Black Girls Code: Subverting Sabotage
Transforming Digital Surveillance into Technological Empowerment
As technology evolves, Black feminists and engineers/computer scientists must collaborate in order to create well informed innovations that are conscious both of the radical potential of technology to serve Black feminist praxis, and also the dangers that these advancements pose to blackness. For instance, it is necessary to consider whether or not technological advancements are synonymous with savvier ways of employing surveillance. While the fourth amendment is supposed to be committed to notions of privacy, judicial creativity traditionally finds a way to circumnavigate and permeate these boundaries of privacy. Technical professions inherently complicate notions of discretion, a privilege that black folks have historically been denied. This basic human right is continually threatened in creative ways that are intended to render harm onto Black bodies. Columbia University’s Stop and Frisk Algorithm for instance exemplifies how the dominant culture in the United States has established and normalized a pervasive legacy of “watching” its citizens. The response of outrage yielding from the students speaks to their insistence to refuse the quotidian violence that haunts Black students in particular.
A student from Columbia posts in the schools newspaper:
“ A Computer Science professor, Satyen Kale assigned to his Machine Language class a competition “to produce the eponymous cyborg law enforcer.” Drawing on data from the NYPD’s “Stop, Question and Frisk” records, students have been asked to create a machine learning algorithm to “decide when a suspect it has stopped should be arrested” based on characteristics ranging from “sex” and “race” to “suspect was wearing unseasonable attire”, “suspicious bulge”, and “change direction at sight of officer”. Stop and Frisk is a violently racist program that allows police to stop, question, and frisk any pedestrian who arouses “reasonable suspicion.” Numerous studies and investigations of the NYPD’s own data have shown that Stop and Frisk disproportionately targets Black people. It has torn apart Black communities in the city and contributes to a system of mass incarceration and policing that brutalizes, incarcerates, and kills Black people across the nation. A Columbia professor would ask students to implement a program that reproduces and aids Stop and Frisk policing with zero acknowledgement of the violence and harm inflicted by the actual program–and in fact suggest that machine learning algorithms like this constitute “the future” of machine learning applications — is an egregious example of racist, ahistorical, and irresponsible pedagogy. Data are not apolitical. Algorithms are not objective. To teach technical skills without also teaching antiracist, antioppression developing principles is unforgivable, despicable, and dangerous…” For more, click below:
Indeed technology ad cultural competency is not mutually exclusive. One of the dangers of developing technology is perpetuating violent practices, to which Black folk and Black women in particular will be the immediate casualty. Black women inherently lay at the center of technical innovations. However, when we deliberately reposition ourselves not merely as consumers but as inventors, we can then create the conditions under which technology evolves. Please take note that Black women actively engaging in academic labor and activism, striving to be socially conscious engineers, is an intentional practice of Black feminism. This creates the space to subvert malice on part of dominant structures into a radical imagination as to how Black folks live in America. Furthermore Black women as pioneers of technology forces society to extend its capacity to reimagine and engage with blackness using a rhetoric around our bodies that is created on our own terms.
While Black women in technology are largely an anomaly, their participation in STEM is step towards actualizing imaginative narratives of blackness as we move towards the future. Black Girls Code, for instance, is an organization that acts as a pipeline that strives toward recruiting more historically oppressed women into fields that have historically rendered them and their contributions invisible. The organization is black feminism in practice that works to revolutionize spaces that instigates their marginalization of Black women.
The organization intentionally disrupts the legacy of monolith that is technology today. Black Girls Code is dedicated to interrupting dominant culture by insisting on creating a space for themselves in a market largely void of their presence. Black Girls Code is a site of Black performance to which activists and technologists alike need to develop language around, when thinking through the necessity of being a Black woman in tech and how that translates into theorizing the legacy of the Negro in this contemporary moment and how Black women are imagining our legacies going forward.
