Black Software by
Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most peopleknow. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter.Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make blackpolitics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism. From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how blackpeople seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the UnitedStates and across the globe.
The Digital Edge by
How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the "technology rich" and the "technology poor" have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world. Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.
Race after Technology by
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.
Reclaiming Our Space by
In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular--one pithy tweet at a time. These online platforms have given those outside the traditional university setting an opportunity to engage with and advance these conversations--and in doing so have created new energy for intersectional movements around the world. It has been a seismic shift, and as Jones argues, no one has had more to do with this renaissance of community building than Black women. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women's innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new interactive way. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them. Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism's past, present, and future, and places Black women front and center in a new chapter of resistance and political engagement.
The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery by
The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery shows how, at a moment of crisis after the Age of Revolutions, ambitious planters in the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil forged a new set of relationships with one another to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern UnitedStates. They hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to suit "tropical" needs and maintain profitability. These experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked.Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of skilled enslaved workers contradicted the racial ideologies underpinning slavery and allowed black people to wield new kinds of authority withinthe plantation world, their contributions reinforced the economic dynamism of the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. When separate wars broke out in all three locations in the 1860s, the transnational bloc of masters and experts took up arms to perpetuate the Greater Caribbeanthey had built throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Slaves played key wartime roles on the opposing side, helping put an end to chattel slavery. However, the worldwide racial division of labor that emerged from the reinvented plantation complex has proved more durable.
What Is Digital Sociology? by
The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology. Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship. Designed for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, this timely introduction will be an invaluable resource for all sociologists seeking to focus their craft and thinking toward the social complexities of the digital age.
"We often call on technology to help solve problems. But when society defines, frames, and represents people of color as “the problem,” those solutions often do more harm than good. We’ve designed facial recognition technologies that target criminal suspects on the basis of skin color. We’ve trained automated risk profiling systems that disproportionately identify Latinx people as illegal immigrants. We’ve devised credit scoring algorithms that disproportionately identify black people as risks and prevent them from buying homes, getting loans, or finding jobs."
McIlwain, C. (2020, June 30). Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/03/1002589/technology-perpetuates-racism-by-design-simulmatics-charlton-mcilwain/
Algorithms of Oppression by
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for "black girls"--what will you find? "Big Booty" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in "white girls," the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about "why black women are so sassy" or "why black women are so angry" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance--operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond--understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance. An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
Caging Borders and Carceral States by
This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration, detention, deportation and the boundaries of domestic law. Contributors: Dan Berger, Ethan Blue, George T. Diaz, David Hernandez, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Pippa Holloway, Volker Janssen, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Heather McCarty, Douglas K. Miller, Vivien Miller, Donna Murch, and Keramet Ann Reiter.
Dark Matters by
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.
Data Politics by
Didier Bigo is Professor of War Studies at King¿s College London and Research Professor at Sciences-Po, CERI Paris. He is editor of the quarterly journal, Cultures & Conflicts, and was the founder and co-editor of International Political Sociology, published by International Studies Association. His work concerns sociology of surveillance, policing, and borders. He co-edited Transversal Lines (with Tugba Basaran, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet and R. B. J. Walker, 2016) as part of the Routledge Studies in International Political Sociology. Engin Isin is Professor in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London and University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). Isin¿s work concerns politics of the changing figure of the citizen as a political subject. He has authored Cities Without Citizens (1992), Citizenship and Identity (with Patricia Wood, 1999), Being Political (2002), Citizens Without Frontiers (2012), and Being Digital Citizens (with Evelyn Ruppert, 2015). He has edited Acts of Citizenship (2008) with Greg Nielsen, Enacting European Citizenship (2013) with Michael Saward, and Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (2014) with Peter Nyers. His latest book is Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory (2015). Evelyn Ruppert is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studies how digital technologies and the data they generate can powerfully shape and have consequences for how people are known and governed and how they understand themselves as political subjects, that is, citizens with rights to data. Evelyn is PI of an ERC funded project, Peopling Europe: How data make a people (ARITHMUS; 2014¿19). She is Founding and Editor-in-Chief of the SAGE open access journal, Big Data & Society. Recent books are Being Digital Citizens (with Engin Isin, 2015) and Modes of Knowing (with John Law, 2016).
Digitize and Punish by
Tracing the rise of digital computing in policing and punishment and its harmful impact on criminalized communities of color The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that law enforcement agencies have access to more than 100 million names stored in criminal history databases. In some cities, 80 percent of the black male population is registered in these databases. Digitize and Punish explores the long history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years--with devastating impact on poor communities of color. Providing a comprehensive study of the use of digital technology in American criminal justice, Brian Jefferson shows how the technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation's racialized policing and punishment. After examining how the criminal justice system conceptualized the benefits of computers to surveil criminalized populations, Jefferson focuses on New York City and Chicago to provide a grounded account of the deployment of digital computing in urban police departments. By highlighting the intersection of policing and punishment with big data and web technology--resulting in the development of the criminal justice system's latest tool, crime data centers--Digitize and Punish makes clear the extent to which digital technologies have transformed and intensified the nature of carceral power.
Forever Suspect by
The declaration of a "War on Terror" in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks brought sweeping changes to the American criminal justice and national security systems, as well as a massive shift in the American public opinion of both individual Muslims and the Islamic religion generally. Since that time, sociologist Saher Selod argues, Muslim Americans have experienced higher levels of racism in their everyday lives. In Forever Suspect, Selod shows how a specific American religious identity has acquired racial meanings, resulting in the hyper surveillance of Muslim citizens. Drawing on forty-eight in-depth interviews with South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans, she investigates how Muslim Americans are subjected to racialized surveillance in both an institutional context by the state and a social context by their neighbors and co-workers. Forever Suspect underscores how this newly racialized religious identity changes the social location of Arabs and South Asians on the racial hierarchy further away from whiteness and compromises their status as American citizens.
The Future of Change by
In The Future of Change, Ray Brescia identifies a series of "social innovation moments" in American history. Through these moments?during which social movements have embraced advances in communications technologies?he illuminates the complicated, dangerous, innovative, and exciting relationship between these technologies, social movements, and social change. Brescia shows that, almost without fail, developments in how we communicate shape social movements, just as those movements change the very technologies themselves. From the printing press to the television, social movements have leveraged communications technologies to advance change. In this moment of rapidly evolving communications, it's imperative to assess the role that the Internet, mobile devices, and social media can play in promoting social justice. But first we must look to the past, to examples of movements throughout American history that successfully harnessed communications technology, thus facilitating positive social change. Such movements embraced new communications technologies to help organize their communities; to form grassroots networks in order to facilitate face-to-face interactions; and to promote positive, inclusive messaging that stressed their participants' shared dignity and humanity. Using the past as prologue, The Future of Change provides effective lessons in the use of communications technology so that we can have the best communicative tools at our disposal?both now and in the future.
Mestizo Modernity by
Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the HumanitiesAfter the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, postrevolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country?s racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity?the mestizo. This book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican government believed it could modernize ?primitive? indigenous peoples through technology in the form of education, modern medicine, industrial agriculture, and factory work. David Dalton takes a close look at how authors, artists, and thinkers?some state-funded, some independent?engaged with official views of Mexican racial identity from the 1920s to the 1970s.Dalton surveys essays, plays, novels, murals, and films that portray indigenous bodies being fused, or hybridized, with technology. He examines José Vasconcelos?s essay ?The Cosmic Race? and the influence of its ideologies on mural artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He discusses the theme of introducing Amerindians to medical hygiene and immunizations in the films of Emilio ?El Indio? Fernández. He analyzes the portrayal of indigenous monsters in the films of El Santo, as well as Carlos Olvera?s critique of postrevolutionary worldviews in the novel Mejicanos en el espacio.Incorporating the perspectives of posthumanism and cyborg studies, Dalton shows that technology played a key role in race formation in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. This cutting-edge study offers fascinating new insights into the culture of mestizaje, illuminating the attitudes that inform Mexican race relations in the present day.A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodriguez
The Rise of Big Data Policing by
Winner, 2018 Law & Legal Studies PROSE Award The consequences of big data and algorithm-driven policing and its impact on law enforcement In a high-tech command center in downtown Los Angeles, a digital map lights up with 911 calls, television monitors track breaking news stories, surveillance cameras sweep the streets, and rows of networked computers link analysts and police officers to a wealth of law enforcement intelligence. This is just a glimpse into a future where software predicts future crimes, algorithms generate virtual "most-wanted" lists, and databanks collect personal and biometric information. The Rise of Big Data Policing introduces the cutting-edge technology that is changing how the police do their jobs and shows why it is more important than ever that citizens understand the far-reaching consequences of big data surveillance as a law enforcement tool. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson reveals how these new technologies --viewed as race-neutral and objective--have been eagerly adopted by police departments hoping to distance themselves from claims of racial bias and unconstitutional practices. After a series of high-profile police shootings and federal investigations into systemic police misconduct, and in an era of law enforcement budget cutbacks, data-driven policing has been billed as a way to "turn the page" on racial bias. But behind the data are real people, and difficult questions remain about racial discrimination and the potential to distort constitutional protections. In this first book on big data policing, Ferguson offers an examination of how new technologies will alter the who, where, when and how we police. These new technologies also offer data-driven methods to improve police accountability and to remedy the underlying socio-economic risk factors that encourage crime. The Rise of Big Data Policing is a must read for anyone concerned with how technology will revolutionize law enforcement and its potential threat to the security, privacy, and constitutional rights of citizens. Read an excerpt and interview with Andrew Guthrie Ferguson in The Economist.
Superior by
2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019" (Library Journal) An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences. Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between "races"--to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions--stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science--and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
