Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Race And Technol

Im coming to you from the occupied lands of the free fire confederacy. On behalf of everyone involved in this event we want to acknowledge the original keepers of the lands that we are on an Indigenous People living here today as we stand in solidarity with their ongoing strugglefor sovereignty and selfdetermination. Before i introduce doctor benjamin and doctor robert i want to thank the organizer of this teach in, haymarket books area now more than ever is critical we support independent publishers and independent bookstores you can do this in three ways. By buying books from haymarket and other publishers directly. Second by joining the haymarket books club and third if you are in a position to make a donation no matter how small the then low, there will be a card on the screen about how to do this and there will be folks posting information in the youtube chat. We really appreciate any donations. The video, this video will be recorded and afterwards it will be shared on the haymarket booksyoutube channel. Described the channel, like the video and do share it with other folks that you know. Really quickly i want to let you know about upcomingevents in this last june series. Tomorrow we have the struggle for police preschools and an equitable safe reopening read that july night, tomorrow at 6 00 eastern and next week we have the thoughts for next steps. Thats july 14 at 5 00 eastern and incarceration from the us to palestine july 21 at 5 00 pm eastern. You can register for all these events on events bright. A few last housekeeping items before we get to our conversation. We are moderating a check but we cannot guarantee everyone will observe our Community Guidelines so anyone who does violate those guidelines will have their comments deleted asquickly as we are able. For folks want to follow the chat we suggest using the top option rather than live chat. And with so many people joining this call we need patience if we have any technical issues. If our stream gets choppy and may help to reduce the image quality. Haymarket will give you instructions on how to do this. If our youtube feed is interrupted, you may need to navigate back to the haymarket books youtube page and the feed should resume there in case of any interruption. This event will have live closed captions and instructions for accessingthe captions will be posted in the chat. With this in mind all of us will try to speak more clearly. A special thank you to patty nelson for livecaptioning this event for us. We should have time to the end of our discussionfor q a from the audience. Please post questions and the youtube chat window and we will get to them later in the program. Thats all for housekeeping and now its my pleasure to bring in doctor benjamin and doctor roberts. Doctor rahall benjamin associate professor of africanamerican studies at Princeton University and author of the awardwinning book piece after technology, tools for the new code as well as editor of technology and is also the founder of the just data labs brings together students, activists, artists and educators to develop critical and creative approach to data justice. Doctor Dorothy Roberts is a University Professor at university of pennsylvania with joint appointments in the law school and departments of African Studies and sociology. She is also founding director of the penn programon race , science and society. Books include data invention, how science politics and big business recreate race in the 20th century. During the blackbody, race reproduction and the meaning of liberty and shattered bonds the color of Child Welfare. Doctor benjamin and doctor robert you so much for being here. So happy to be here with both of you. Thank you for having us. Ill get right into it. I wanted to begin with is to read. Both of you have been critical in calling attention to the deeply rooted presence of racism in what are often seen as objectives feels like science and medicine. This has a long history in this country so to start off id love to share a little bit about bothof your entry points into writing about these topics. Ill kick it off it. Thank you for the introduction and thank you so much to haymarket for posting this and so many great programs on abolition and policing. Its a special thrill to participate in this one with my brilliant friend and comrade Ruha Benjamin so knowing we would begin stating our personal histories that led us to writing about policing in the context of science and medicine, it made me think more than i have in the past about what was my entry into this topic. And last i woke up in the middle of the night realizing that id written on the topic of policing long before i ever acknowledged in public. Ive actually never open about this before. I dont know why it has escaped me because it was 40 years ago. I remembered that as a thirdyear student in 1979 and 1980 in law school when i was 23 years old i wrote my third year thesis on police surveillance. So this morning i went down into the bowels of my basement and i found the paper and its entitled wolf in sheeps clothing under covering the role of police as political intelligence agents submitted in may 1980 on a course in critical law and administration. I dont think i looked at this paper for almost 40 years now and i just want to read the purpose of the paper , my conclusion briefly area i present a critical analysis of the functional police by functioning on the role as political intelligence agents. Intelligence operations have been ineffective and unrelated to the preventing crime. Most significantly the cause of political intelligence thats showing of lawful political expression and the destruction of innocent lives far outweigh any possible benefits. And then i wrote the 70 page paper on all the harm caused by police in this political surveillance and i concluded that all the reforms were unrealistic and i wrote a realistic approach to the problem of domestic political intelligence must acknowledge the institutions function to maintain the present social order through the repression of political dissent because of this underlying purpose, because its underlying purpose is repugnant to democratic government and produces devastating consequences, the institution should be abolished in all its forms so i think its time i used abolition in connection with policing when i was 23 area whats fascinating to me rereading those words is that they largely reflect my thoughts today. If we take a realistic honest look at the function and outcomes of policing we have to come to the conclusion that abolition is the only answer to the problem. After i graduated from law school i practiced in new york city and spent a number of years organizing with and defending a group of people you dont hear muchabout today. Rand jury resistors. Those are people who refuse to testify when subpoenaed before rand jurys convened to put political activists in prison. Basically they refuse to collaborate in policing and prison systems area i became involved in that struggle when my former husband was detained as a political prisoner in new york city in the 1980s. So i had at a young age and Early Education by fire about policing and prison. At the same time i became interested in reproductive justice. Again, my entry was personal. Midwives were the first reproductive justice activist and i knew before the term was coined because i had my first three babies at home, attended exclusively by midwives in 1982 and 1986 and my midwife were two puerto rican sisters in harlem had political activism that i had met in my work and i connected my own birth to my awareness of the commercialization of medical practice and injustice in the healthcare system. Now around the same time i began to be alarmed by the prosecutions of black women were using crack cocaine while pregnant. And while left Legal Practice to become a professor and my First Research project was investigating the policing and the criminalization of black mothers for an article challenging the constitutionality of those prosecutions, i realized that the prosecutions were probably part of a much broader history of state regulation of black womans slavery to the present day and the policing black mothers was crucial to reproductive and racial politics inamerica. And i ended up writing to what women in a blackbody which was foundational to my work with women of color activists to build a movement for reproductive justice that puts black women organizing at the forefront. While working on killing the blackbody i became familiar with the socalled Child Welfare system and discovered that it was an even more widespread system of policing andpunishing black mothers. A system designed to terrorize and destroy families protecting children and that led to my second book shattered bonds, the color of Child Welfare published 20 years ago almost in 2001. And around that time i began reading about scientific studies that were seeking to find race at the genetic level and searching for generic differences between races. I began to explore the origins of the biological concept of race and think about all these manifestations over the last 400 years and i wrote my latest book fatal invention to explain why race was invented and why its resurgence in science, medicine and biotechnology reinforces Structural Racism and white supremacy. So what ties all this together . Ill explain more as we go through the program but all these projects are about ways in which biological explanations of the racial order are reinforced by sciencemedicine and technology. They make any quality seem natural rather than unjust power arrangements. Black womens childbearing and parenting in particular have been made the scapegoat for social problems are caused by Structural Racism. Policing people who are deemed to be naturally predisposed to bad outcomes is not only a way of justifying controlling them but also a way to legitimize oppressive systems like Police Presence and foster care. Shall i jump in . Thank you so much for moderating and haymarket for hosting and i just want to give some virtual flowers to dorothy who has as you just got a glimpse sort of glazed this trail in the academy and Community Activism and i get to bask in the warmth of that trail that she has blazed. I was thinking i should have dug up a paperto. And i was thinking about first i was thinking in terms of entry points. Just growing up in a heavily policedneighborhood. I did want that sort of insight and into questions of policing monday or any. When you look at monteverdi from its underside you have an insight in knowing the way of the world that has been valuable to me. So in terms of scholarly entry points, for me it really started in undergrad summons where i was looking and comparing medicine obstetrics in particular and the sort of policing of childbirth there and i was heavily influenced at that time by dorothys work in killing the blackbody and really thinking about the relationship between authoritative forms of knowledge area how they are institutionalized and not just whos harmed by that but one, whos benefiting in terms of what is produced by oppressive systems and i was comparing obstetrics black midwives in georgia where then and even now the practice of laying midwives is about lives in thinking when we have these oppressive systems or forms of resistance and creative reimagining thats always there so excavating that and bringing that to light as part of this story. And i think connects to our conversation today is that the flesh and blood police and the institution of policing is only one of many places that policing happens in our society so part of the motivation i think behind our conversation is to identify and understand the broader landscape of policing because it primarily is focused on one institution and one set of processes where factual or forms of violence are obvious , then were going to miss a whole slew of other sites and logics and tools that allow policing to continue so for me, bringing medicine into that is important because medicine is the do getting profession so we think about policing on one end, medicine has a long history of racial violence embedded in it from its origins. So what that tells us is if we find it there, we should expect to find it anywhere in this do getting profession which led me then from my undergrad thesis at selman and i was trying to jot down the title when dorothy brought her paper up, it was a classic undergrad title. It was a moment of conception. Racism, patriarchy and capitalism converge in the uterus. That was it. So theres like no subtlety and i love it. Then i went from selman to looking at biotechnologies and looking at some of these questions and i think again what motivates me is to question things that we are not supposed to question. So if we think about science and a bottle or technology as sort of hovering above society and everyday people dont feel like you have the right or the power to question it even though its impacting your life. If you dont have some credential or specific expertise you are somehow barred from raising questions about it but your expertise is your experience with that technology. That medicine, that is a kind of knowledge that we have to give voice to. My first book was around biotechnology with looking at Stem Cell Research and most recently those questions of power and inequality to bear on the emerging technologies around data sciences, algorithmic discrimination, automated decision systems and again its really thinking about how racism and other systems of oppression are productive. That is, its not simply is harmed but whos benefiting not only financially but in many other ways from the maintenance of these oppressive systems. Its about thinking about the relationship between race and technology in particular. You know, we are more and more inclined to think about the social andethical impact of technology , who is affecting rather than input, whos producing it and with what logic, with what values and worldviews so we need to tell that part of the story to and the last thing again thinking about the black midwives and the early part of my work and adore these as well is really understanding that imagination is a terrain of struggle. It was imagination rains . Wanting to understand the inequalities and injustices we see is that many people are forced to live inside someone elsesimagination. So when we think about the Digital World is being crafted for us. The physical sort of socialization of race and inequality. That is the materialization of someones imagination. And part of monetizing and resisting the imposition of that imagination is also cultivating our own counter imaginarys, are more liberatory imagination so imagination is not like an afterthought. Its not a luxury. Its not just something for the privilege. Its a terrain of action and we have to struggle and work towards materializing a world in which we can allthrive. You both so much. I lovethat. I think that you both on a lot of points that id love to draw out different threads. I guess just on the class system i want to talk about what Role Technology plays when it comes to Law Enforcement and kind of what are some of the parts of this system that were not seeing area were seeing the brutal and violent work of the system all the time but kind of whats going onbehind that. Some of the places we might not be as familiar with, might not be seeing so yes. Its interesting, we have brought up this contrast between medicine and Law Enforcement or the police. And i think its very interesting to think about how racism is built into predictive tools. In different ways. Those domains. So we can think about racism in predictive of the rhythms in policing across multiple systems and in fact one way to think about how widespread policing is and how it takes so many different forms is to think about the role of prediction in all of these different institutions and it helps you see that theyre all about policingpeople. Theyre not about helping people, even systems like the Child Welfare system or the Health Care System that is supposed to be benevolent and supportive are actually designed to police and punish people for the reasons she was saying. Whose hands are they, whos imagining the world that these systems are supposed to facilitate . Its actually a world that is static or becomes more oppressive but the point of it is to keep the status quo. Not to allow imagination of something more equal and humane. Theres a way in which these predictive algorithms works imagination or social change because they embed whats in them existing inequalities. So whether were talking about predictive algorithms in the Police Department or in family regulation or education, public assistance programs, medicine, race gets embedded in a way that maintains the current racial order. And its not so much how the technology themselves operate. Its a common purpose to facilitate policing marginalized people in order to do lots of different things. Deny them benefits, keep them away fromresources, resources out of their hands. An item care, deny them freedom. Funneling them into prisons and Detention Centers. So in medicine diagnostic algorithms explicitly use race to adjust their output because its seen as accessible to treat race as a biological trait. Now in Law Enforcement it happens in a different way. Racism gets built into the algorithms without any explicit mention of race as a factor. So theres all these different ways that happens but whats critical and this is something that virginia eubanks points out in her book on algorithms and public assistance programs and maybe somebody can help me, im blanking on the name. Automating inequality. Thank you, i reviewed the book. Im remembering all these things but she points out that in the past, the risky individuals were watched. They were identified and that was a form of surveillance but new databases, the target emergence from the data and so its people who are targeted are people who are already have been treated unequally and so there any quality is embedded in the data already. The data is already structured to maintain their inequality. And so state agencies ability to apply sophisticated analytical tools to map the amounts of Indigenous People<\/a> living here today as we stand in solidarity with their ongoing strugglefor sovereignty and selfdetermination. Before i introduce doctor benjamin and doctor robert i want to thank the organizer of this teach in, haymarket books area now more than ever is critical we support independent publishers and independent bookstores you can do this in three ways. By buying books from haymarket and other publishers directly. Second by joining the haymarket books club and third if you are in a position to make a donation no matter how small the then low, there will be a card on the screen about how to do this and there will be folks posting information in the youtube chat. We really appreciate any donations. The video, this video will be recorded and afterwards it will be shared on the haymarket booksyoutube channel. Described the channel, like the video and do share it with other folks that you know. Really quickly i want to let you know about upcomingevents in this last june series. Tomorrow we have the struggle for police preschools and an equitable safe reopening read that july night, tomorrow at 6 00 eastern and next week we have the thoughts for next steps. Thats july 14 at 5 00 eastern and incarceration from the us to palestine july 21 at 5 00 pm eastern. You can register for all these events on events bright. A few last housekeeping items before we get to our conversation. We are moderating a check but we cannot guarantee everyone will observe our Community Guidelines<\/a> so anyone who does violate those guidelines will have their comments deleted asquickly as we are able. For folks want to follow the chat we suggest using the top option rather than live chat. And with so many people joining this call we need patience if we have any technical issues. If our stream gets choppy and may help to reduce the image quality. Haymarket will give you instructions on how to do this. If our youtube feed is interrupted, you may need to navigate back to the haymarket books youtube page and the feed should resume there in case of any interruption. This event will have live closed captions and instructions for accessingthe captions will be posted in the chat. With this in mind all of us will try to speak more clearly. A special thank you to patty nelson for livecaptioning this event for us. We should have time to the end of our discussionfor q a from the audience. Please post questions and the youtube chat window and we will get to them later in the program. Thats all for housekeeping and now its my pleasure to bring in doctor benjamin and doctor roberts. Doctor rahall benjamin associate professor of africanamerican studies at Princeton University<\/a> and author of the awardwinning book piece after technology, tools for the new code as well as editor of technology and is also the founder of the just data labs brings together students, activists, artists and educators to develop critical and creative approach to data justice. Doctor Dorothy Roberts<\/a> is a University Professor<\/a> at university of pennsylvania with joint appointments in the law school and departments of African Studies<\/a> and sociology. She is also founding director of the penn programon race , science and society. Books include data invention, how science politics and big business recreate race in the 20th century. During the blackbody, race reproduction and the meaning of liberty and shattered bonds the color of Child Welfare<\/a>. Doctor benjamin and doctor robert you so much for being here. So happy to be here with both of you. Thank you for having us. Ill get right into it. I wanted to begin with is to read. Both of you have been critical in calling attention to the deeply rooted presence of racism in what are often seen as objectives feels like science and medicine. This has a long history in this country so to start off id love to share a little bit about bothof your entry points into writing about these topics. Ill kick it off it. Thank you for the introduction and thank you so much to haymarket for posting this and so many great programs on abolition and policing. Its a special thrill to participate in this one with my brilliant friend and comrade Ruha Benjamin<\/a> so knowing we would begin stating our personal histories that led us to writing about policing in the context of science and medicine, it made me think more than i have in the past about what was my entry into this topic. And last i woke up in the middle of the night realizing that id written on the topic of policing long before i ever acknowledged in public. Ive actually never open about this before. I dont know why it has escaped me because it was 40 years ago. I remembered that as a thirdyear student in 1979 and 1980 in law school when i was 23 years old i wrote my third year thesis on police surveillance. So this morning i went down into the bowels of my basement and i found the paper and its entitled wolf in sheeps clothing under covering the role of police as political intelligence agents submitted in may 1980 on a course in critical law and administration. I dont think i looked at this paper for almost 40 years now and i just want to read the purpose of the paper , my conclusion briefly area i present a critical analysis of the functional police by functioning on the role as political intelligence agents. Intelligence operations have been ineffective and unrelated to the preventing crime. Most significantly the cause of political intelligence thats showing of lawful political expression and the destruction of innocent lives far outweigh any possible benefits. And then i wrote the 70 page paper on all the harm caused by police in this political surveillance and i concluded that all the reforms were unrealistic and i wrote a realistic approach to the problem of domestic political intelligence must acknowledge the institutions function to maintain the present social order through the repression of political dissent because of this underlying purpose, because its underlying purpose is repugnant to democratic government and produces devastating consequences, the institution should be abolished in all its forms so i think its time i used abolition in connection with policing when i was 23 area whats fascinating to me rereading those words is that they largely reflect my thoughts today. If we take a realistic honest look at the function and outcomes of policing we have to come to the conclusion that abolition is the only answer to the problem. After i graduated from law school i practiced in new york city and spent a number of years organizing with and defending a group of people you dont hear muchabout today. Rand jury resistors. Those are people who refuse to testify when subpoenaed before rand jurys convened to put political activists in prison. Basically they refuse to collaborate in policing and prison systems area i became involved in that struggle when my former husband was detained as a political prisoner in new york city in the 1980s. So i had at a young age and Early Education<\/a> by fire about policing and prison. At the same time i became interested in reproductive justice. Again, my entry was personal. Midwives were the first reproductive justice activist and i knew before the term was coined because i had my first three babies at home, attended exclusively by midwives in 1982 and 1986 and my midwife were two puerto rican sisters in harlem had political activism that i had met in my work and i connected my own birth to my awareness of the commercialization of medical practice and injustice in the healthcare system. Now around the same time i began to be alarmed by the prosecutions of black women were using crack cocaine while pregnant. And while left Legal Practice<\/a> to become a professor and my First Research<\/a> project was investigating the policing and the criminalization of black mothers for an article challenging the constitutionality of those prosecutions, i realized that the prosecutions were probably part of a much broader history of state regulation of black womans slavery to the present day and the policing black mothers was crucial to reproductive and racial politics inamerica. And i ended up writing to what women in a blackbody which was foundational to my work with women of color activists to build a movement for reproductive justice that puts black women organizing at the forefront. While working on killing the blackbody i became familiar with the socalled Child Welfare<\/a> system and discovered that it was an even more widespread system of policing andpunishing black mothers. A system designed to terrorize and destroy families protecting children and that led to my second book shattered bonds, the color of Child Welfare<\/a> published 20 years ago almost in 2001. And around that time i began reading about scientific studies that were seeking to find race at the genetic level and searching for generic differences between races. I began to explore the origins of the biological concept of race and think about all these manifestations over the last 400 years and i wrote my latest book fatal invention to explain why race was invented and why its resurgence in science, medicine and biotechnology reinforces Structural Racism<\/a> and white supremacy. So what ties all this together . Ill explain more as we go through the program but all these projects are about ways in which biological explanations of the racial order are reinforced by sciencemedicine and technology. They make any quality seem natural rather than unjust power arrangements. Black womens childbearing and parenting in particular have been made the scapegoat for social problems are caused by Structural Racism<\/a>. Policing people who are deemed to be naturally predisposed to bad outcomes is not only a way of justifying controlling them but also a way to legitimize oppressive systems like Police Presence<\/a> and foster care. Shall i jump in . Thank you so much for moderating and haymarket for hosting and i just want to give some virtual flowers to dorothy who has as you just got a glimpse sort of glazed this trail in the academy and Community Activism<\/a> and i get to bask in the warmth of that trail that she has blazed. I was thinking i should have dug up a paperto. And i was thinking about first i was thinking in terms of entry points. Just growing up in a heavily policedneighborhood. I did want that sort of insight and into questions of policing monday or any. When you look at monteverdi from its underside you have an insight in knowing the way of the world that has been valuable to me. So in terms of scholarly entry points, for me it really started in undergrad summons where i was looking and comparing medicine obstetrics in particular and the sort of policing of childbirth there and i was heavily influenced at that time by dorothys work in killing the blackbody and really thinking about the relationship between authoritative forms of knowledge area how they are institutionalized and not just whos harmed by that but one, whos benefiting in terms of what is produced by oppressive systems and i was comparing obstetrics black midwives in georgia where then and even now the practice of laying midwives is about lives in thinking when we have these oppressive systems or forms of resistance and creative reimagining thats always there so excavating that and bringing that to light as part of this story. And i think connects to our conversation today is that the flesh and blood police and the institution of policing is only one of many places that policing happens in our society so part of the motivation i think behind our conversation is to identify and understand the broader landscape of policing because it primarily is focused on one institution and one set of processes where factual or forms of violence are obvious , then were going to miss a whole slew of other sites and logics and tools that allow policing to continue so for me, bringing medicine into that is important because medicine is the do getting profession so we think about policing on one end, medicine has a long history of racial violence embedded in it from its origins. So what that tells us is if we find it there, we should expect to find it anywhere in this do getting profession which led me then from my undergrad thesis at selman and i was trying to jot down the title when dorothy brought her paper up, it was a classic undergrad title. It was a moment of conception. Racism, patriarchy and capitalism converge in the uterus. That was it. So theres like no subtlety and i love it. Then i went from selman to looking at biotechnologies and looking at some of these questions and i think again what motivates me is to question things that we are not supposed to question. So if we think about science and a bottle or technology as sort of hovering above society and everyday people dont feel like you have the right or the power to question it even though its impacting your life. If you dont have some credential or specific expertise you are somehow barred from raising questions about it but your expertise is your experience with that technology. That medicine, that is a kind of knowledge that we have to give voice to. My first book was around biotechnology with looking at Stem Cell Research<\/a> and most recently those questions of power and inequality to bear on the emerging technologies around data sciences, algorithmic discrimination, automated decision systems and again its really thinking about how racism and other systems of oppression are productive. That is, its not simply is harmed but whos benefiting not only financially but in many other ways from the maintenance of these oppressive systems. Its about thinking about the relationship between race and technology in particular. You know, we are more and more inclined to think about the social andethical impact of technology , who is affecting rather than input, whos producing it and with what logic, with what values and worldviews so we need to tell that part of the story to and the last thing again thinking about the black midwives and the early part of my work and adore these as well is really understanding that imagination is a terrain of struggle. It was imagination rains . Wanting to understand the inequalities and injustices we see is that many people are forced to live inside someone elsesimagination. So when we think about the Digital World<\/a> is being crafted for us. The physical sort of socialization of race and inequality. That is the materialization of someones imagination. And part of monetizing and resisting the imposition of that imagination is also cultivating our own counter imaginarys, are more liberatory imagination so imagination is not like an afterthought. Its not a luxury. Its not just something for the privilege. Its a terrain of action and we have to struggle and work towards materializing a world in which we can allthrive. You both so much. I lovethat. I think that you both on a lot of points that id love to draw out different threads. I guess just on the class system i want to talk about what Role Technology<\/a> plays when it comes to Law Enforcement<\/a> and kind of what are some of the parts of this system that were not seeing area were seeing the brutal and violent work of the system all the time but kind of whats going onbehind that. Some of the places we might not be as familiar with, might not be seeing so yes. Its interesting, we have brought up this contrast between medicine and Law Enforcement<\/a> or the police. And i think its very interesting to think about how racism is built into predictive tools. In different ways. Those domains. So we can think about racism in predictive of the rhythms in policing across multiple systems and in fact one way to think about how widespread policing is and how it takes so many different forms is to think about the role of prediction in all of these different institutions and it helps you see that theyre all about policingpeople. Theyre not about helping people, even systems like the Child Welfare<\/a> system or the Health Care System<\/a> that is supposed to be benevolent and supportive are actually designed to police and punish people for the reasons she was saying. Whose hands are they, whos imagining the world that these systems are supposed to facilitate . Its actually a world that is static or becomes more oppressive but the point of it is to keep the status quo. Not to allow imagination of something more equal and humane. Theres a way in which these predictive algorithms works imagination or social change because they embed whats in them existing inequalities. So whether were talking about predictive algorithms in the Police Department<\/a> or in family regulation or education, public assistance programs, medicine, race gets embedded in a way that maintains the current racial order. And its not so much how the technology themselves operate. Its a common purpose to facilitate policing marginalized people in order to do lots of different things. Deny them benefits, keep them away fromresources, resources out of their hands. An item care, deny them freedom. Funneling them into prisons and Detention Centers<\/a>. So in medicine diagnostic algorithms explicitly use race to adjust their output because its seen as accessible to treat race as a biological trait. Now in Law Enforcement<\/a> it happens in a different way. Racism gets built into the algorithms without any explicit mention of race as a factor. So theres all these different ways that happens but whats critical and this is something that virginia eubanks points out in her book on algorithms and public assistance programs and maybe somebody can help me, im blanking on the name. Automating inequality. Thank you, i reviewed the book. Im remembering all these things but she points out that in the past, the risky individuals were watched. They were identified and that was a form of surveillance but new databases, the target emergence from the data and so its people who are targeted are people who are already have been treated unequally and so there any quality is embedded in the data already. The data is already structured to maintain their inequality. And so state agencies ability to apply sophisticated analytical tools to map the amounts of Data Collected<\/a> in sweeping surveillance is radically transformed the nature of prediction so that prediction today is even more and it was in the past a way of maintaining a racist social order. So now the reliance on these Big Data Analytics<\/a> is critical to the expansion of the car incarceration regime because the states meaning is to control population rather than to adjudicate individual guiltor innocence. Its managing social inequalities, not aiding people who are suffering from social inequalities. So risk assessments is no longer about actually determining whether an individual is going to do something. Its about whether the individual belongs to a population that the state wants to manage and so thats why you get some of these Law Enforcement<\/a> databases and algorithms that are already predicting that toddlers are going to be gang members. They havent done anything or be a risk to anybody but its not their individual characteristics, its that they are in a population that needs to be managed and thats what the production is all about. Also, big data predictive algorithms for facilitate the causal States Mission<\/a> in new ways but i want to point out and this goes back to some of what i was saying in my introductory comments but racism has always been about predicting. About making certain racial groups seem as if they are predisposed to doing bad things and therefore justify controlling them so race itself is a form of state categorization that ranks people by supposedly innate traits that claim to predict their behavior and their character. So these stereotypes are then justified, help to justify or excuse or rationalize state control of whole groups of people based on their race. So thats just some of the ways in which prediction operates across multiple institutions to make race seem as if itself is a predictive factor so that it can be the basis of state control, state intervention, state violence. All these algorithmic tools are based on the racist ideology black race itself is at risk whether were talking about the risk of disease or the risk of criminality. It cuts across all these disparate domains are tied together i this notion of prediction that just embeds and reinforces a current state of inequality. Thank you so much for that. I want to bring in doctor benjamin as well and talk about some of the things you mentioned as well about maybe giving us zeroing in on some of these technologies and giving us some more on that. I emphasize the point dorothy made, the idea that even before you get to the hardware and software technology, understanding race as a kind of Predictive Technology<\/a> that has historically been used to control and subordinate, it doesnt matter if you dont understand the intricacies of some new hightech thing, you can understand through your lives experience of being profiled and predicted against what the stakes are in this conversation. With that i really also wanted to with this idea of the new jim crow understand that innovation goes handinhand with containment. Often times we conflate innovation in terms of technology with social progress. We have so much evidence to counter that conflation. We should understand it just as well produces new forms of containment and by using this idea of the new jim crow its renaming the reality from the perspective of those are harmed by all of these fancy new developments. We have to think about the marketing of one tool after another and the promises embedded in even the names of these things. They really hide the reality for those are harmed and so the new jim crow is a way of understanding the power of naming and naming things from the perspective that one experiences it. So i want us and again think about the conversation last week which was so crucial how they laid out how reform reproduced oppression. I think about my colleague simone brown who laid out the social history and the oldschool technologies were lanterns in new york city having lantern laws that force black people to carry around so they can be easily identified after dark. That is part of the genealogy of facial Recognition Systems<\/a> now. Using the lantern. So that was the technology of identification and recivilization that goes back pretty far. Check out simones work and understand theres a spectrum from the most obvious forms of the code and the things that we can see that are basely harmful to the moat under more insidious that is promised and wrapped in progress with all of the bells and whistles of the fixing social problems and we want to understand on a spectrum that is not just the most harmful that we should really care about, whether were talking about those recommendation systems when you open netflix over the last new interview weeks you will notice the black movies being recommended on netflix and this moment. That is a predictive recommendation system, based on the data that is collecting on you and seems not just harmless but beneficial that youre glad that you dont have to wade through all the movies ever and you can have these more targeted experiences and what that means, in the same way that you can be included by this technology, you can be excluded. Targeted marketing allows people who are selling goods and services and advertising to exclude the hundred different demographics. You see that with housing ads on facebook and other social media that say i dont want elderly people to see this, i dont want black and lot next people to see it so now theres a classaction lawsuit on Housing Developers<\/a> that have used the targeted advertising to exclude. So you do only have a whites only signed that is so obvious is through the backdoor technology and marketing and weve heard a lot over the last few weeks about facial recognition but theres also date recognition, how you walk, a motion recognition, every single biometric detail that could be an object of analysis can be used in that way. So we just shouldve focused on facial recognition however, important that is and there have been some wins in the last few weeks in terms of the stoppage of the systems which we can talk about in just a minute. Ill provide a really quick concrete example of how this can go sideways, very easily. One of the first schools to announce that it was going to automate the vetting of people when you walk on the campus of facial recognition system that would tell the campus authorities whether you belong to or not and whether your a student or faculty. Ucla was about to roll this out and a nonprofit called fight for the future didnt audit on the recognition system by amazon and used 400 photos of public photos of members of the ucla Campus Community<\/a> and found that it got back 58 false positive matches that linked students to people with criminal records and the vast majority of those matches were people of color. So now, imagine not being triggered, you been a student or faculty and Campus Police<\/a> being called, lapd being called in the domino effect all based on the supposedly neutral system. The last point i really want to emphasize, this is not just a cop down process, not just big institutions adopting systems that are out of our reach, it is also about how we use everyday apps and technology, we think about apps and various neighborhood watches, groups and apps. We want to think about how we are implicated as deputies of the police. How we perpetuate policing. Rather than just focusing all the institution, how do we internalize the logic that these things actually make us safer and so we want to identify our responsibility in this in the process begin to think about and imagine other alternatives actually would make us safer and have a more cohesive sort of community and society we would like to live in. Thank you so much. There is a lot in there that i also want to pull out but i guess before we get into more of this about some of these technologies, i want us to dwell on the intersection around healthcare, the question of racism in medicine in becoming from doctors versus the question of racism and technology in the healthcare industry. So i wanted to hear both of your takes on that intersection. Dorothy do you want to . I think when we think about the way in which race gets embedded in medicine and science more broadly as if it were a biological trait in a natural risk factor, we have to go back to the very invention of race, i found as i worked on this, it is helpful to not just call race a social construction because people will say, its a biological category that socially constructive. Too really emphasize that it was invented and it keeps getting reinvented, it was invented during the enlightenment age, largely by scientists, european scientist who started to classify human beings based on highlights that they wanted to say was natural, in order to justify european dispossession of Indigenous People<\/a> in enslavement, African People<\/a> and that is talking about innovation and you think about all the innovation that is gone on in medicine from the enlightenment age to today, there have been lots of them and they have held on to this basic even premodern concept that some natural decided all human beings into races and that science can predict all sorts of things about people based on their race into the enlightenment itself was an innovation of theological thinking that god created the races. And they said nature created the races. Today scientists are saying evolution created the race and those are all innovation of the same concept. They reinforces idea by more enlightened and more advanced technology to prove it. So in the 1800s, Samuel Martin<\/a> proved a racial hierarchy that the advanced technology of cranial and and he collected 1000 schools from all over the world and measure the volume and said, this proves that white people are the largest and must be the most intelligent, black people have the smallest and the most ignorant, today neuroimaging can look at the brains of children who grew up in poverty and claim the reason they cannot escape poverty because their brains have been physically damaged by the effect of poverty or genomics claiming that genes can predict. Now more accurately because of the computer driving analysis in the still same basic idea with technology and also hiding oppression. This is what medicine does so perfectly because scientists led onto that in the race entry research to include minority help and treating patients by race in order to make sure the familiarity of the diseases are intended to and we give the right diagnosis and the right treatment. That is embedded into medical technology through something that is called race correction, as i said before, they dont hide it because medicine is for reasons but because their good intentions, they are exempt from any scrutiny about how theyre using race, race correction actually is embedded into all sorts of calculators to automatically adjust the output by race. So for example, risk excess meant tools for cardiovascular disease or for birth after cesarean. And talk about reproductive health, these technologies are hypertension and they all import race as an automatic adjustment in its mainly so that black patients are treated unto treated differently. In every case they fear medical away from patients. It gives you an idea of how embedded in how harmful and based on a racist ideology the doctors dont want to see and that is something called a filtration rate, the estimate for this really important indicator of kidney function and automatically adjusted upward so black patients. Any black patient, whatever this protein is in the blood, whatever the amount is, if its a black patient, africanamerican, its adjusted upwards. Any other human being its adjusted. These past serious implications. The higher the estimate, the less likely you will be referred for Specialty Care<\/a> and more likely youll be ineligible to be listed for a kidney transplant. So these concrete arms to block patients, i could go on to every single one of them, that is just one example are a result of this technology that embeds within it the belief that race is a biological trade and that black people have bodies that are particular and different from any other human being. So antiracism in medicine requires more than just leaning out bias in the minds of individuals and positions. It requires abolishing these ways in which medicine is structured to promote racist ideas, policies and practices. Again, i will emphasize in medicine and we can talk about this acrosstheboard with these predictive analytics, it is racism, not race that puts black people at risk. What i think is so crucial about what you share in this intersection of technology in medicine is often Times Technology<\/a> is the antidote for dealing with human bias and prejudice, it grows again, its like a reform, grows out of acknowledgment but we know this racism exist and we know for example that medical students think that black people feel less pain and more white people. So if we get a study like that the demonstrates that, for many people the go to fix, theres less time and technology that can do it because it will be less bias, not understanding that somebody had to create that, there is data that had to be fed to teach any kind of Automated System<\/a> to make a decision, last fall the colleagues of mine did a study on the healthcare algorithm that affects millions of patients around the country, its basically like a digital triage system trying to identify patients that are predicted to more likely to get sick in the nearterm, ideas that lets identify them so we can give them more attention and resources now so they dont get sick to keep them out of the hospital, digital triaging and what my colleagues found is that the racial bias in the medical algorithm with white patients over thicker black patients. It was an idea that those designed algorithm use this idea of cost, how much we spent on people in the past as a way to predict how much they would need in the future, we dont sell based on need and whether our insurance structure or everyday racism in the healthcare system, people who made are not getting the resources so if youre using the cost mr. Rick, youre reproducing their Health Disparity<\/a> in the past but the danger now that is hidden behind a near neutrality, you cannot point to the racist doctor or nurse who is denying care, youre looking at a computer scene that says you dont measure up, you dont get this particular outpatient treatment. What does that mean in the context of the pandemic. Many Healthcare Organizations<\/a> are using algorithms of all sorts, more oldschool types of algorithms or more automated advanced types. With these, we know for example, the basis of the algorithm is designed which many are, for example we decide whos going to get a ventilator or not. And if the algorithm is designed to ensure the person who gets the ventilator is someone who is more likely to survive by giving them the ventilator, you are using the person who is healthier and more likely to survive in building the understanding into the algorithm so essentially automating new gen x, is ablest, racist, classic, wealthier, whiter, able patients are more likely to get the scarce resource into we have to be very aware now more than ever that when we are automated with decisions and those decisions are predicated on the unthinking value of some kinds of people over others, we are essentially we could do things very dangerous status quo and this gives you a new genic understanding of who deserves care and not and we have to understand, this is really, the stakes are even higher now. Absolutely. I want to go back to this idea, its very important and i want to get both of your more thoughts on that and also particularly to talk a bit about the family regulation system as you call that doctor roberts. So thinking about the idea and also how that is intersecting. Do you want to jump in. Yeah, i just have to Say Something<\/a> about what you are talking about, ventilators because i just finished working on an article with a bio emphasis on that question because youre absolutely right, and guidelines that are already being used in other contexts, the idea is that its more efficient to give the scarce ventilators to people who are more likely to survive in the way in which we measure that were determined that is an algorithm that puts in these factors that systematically disadvantaged black patients and working on it though, i had to keep emphasizing, it is not just the technology, it is not just the factors going into it, it is a very value of number one thinking that utility and equity are opposing and we have to choose one or the other in utility should win. And then even thinking, what is utility, white isnt just a more just society a benefit for everybody. It is actually, but so often our arguments about social justice especially in the sphere of medicine and science get seen as pure ideology that god is not important and the more important questions and facts and reality as if science from the very beginning wills totally sink and the value judgments. Its everything weve been talking about is a value judgment, and ideology, the following and its so infuriating. Social justice, youre just talking about ideology, you social adjust, we dont have to listen to you. But to get back to the question i should be answering, and talking about the family regulation system, i did not claim that term but a very helpful term to replace Child Welfare<\/a> or Child Protection<\/a> or even foster care to understand that these systems are not designed at all to care for anybody to protect anybody or for anyones welfare and they are designed to believe and regulate and punish. I think family destruction would also be a good term for, i want to just for a moment, i have a tendency to do this to go back and look at the origins of these ideas and i talked for a long time about the origins of the Child Welfare<\/a> system in the united states, but i want to point out one aspect of the origin of policing lacked mothers in particular, black mothers and also indigenous mothers are at the most risk of having their children taken away from them by the system and i think its important to note, the Ideological Foundation<\/a> of the state policing of black mothers, one law that shows this so clearly and also shows the invention of race is the very first laws in the colonies passed in 1662 in virginia that gave children born to enslave black women who were raised by white men the status of their mother. So the children could be enslaved. A lot of people say, of course that would happen, they could have also been the status of white people since our fathers were white. And they were the status of the black children. It was a law that created that black women gave birth to an savable children even if their fathers were white. And i think that law cast their rules as the producers of subjugated condition. That ideology still supports institutions today, politicians and researchers in the media have treated black womens childbearing as social problem and that has to be fixed with fixing social problems. They routinely circulate the stereotypes about irresponsibility to support policies, birthcontrol policies, welfare reforms, foster policies, that are all designed to punish black women childbearing and black raising in one of the very first issues that i wrote about that was active around the prosecution of black mothers being charged in fetal crimes. In the way that they took new birth, thousands and thousands of black women because they tested positive of drugs and the images that were so powerful that they fueled congress abolition of the entitlement to welfare allowing states to pass laws better di deliberately aimd at deterring women that we see being public assistant from having more babies. In all of these policies pretend that its black mothers who are the cause of what is actually structural inequalities. That is what is out heart of the family destruction system. It is blaming parents in mostly single mothers and poor neighborhoods for not being able to care for their children, instead of dealing with, addressing and indeed the structural inequalities that are actually what is harming their children. And i think i get an idea of this failure to understand that this system is an integral part of the regime, i think because many people still think its a system that helps children and families in some way and even in some way, if its terrible then its where the children came from. But in fact regulating and destroying black brown and indigenous families in the name of Child Protection<\/a> has been essential to the white supremacist nation from its very origins as much as present and police have been, like the prison Industrial Complex<\/a>, the Foster Industrial<\/a> complex is a multibillion dollar government apparatus that regulates millions of marginalized people to the most intrusive intrusive investigation with someone knocking on your door and sometimes accompanied by police in taking your children away from you then monitoring families, forcibly keeping them in foster care in group homes of therapeutic Detention Centers<\/a> and recently black teenagers have been killed in the vast majority of these investigations, by the way over half of black children are subjective to these investigations and involve allegations because of neglect related to poverty, black families and indigenous families are targeted the most for this disruption and just as police dont make communities safe, Child Protective Services<\/a> affirmatively harm children and their families and does not address the structural causes. So their hearts meet their needs. Residents of black neighborhoods live in fear of state agents entering their homes interrogating and taking their children as much as they see Police Harassing<\/a> them in the streets. I just want to say one more thing because they say lets not be deputies of the police, the Child Welfare<\/a> system and mandatory reporting nate gunter make people deputies of the state agents, mandate them under penalty of law to turn people in if they suspect that their parents are now treating the children so that the children now get sucked up in the whole family is sucked up into the system. We really need to rethink what is supposed to be a system in which it props up all these other aspects as well. One other thing i was thinking about connecting to these conversations is how what you just outlined, not a call to ignore harms that are done, it is about completely coming up with a new paradigm in which to address those harms. And understand the origins of them is not the origin of individual deviance and benevolence but to understand what produces it in a much broader sense, its a more accurate diagnosis so we can actually offer something that actually works and requires changing the paradigm. Quickly, i will just say, you asked me about techno, and adding to the conversation, the word word is technology falling, we have two main stories that we are taught about technology that we continue to reproduce and come up with a new story in a paradigm into which to understand the relationship with technology and one story that technology will not save us, thats the techno utopian version that Silicon Valley<\/a> produces day in and day out in the story that technology will take all the jobs and the source of all evil, how you would love to tell that story and although on the surface this seems like opposing the story, one is helpful and one is harmful in terms of technology, they share an underlying logic which is technology in the drivers seat, were just affected by it. Were harmed or helped, we need to push those two stories to the side and look at whats happening behind the street. The technology that we have is a product of human agency and nevertheless people working overtime to sell us the idea that technology that we have is inevitable and we have to either live with it or find ways to tweak the edges that we cannot demand a fundamentally different set of tools that actually are lifeaffirming. And together we have to begin more than just one alternative but among other stories that are putting the power analysis back into it and to recognize only a small sliver of humanity is imagining in the world that they want and the rest of us are living in that. So what we are talking about is a much more democratic participatory in the fund day of technology but it cannot be produced by this concentrated wealth and power, the silicon fix as my colleague has written about which avoids up to 155 billion worth of taxes between 2010 and 2019. Meanwhile there helping us but avoiding ingesting and the public good systematically. So when we hear the Technology Going<\/a> to save us, we need to look at the facts and the fact that the people producing and the companies producing our avoiding the responsibility of sustaining and investing in the public good and when it comes to Public Health<\/a> and coping, this is actually created a context and when it prepares antidemocratic tools and disinformation and producers of discriminatory system and now jumping into tell us from the pandemic and police violence. But Contact Tracing<\/a> and they dont have the track record to back it up so we need to look to something fundamentally different as whether its going to be the source of our health and wellbeing rather than looking for techs to get us out of this. I want to ask a question along the lines that youre headed there. We have a number of audience questions i want to get to very soon. But before all asked this before we get there. So given the moment wherein, the pandemic, the fact were using technology, many are using much more than we normally would and we know that these technologies are made by people who are in some cases actively doing harm in search of a prophet in on many levels, i guess im wondering in the specific context from strategies for pushing back in how we both exist in this moment knowing that technology is part of our lives and were pushing back at the same time, what are some strategies that we can do that or question the technologies that we are using . Shall i jumping . One way to begin that is a part two conversation, we will give you a little taste. Its really thinking through every route and the term is produced, that is also a potential site about thinking about alternatives. As an individual and the Community Level<\/a> in terms of the wider body politics, i will mention three buckets of things we can be thinking about contributing to. One we printed out already in terms of the legal and policy context, we can think about as the ecosystem in which technology is about, so this tweaking indeed by using one tool is not going to help us, although that may be useful, however, a few weeks ago people who use zoom or free their data can be shared with Law Enforcement<\/a>, people who paid their data would be encrypted and protected and within a few days there were such outcry that they reversed that position. Thats an example of a very specific tool that all of us are using now in which people said no, there would be mass exit and it would be a very quickly reverse course. But we have to think about the larger ecosystem we see profit over people and the exploitation of data in the use of data. That whole idea that policy and legal system, a lot of great things happening that people can plug into. And thinking about new york, there was a win a couple weeks ago, the new york City Surveillance<\/a> Oversight Technology<\/a> project stopped, the new York City Council<\/a> just voted for a new bull that requires the nypd to disclose whatever surveillance tools that they are using and in an oversight system. So this is something that the project was working for free several years but in this climate, mass protest works and in this climate the council finally passes bill and in l. A. , there is an Amazing Organization<\/a> that people should support and plug into, lapd fine coalition. One of the things i love about them is a popular education model and this is not just for a select few people with degrees, and if it affects you and your community, then you get to be involved in have a say, one of the great tools that stop l. A. Fine coalition is amassing of what they call the stocker state. Hopefully we will add that in the chat but it shows you all of the tentacles, all of the ways in which people are surveilled and data is collected in the looking specifically at Contact Tracing<\/a> in the data shared across sectors in terms of Contact Tracing<\/a> apps. These are just two places in new york and l. A. But also in the midwest, there is a lot of Great Community<\/a> and policy work happening in st. Paul minneapolis and a few years ago there was something called the Innovation Project<\/a> at Public Schools<\/a> and police join forces and within a year they shut it down and we saw in the last few weeks and moving resources. All across the country there are these communities, initiatives happening, data for black lives, if you or someone in tech and again, rather than thinking that youre going to come up with some of the solutions, the idea is to put into the ecosystem and support organizations that have been working on social justice and black lives is a wonderful Umbrella Organization<\/a> that allows as a cooperation stop in. The last to set the bucket of things and we can think about, contributing and supporting are creative and subversive uses of technology, it is not just that we refuse technologies that harm us but we can create Digital Tools<\/a> that are working for communities, data justice tools, one example that i always invoke is the whitecollar Early Warning<\/a> system which creates a heat map of city with financial crimes that are likely to occur and even has a facial recognition system based on and what are we looking and what are we predicting in a very subversive way to question that and another version of that that is actually helping with housing discrimination is the antieviction mapping project which is using Digital Tools<\/a> rather than predicting the most vulnerable whether someone is going to default or not pay their rent or their mortgage, is looking at landlords and Property Owners<\/a> in taking the digital lens and turning it back on those with real power and authority in mapping in different cities in the eviction process and updating that for covid evictions. It is not just about giving us the data but organizing tool to house the data to target various kinds of laws and things on the ground. So again, the very last thing i will say in terms of education, the Equitable Internet Initiative<\/a> there working in detroit in new york and other places building up communities to grow digital equity, there is a great case study of this that was published in people should take a look at and adapt, you could take a look at the resources page as my personal website and offers a lot more, but essentially theres so many different ways to get involved in plugin on what youre passionate about and where you can get in and everybody has a role to play. Are we wrapping up now, im wondering if i should shift to my closing thoughts. We have a bit more time and i was going to take some audience questions if thats okay but i can definitely leave some time for closing thoughts. In terms of thinking about the family regulation or destruction system and how it relates to calls to defend the police. I just wanted to make a point about that and make sure i got that out and i dont know if this is a good time to do it. Absolutely. I have been concerned about and first of all let me just say everything that wuhan recommended would be beneficial to organizing around abolishing the family regulation system, it isnt as technologically sophisticated or as longstanding or organized as some other movements are but it is all about creating a different way of meeting peoples needs that doesnt rely on removing children from their home, putting children in Detention Centers<\/a>, locking up adults in prison and so everything that wuhan mentioned would also be beneficial to the movement to abolish foster care or family regulation. But i did want to make a point about the way in which some people have been recommending that in defunding the police, the money be transferred from police to helping Human Services<\/a> because health and Human Services<\/a> agencies are the ones that handle Child Protective Services<\/a>. I think we have to be very careful not to take money and resources and from one oppressive institution or system and put it into another one. First of all police and Child Protective Services<\/a> work handinhand and so you are not really moving it to some separate system at all and also building up the already billions of dollars that are spent on taking children away from their families and putting them in some type of substitute government custody is not going to benefit anybody, its not going to achieve what were working to achieve. So giving welfare and more power would only result in even more state surveillance and control of indigenous communities, there is a small but growing movement to radically transform or abolish the family regulation system, its been ignited by black mothers who have been separated from their children joined by social justice activists, Legal Services<\/a> provided, nonprofit organizations and scholars, i do want to contrast from libertarian calls to keep the government out of families and this is not a movement to ignore harms to children, its a movement to deal with them in a way that actually makes families safe and provide for their needs, but libertarians dont want that to happen, they just want government out but theyre not thinking about a radically different kind of society that supports families, our goal is not just to dismantle the current system, it is to imagine and create better ways of caring for children in meeting families needs and preventing domestic violence. So the abolition includes diverting the billions of dollars spent on separating children from their families to healthcare and housing and other support provided directly and not coercively to families who need them. Again the kinds of networks and movements that we see happening to abolish the Industrial Complex<\/a> are very much in tune and collaborate and collaborate with, the same mission, data point where its hard to say, is it the same movement but at least i would say, it is the same vision to collectively build a new society that supports rather than destroys families and communities and i would hold up as to two organizations that are doing great work with areas that people should connect with, one is movement for family power that just issued a really important report on how it is connected to this and also the national coalition, Child Protection<\/a> reform which would collect a lot and really useful information and connect people who are working in this area. I hope if people want to know more about this movement, they will look to those two sources. Thank you so much for bringing that up because there is a really important question about reforms that appear and exacerbate the very problems and things that were trying to dismantle and then rebuild elsewhere. I did want to linger on that for one second, if either of you had anything else to say about other examples were that may be the case, reforms that are posing as reforms but are keeping us within the same paradigm in the same oppressive framework. I think a lot of the examples that we pointed to with fixes, also about the protest like no money for police money for schools, the schools are another site of cursor reality. We think about the fact that the School Resource<\/a> officers which in police are many places funded by the department of education. You take money for the police and get more money for education and nothing from preventing hiring more cruel police. Again its all the institutions that are infected with this imagination and these tools for imposing social and racial control, that means its not just about shifting money around, it is about completely upending the foundation and reimagining. Of course we want education and healthcare and families and part of what we need to do as collectives and as a movement is to devote as much energy into feeding those alternatives as we do in terms of critiquing the status quo. Not just imagining them but experimenting with them and in many ways what were seeing of mutual aid groups allowing the world in many cases, not all but in many cases those are experience with mutuality, solidarity with completely reanalyzing the source of harm and therefore the source of lifeaffirming practices. So we are actually building right now, experimenting with alternatives through the many ways of my two aldi and many of them do not require new fancy tech fix. That is part of it. What would be the new paradigm is not what were promised the new shiny thing will be. Many times whats new is going back to some of our roots as well in terms of mutuality. Mutual aid was not invented in the last ten or hundred years, it is something that is grounded in indigenous communities and communities all over the world that have been smothered by a capitalist paradigm by races, white supremacist paradigm. It is actually allowing what has been there two floors again and again, lets think about not discounting these small experiments and not waiting for a down fix but the big ecosystem, that is important but there is stuff we could do yesterday that could begin to grow and see the world that we want. Even in our own imagination, we put a just in front of it, just this little thing, just me and my friend doing x, y, and z. Partly what it takes is to peel that out of her own thinking and not discount what it means to build world, the small world on a different set of values, they are based on a different way of seeing one another in a different way of understanding what in power. Its very particular notion of power and therefore we reject it, what other forms of empowerment and how are we cultivating. In wealth with certain things. We have to redefine, its like starting everything new, and this is the time to do it, we have to rethink all of our starting categories and principles to ensure whatever we create is not infected with these ways that continue to reproduce again and again, because we have change without actually looking at what is inside. Thank you so much. I think thats an incredible point into just bring in a couple of audience questions. There is a number of different threads, i will bring that into one question. From a couple different fields, people are wondering how to sort of operate from an abolitionist framework. You have on the one hand stem fields and in this case specifically stem fields that dont directly contribute, chemistry or physics and how to be in that field and do research and ensure in your work is not producing these kinds of and on the other side workers in tech, thinking about tommy already pointed to great organizations and resources but i wanted to draw this out a little bit in terms of what folks are watching that might be in those particular industries can think about and do in their work. I could start with a different kind of industry that im familiar with and thats Biomedical Research<\/a>. I get the question a lot which is very similar to this question from Biomedical Research<\/a> or medical students also who are being trained by people who believe in biological concept and race and think it is essential to doing medicine or understanding human bodies, there are so many people that think you could possibly do that without dividing people into biological races and predicting everything about them that is relevant to the study or the disease based on their race. And what can medical students or postdocs and genomics lab, what can they do. Sometimes they are also confused about how do we deal with race, because were being taught, all we know is a biological concept and i think one thing that is important is to keep in mind that race is invented and reinvented and to think about how its being used in any particular context if its being treated a as it were a biologicl natural category. Or is it being used for what it is. A system of governing people that have always been promoted in a higher fashion by dominant science and people in power. Also to realize, you cannot do this on your own, you have to have solidarity with other students, try to find people, im thinking in the academic context, its different in the corporate world but there are always going to be people who are higher ups who have more authority that you can work with. I will just give example of race correction now where there are now about four or five hospitals that have ended it in every case because of students organizing to indent and in the context of an antiracism demand for a new kind of education about race and racism, one that takes into account Structural Racism<\/a> and does not rely on the biological concepts. They have one so many exciting victories lately, it can be done, sometimes you have to form a group outside of the structure that youre working in, whether its a working group or an activist group, thats important as well. But it can be done in a has to be done because if we dont change the way in which these paradigms are being reproduced by people who have not bought into them yet, there is no hope but there is hope in people and the students, i dont want to say it is all just young people in older people are hopeless but i found it is the students, the people coming in willing to change the value, structures and paradigms that can make a change. Too that i would add, whether youre in chemistry or tech industry, know your history. In terms of, youre not the first to be concerned about this, so the history of organizing in your particular locale, i love the organization and science for the people with a history of engineers and technicians going back so long in terms of understanding, they are not just individuals, not just with the titles of the profession but they have a larger responsibility, if you are the first one seen the development of some harmful thing or the ignoring of a harmful thing, your responsibility to blow the whistle into work with others. Also thinking about the relationship between people and their profession and communities that are ultimately impacted and how to create as part of the ecosystem, the connections between before something hits the fan. And im thinking i want to recommend the Design Justice Network<\/a> and the design justice principles as one of the guides for people in different sectors to think about how to cultivate those relationships really way upstream in any process. And finally, begin to understand the hierarchies in your own backyard, it is so much easier to see the problem when its in the distance but in your own backyard, if youre in academia, it makes it so people can graduate from stem fields and have no historical literacy and no sociological literacy and be producing things that will have these impacts, that hierarchy of knowledge that makes it so you can think you are educated and proficient in a particular field without basic insights from other disciplines, that dives into the structure of what knowledge is valuable or not, likewise when you think about the hierarchies within Tech Companies<\/a> in most of these places have their residence and social scientist but again, who has the last say, whose thinking is actually giving the most value, you can have all the disciplinary diversity that you want in the world and all the racial Ethnic Diversity<\/a> but you dont have to listen to [bleep]. You can do what you want to do. It actually creates an ecosystem that allows these things to continue to be reproduced, do that homework in your own backyard, know your history and a power analysis in your own concept. Take you both so much, i feel like i have so many more things to ask you but in virtually were out of time. I feel like this went so fast. So thank you so much, both of you, this has been an incredible conversation, like i said theres so much more to say and just my gratitude to both the real for sharing such critical spiriperspectives and wisdom wis today. Before we close, ive had a few closing announcements. Thank you to everyone for joining us, we really appreciate your Great Questions<\/a> and for being here with us, i went to let you know about a couple of events coming up soon, tomorrow is an equitable safe reopening at 6 00 oclock eastern time and then next week we have talked to next steps, that is on july 1 4n july 21 we have decreased duration from the u. S. Of palestine, that is at 5 00 oclock eastern","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia903205.us.archive.org\/0\/items\/CSPAN2_20200802_030000_Author_Discussion_on_Race_and_Technology\/CSPAN2_20200802_030000_Author_Discussion_on_Race_and_Technology.thumbs\/CSPAN2_20200802_030000_Author_Discussion_on_Race_and_Technology_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240716T12:35:10+00:00"}