Facial Recognition, Physiognomy, and Racism
by Averyl Dietering
In October 2019, the Trump administration placed 28 Chinese organizations on a U.S. blacklist over concerns about human rights violations. According to a Commerce Department filing, these actions were in response to China’s aggression against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. Among the 28 Chinese companies and government organizations that were blacklisted are three facial recognition technology (FRT) companies, considered to be some of the most valuable FRT startups in the world.
For months, news outlets have reported that the Chinese government has worked with FRT companies to develop programs that can identify Uyghurs, track their actions, and send alerts to local police about “suspicious” behavior. Some of these technologies are being used to determine which Uyghurs to send to internment camps, which the Chinese government has claimed are “re-education camps” designed to teach Uyghurs Chinese language and job skills (government officials have also recently claimed that Uyghurs held in camps have been freed after “graduating” from these camps, but these claims cannot be verified). These reports of FRT as a genocidal technology are disturbing but unsurprising: for decades, FRT has been controversial, raising concerns about privacy, policing, racism, and homophobia, not to mention its dangerously high failure rate. The U.S. has pioneered the use of FRT for racial profiling and violating human rights with practices such as mining DMV databases to deport undocumented immigrants, tracking protesters, and violating the right to due process.
While the coding that FRT relies on is new, the underlying logic of FRT — that information about a person’s face can be used to identify underlying truths about that person and then inform decisions about how to treat them — has roots in the millennia-old tradition of physiognomy. Physiognomy is the practice of viewing a person’s physical body — most especially, their face — to determine that person’s personality and fortune. In medieval and early modern England, physiognomical treatises saw physical differences as divine marks that enabled the practiced physiognomer to know a person’s soul simply by observing their face.
As the English expanded their empire in the early modern period, physiognomy became inextricably intertwined with race. Consider this physiognomic description in Richard Saunders’s 1653 Physiognomie and Chiromancie:
the color of the face is black and leady, pale, or filbert-like; he is great-nosed, and commonly high, smelling of an Ethiopian, having great lips, the hair curling or frizzling, and very black. Such persons are great fornicators, and malicious, very undisciplinable, and yet ambitious to be near kings and princes, though they are ordinarily most unfortunate in war […]. (158)
This passage trains the reader to associate people matching this description with a plethora of negative traits, while also suggesting that they are like Ethiopians. This racist il-logic justifies and encourages readers’ racism by claiming that the racialized body reveals its own depravity.
Unlike physiognomy, FRT does not attach inherent value or meaning to facial features — at its core, FRT is a technology that plots points on a face, measures distances between these points to create a “facial signature,” and then compares facial signatures to each other. But claiming that FRT is a neutral technology that simply needs to be “used correctly” blatantly ignores the racist political forces that drive the development of this technology, as well as the racist histories of body-reading methods, such as phrenology, calculating facial angle, and of course, physiognomy, from which FRT emerges. Given that FRT is riddled with dangerous biases, it is heartening to know that the U.S. government has blacklisted Chinese companies who have used FRT to support the Uyghur genocide. Or is it?
To answer this question, I turn to a comparable situation in sixteenth-century England, when physiognomy was outlawed because of its association with foreigners. In 1530, two very similar parliamentary acts were decreed: the Vagabonds Act and the Egyptians Act (“Egyptians” here is a misnomer: the name of the people that the act referred to is the Romani people, who migrated from Northern India but were assumed by many English to have come from Egypt and were called by the racial slur “Gypsies”). The Egyptians Act warned of “outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians” who immigrated to England to cheat people with their palmistry and fortune-telling (sig. B5r), while the Vagabonds Act complained of vagrants who ran scams pretending to practice “physic, physiognomy, palmistry or other crafty sciences”(sig. C3r).
Together, these acts linked physiognomy, vagrancy, and the Romani people with each other. These acts show how the hatred of physiognomy was intertwined with hatred of the Romani people: the outlawing of physiognomy was not about the potential dangers inherent in reading faces as much as it was about outlawing the actions and practices associated with the Romani people, attempting to make their lives in England less livable.
Similarly, the U.S.’s blacklisting of Chinese FRT companies is not as motivated by concerns about Uyghur genocide as it is about weakening Chinese economic power to maintain the U.S.’s own trade interests. This is nothing new. From the Naturalization Act of 1790 to the arrest of Xiaoxing Xi in 2015, the U.S. government has framed its concerns over Chinese economic power in the terms of national security. To justify this narrative, the U.S. relies on racist portrayals of Chinese people as stealing U.S. capital, technology, research, and resources for China.
Likewise, since the inception of FRT, its advocates have used national security to justify the technology’s investment in protecting government interests: FRT inventors began teaching the algorithms to read faces with a book of mugshots and were funded early-on by the CIA (a proposal to develop FRT was sent to the King-Hurley Research Group, later revealed to be a shell company for the CIA). Given the long history of anti-Chinese racism that has portrayed Chinese people as immanent threats to U.S. national security, it is no wonder that the U.S. government is denouncing Chinese FRT as a violation of human rights while continuing to develop its own FRT for racial profiling and other human rights violations.
Just as the U.S.’s blacklisting of Chinese FRT companies was motivated by racist fears of Chinese dominance, outlawing physiognomy did nothing to make England safer; rather, it was part of a violent process of legislating against the Romani people. But it was also part of a process of removing physiognomy from its association with racial others and whitewashing it as an English, Christian practice.
Take, for example, The Contemplation of Mankind, a 1571 physiognomy by Thomas Hill, which portrays physiognomy as a Christian science. Hill argues that physiognomy fulfills the Christian duty to “know God,” “know ourselves,” and “know our duties towards our neighbors,” because it teaches practitioners to look for God’s marks on their own bodies and others’ bodies (sig. ¶¶1v). Hill critiques those who claim that physiognomy is inherently dangerous, arguing that it is neutral: like wine and knives, hazardous to those who abuse it, but helpful to those who use it correctly. Thus, Hill’s physiognomy is beneficial because it is practiced by a Christian Englishman, while the physiognomy of the Romani people is bad because its practitioners were stigmatized as greedy, deceptive, and desirous “Gypsies.”
Hill’s whitewashing of physiognomy is just a small part of a long and complex historical process to legitimize body-reading methods that sort bodies for differential treatment, such as phrenology, measuring facial angle, cranial capacity, anthropological criminology, and eventually facial recognition technology. When we hear of the U.S. government and other western organizations condemning Chinese FRT companies for aiding in the genocide of the Uyghurs, we also must critique the U.S. government and western organizations, who helped to develop the same FRT used to commit this genocide. We must also critique western academia for publishing papers, inviting speakers, and hosting conferences that tried to scientifically legitimize the ethnic identification of Uyghurs through FRT.
Finally, we must recognize that the U.S. government and organizations are using their condemnation of Chinese FRT companies to produce a veneer of morality, to hide their own racist uses of FRT, and to claim, like early modern physiognomers, that FRT is a neutral tool that is bad in the hands of racial others but good when serving white supremacy. We must absolutely condemn the genocide of the Uyghur people, but focusing our condemnation on the Chinese FRT companies involved in this genocide without condemning the U.S.’s direct involvement in developing FRT and pioneering its use as a racist technology not only fails to help the Uyghurs and other minorities who have been targeted by FRT, but also reinforces anti-Chinese racism that makes the lives of Chinese people in the U.S. less livable.
Is there ever such a thing as ethical FRT? This is a seemingly innocent question, but it ignores the racist and violent history of body-reading methods FRT developed from, the abundant human rights violations that FRT perpetuates, its inherently faulty and racist logic, and the way that “ethical FRT” is an empty promise used to justify even more invasive uses of the technology. Instead, let me respond with another question: How much history are we willing to ignore and how many more genocides must be committed before we abandon these racist methods?
Averyl Dietering is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Front Matter: Reading and Writing the Forehead in Early Modern Literature,” which argues that the forehead was imagined as a privileged site of knowledge about the body, a text that could reveal one’s thoughts, emotions, morality, race, and sexuality, among other information. From the cuckold’s horns to foreheads that were cosmetically whitened or demonically marked, “Front Matter” explores the early modern landscape of bodily legibility and the race, gender, and class structures that read some bodies as less human and less valuable. She has published in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 and is currently writing pieces on racial drag and punitive forehead branding and on how Afro-pessimism can be used to analyze the early modern roots of white supremacy in anatomical texts. You can connect with her on Twitter at @ADietering.
The author would like to thank Su Fang Ng, Sydnee Wagner, Amanda Kong, and Kristen Cardon for reading and responding to earlier drafts of this piece.
