.