Race, Technology + Civil Society panelists share best practices for collaborating with community partners
BY PERLITA R. DICOCHEA (CCSRE Staff)
In a trans-disciplinary, trans-sector discussion held on October 9, 2020, with over 100 attendees at the first Race, Technology + Civil Society virtual roundtable of Fall Quarter, panelists Ruha Benjamin (Princeton), Rediet Abebe (Harvard) and Matt Cagle (ACLU) shared best practices for collaborating with communities of color and the ways they challenge academic and professional boundaries between science, technology, public policy and racial justice activism.
Moderator Duana Fullwiley (Anthropology), whose own work interrogates biological notions of race in genomic science, opened the program with a sense of urgency about the need to rehumanize data. “The lives, actions and thoughts that data represent speak to what and who we value,” she said.
For all of the speakers, the lives of communities negatively impacted by exploitive uses of technology is central to their professional work. As Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, Ruha Benjamin employed students, many of whom lost jobs and internships due to COVID-19, to develop the Pandemic Portal and collaborate directly with community-based organizations on various applied projects.
It’s the kind of work that led one academic to ask Rediet Abebe, “Are you a scientist or an activist?” Deriving inspiration from social justice action, Abebe, who is co-founder of and faculty advisor for the non-profit Black in AI, explained, “The process is not different and not less technical. It’s just a matter of what one’s work is applied to, not how.” She continued, “If I’m going to stand out anyway, I may as well try to do [the work] I want with whatever power I have for others to build on.”
Coming from what he described as a very privileged organization, Matt Cagle acknowledge his positionality as a white male attorney working on racial justice and tech policy within the ACLU. Cagle explained how the ACLU incorporates community partners at the onset of organizing a push for policy change, including discussing the goals of projects jointly, how to achieve them, and what the red lines would be in the negotiating process. “Together we reflected on how exactly the law should effect the community,” Cagle added.
The City of San Francisco’s ban on facial recognition technology in May of 2019, Cagle noted, is a prime example of the ACLU’s approach that involved many ongoing conversations with community partners to strategize on the effort together.
Reflecting on the discussion, attendee Bethan Cantrell, a privacy strategist for Microsoft, said, “It’s critical to understand how systems affect people’s privacy and agency, especially marginalized people. When experts like these panelists free up time to share their insights, it’s a real opportunity.” One of the points that was particularly striking, Cantrell furthered, was Ruha’s discussion point on predatory inclusion and her statement that “Racism is productive,” having always relied on forms of inclusion.
Joining the webinar from South Africa, attendee Ramila Patel shared, “Having grown up in the UK during the 60s, 70s, and the 80s, systemic racism only made sense much later as I grew older. It makes even more sense now and I particularly appreciated the links [made in the discussion] with how we now depend on digital communication daily and its impact on our lives.”
“I hope that people in attendance were inspired to think deeper about how important it is to see the diverse lives behind the data. In so many fields there is a danger in ‘abstracting’ human life into data points,” Fullwiley said, adding, “Our panelists reminded us of how crucial it is to avoid committing acts of violence, large and small, that range from social exclusions to the forced inclusion of individuals and whole populations into ‘actionable’ data for studies or interventions.”
Perlita R. Dicochea is Communications and Events Associate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, Stanford University. You can find her on twitter @dr_perlita.
