#ruhabenjamin

“Note to selves: remember to imagine and craft the world you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”

Image: Pranchetober 2020 - Day 21 by Leandro Massai https://www.behance.net/gallery/128359753/Pranchetober-2020?locale=en_US

Colorblind Algorithms

“These tech advances are sold as morally superior because they purport to rise above human bias, even though they could not exist without data produced through histories of exclusion and discrimination.” — Ruha Benjamin, “Race After Technology.”

“Names are racially coded,” writes Benjamin, after explaining that giving her son an Arabic first and middle name will most definitely ensure racial profiling at the airport. “While [names] are of the everyday tools we use to express individuality and connections, they are also markers interacting with numerous technologies, like airport screening systems and police risk assessments, as forms of data” (Benjamin 1).

But the list doesn’t end there. The Old Jim Crow transitions our world from “explicit racialization” to The New Jim Crow of “colorblind ideology” as legal systems and software programs alike discriminate against Black names (Benjamin 5). A key factor here is the tech companies' drive for objectivity —which Benjamin notes is merely an “allure [of nonpartisan information] without public accountability” (36).

For instance, Mark Zuckerberg’s famous quote, “Move fast and break things,” pushed Facebook into the hands of billions as a radical attempt to avoid government oversight. But for Benjamin, it only glossed over important distinctions of racial inequity. As a result, we got Facebook faster than we should've, and with that came a hoard of issues.

Benjamin ultimately retorts with the slogan, “Move slower and empower people,” against the wave of Facebook's racist ad delivery, allowance of hate speech, and lack of racial bias research (6).