Black History Month focus: fighting racism with data & AI

A look at the Call for Code for Racial Justice community

A crime incident in a Black community where the police report differs substantially from that of bystanders. A judicial system where a Black person is more likely to be convicted for the same crime as a white person merely because of the color of their skin. Legal policy documentation that inadvertently calls out the Black community in a negative light. There are still many instances where we have not moved on that far from the issues the Civil Rights activists fought against over 50 years ago. The rise of #BlackLivesMatter in the 2020s has at its core frustration at how far we still have to go on the road to social justice.

Yet as bad situations often bring out the best in us, so was the case with the Black community in IBM whose grassroots effort to build apps to take on racism has now grown into a sizable open source movement.

Seven projects were released into the wild at the end of 2020 under the umbrella of the Call for Code for Racial Justice. Being open source, anyone is free to engage and work on these projects, covering topics as diverse as sentencing and the judicial system, voting, crime incident reporting and finding bias in documentation.

One common thread running through all projects is the considerable role data & AI plays. During the course of February 2022, we have caught up with a number of the members of the Call for Code for Racial Justice, who explain how the latest tech can be used against age-old problems. Check out their stories.

Demi first started working on a number of projects in the Call for Code for Racial Justice on the side. This passion led to a full-time position as the first community manager for the initiative, where she is now actively engaged in nurturing the community of committed individuals.
More on Demi

Preetika is an ally to the Black community who picked the TakeTwo project on finding bias in documentation using AI not only because it fit her skillset but it also opened her eyes to the implicit bias that surrounds us. She highlights the need for development teams to include more than technologists, such as linguistic experts that understand the relationship between words and culture.
More on Preetika

Based on her volunteer work to improve the relationship between communities, the police, and the judicial system, Jo Ann chose to focus on the Open Sentencing project. Arming defense lawyers with data on the racial bias in sentencing can help them make a stronger case for their defendants.
More on Jo Ann

Motivated by the events surrounding the death of George Floyd, Tunde uses his knowledge of AI in the Incident Accuracy Reporting System (IARS) to both gather multiple viewpoints from the community following a criminal incident and also to cluster those reports and look for anomalies.
More on Tunde

Solutions maturing and now being deployed

All the projects under the Call for Code for Racial Justice continue to be developed. A number of these projects are also being tested and deployed into communities to start making a difference for the people with the greatest need. As an example take a look at how students have been working with Five Fifths Voter to make the voting process more accessible, particularly for youth from underserved communities.

The sheer number of issues that we still face means that we can’t just spend a month considering issues of social justice. This has to be a year-round endeavor, and this is definitely the case with the Call for Code for Racial Justice. I encourage you to check out the projects — there are so many different ways how you can get involved.