Evolved in this event we want to acknowledge the original keepers of the lands that we are on as we stand in solidarity with their ongoing struggles. Before introduce our guest thank you to the organizer haymarket books now its important we support independent publishers and bookstores. You can do this in three ways by buying books from publishers directly and haymarket books and joining the book club and third, if you are in a position to make a donation no matter how small there is a card how to do this. We appreciate any donations. This video will be recorded and shared on the youtube channel. Please subscribe and make the video and do share it. I went to let you know about upcoming events. The end of zionism july 14. Incarceration from us to palestine. So i 21st. You can look at thes events that haymarket books. We are moderating the chat we cannot guarantee everybody observes Community Guidelines anybody who does violate those will have comments deleted as quickly as we are able. If you want to follow the chat we may need your patience if we have technical issues. We will give you instructions on how to adjust your settings in the chat. Always navigate back into the youtube page and watch without any interruption. We will have live closed caption instructions are posted in the chat and we will try to speak more slowly thank you for patty for captioning this event for us. We should have time for q a please post questions in the youtube chat window. That is all for housekeeping it was my pleasure to bring in doctor benjamin and the doctor wrote on roberts associate professor of africanamerican studies at princeton and author of the awardwinning book abolitionist tools under the new jim crow. Also the founder to bring together students and activists and educators to develop a critical and creative approach. University professor at university of pennsylvania on the departments of Africa Hannah studies and sociology her books include creating race in the 21st century reproduction and the meaning of liberty and the color of Child Welfare thank you so much for being here. Where happy to be here with both of you. I wanted to begin with history you have been critical in calling attention to the presence of racism like science and medicine. So to start us off i would love to hear a little bit about both of your entry points of writing about these topics. I will kick it off. Thank you for the introduction and thank you to haymarket for hosting this and so many other great programs on abolition and policing. Its a special thrill to participate in this one with my brilliant friend. So stating our personal histories that led us to policing in the context of medicine its more than i thought in the past of my entry into this topic. When i realized writing on the topic of policing long before i ever acknowledged ive never spoken about it before. I dont know why it escaped me for so long. But i do remember a certain student in 1979 and 1980 when i was 23 years old i wrote my thesis on police surveillance. Going down into the bowels of the basement i found a paper entitled the wolf in sheeps clothing submitted may 1980. And i think i have looked at this paper for almost 40 years now. I just want to read the purpose of the paper of my conclusion. It is to present a critical analysis by focusing on the intelligence agents that has been ineffective to that stated objective to show political expression to destroy lives outweigh any possible benefits. And i wrote a 70 page paper of all the harm caused by police with political surveillance. I concluded all reforms were unrealistic and to the intelligence to acknowledge the function of the present social order through political defense. Because of this underlying purpose is to democratic government with consequences the institution should be abolished in all forms. The first time i used abolition in connection with policing when i was 23. But they largely reflect my approach today if we take a realistic and honest luck of policing abolition is the only answer to the problem. I practiced in new york city and spent years organizing by defending a group of people we dont hear much about today. People who refuse to testify with political activists from prison basically they refuse to collaborate in the present system. I became involved in that struggle when my husband became involved in the early eighties so at a young age and Early Education by fire of policing and present at the same time i became interested in reproductive justice. It was personal and midwife and justice i knew before the term was coined and they had three babies at home attended exclusively by midwives and they were two puerto rican ancestors from harlem that were political activists that i had met in my work and i connected my home birth to the awareness of the commercialization of medical practice and injustice in the Healthcare System. Around the same time, i began to be alarmed by the prosecution of black women using crack cocaine while pregnant i left that to become a professor to investigate policing in criminalization of black mothers for an article challenging the constitutionality but then i realized the prosecution was much broader history of black women in slavery to the present day and the policing of black mothers was crucial to reproductive and racial politics in america. I ended up writing which was foundational to my work for women of color activists to build the movement for reproductive justice putting black women organizing at the forefront. And then i became familiar with the socalled Child Welfare system and even more widespread system of policing and punishing black mothers designed to hurt families in the name of children that led to my book the color of Child Welfare published 20 years ago forgot that time i was looking at scientific studies to have at the genetic level and differences between races. I began to explore the origins of the biological concept of race in think of those manifestations over the last 400 years in my latest book was written to explain why race was invented my medicine and technology with the Structural Racism and white supremacy. So to tie this together, i will explain what is to go to the program but all these progress programs are the explanation of the racial order reinforced by science and medicine and technology and with the unjust power arrangement. And those have been made a scapegoat for those problems. Those that are naturally predisposed to bad outcomes among to justify controlling them but also to legitimize the system like police and prisons and foster care. Shall i jump in . [laughter] thank you so much for moderating and haymarket for hosting. And to give a virtual flowers to dorothy as you just got a glimpse who has blazed the trail in the academy and Community Activism and i can bask in the warmth of that trail. I was thinking i should have dug up a paper also. [laughter] first i was thinking in terms of entry point just growing up in a heavily policed neighborhood and with that insight and side i already to the questions of policing and look at modernity from the underside in the world that has been invaluable to me. In terms of scholarly entry points starting the undergrad at spelman where i was comparing medicine and obstetrics in particular in the policing of childbirth and i was heavily influenced at that time and i really thinking of the relationship between authoritative forms of knowledge how they had been institutionalized and how they have been harmed by that that one who is benefiting to be produced by the oppressive system and then comparing obstetrics to black midwives in georgia the practice is outlawed and that is always there to bring that to light as part of the story and how that connects to our conversation today the flesh and blood police and the institution of policing one of many places it happens part of that motivation between the conversation is identified and to understand the broader landscape of policing to focus on institutions or practices so we will miss a whole slew of other logic that allows policing to continue so it is important so we think of policing on one end it has a long history of racial violence embedded in its origins. So that tells us if we find it there that we should expect to find it everywhere. From my undergrad thesis was trying to put down the title when she brought her paper up it was classic undergrad title a moment of conception racism patriarchy and capitalism converge in the uterus. [laughter] so no subtlety. So that i went from spelman looking at these questions and again what motivates me is what we are not supposed to question so think about technology hovering above society that everyday people dont thank you have the power to question if you dont have a credential or specific expertise you are barred from raising questions about it but your expertise is your experience with that technology so my first book was around biotechnologies Stem Cell Research and most recently the questions of power and inequality to bear on emerging technologies around the sciences algorithms and again thinking how racism and other systems of oppression are productive not only who is harmed but who is benefiting from the system and thinking about the relationship between race and technology in particular with the social and ethical impact and the input of who is producing it with flat logic and value so we have to put that part of the story and then thinking about the black midwives to really understand that is struggle and one way to stand on understand is that many people are forced to learn inside someone elses imagination so that Digital World that is crafted for us that is the materialization of someones imagination and to democratize and resist to that imagination also cultivates our imagination is not an afterthought or a luxury or privilege and we have to begin to struggle the world that we can authorize. Thank you so much. You hit on a lot of points. But just on the system i want to talk about what Role Technology plays with Law Enforcement and the parts of the system we see a violent work of the system all the time for places that may not be as familiar with. Its interesting to bring of the concept between medicine and Law Enforcement. And its very interesting to think about how racism is put into predictive tools and different ways to think about racism and algorithms perusing across multiple systems and one way to think about how widespread policing is to think of the role of prediction to helps you see they are all about policing people its not helping people even like the Child Welfare system where the Healthcare System that is supposed to be benevolent and supportive is actually designed to police and punish people so who is imagining the world that these systems are supposed to facilitate . It is a world that is static that becomes more oppressive but the point is to keep the status quo not allowed imagination of something more equal and humane. The way the is predicted is algorithms thwart imagination for social change because they and that within them so whether we talk about predictive algorithms with the Police Department or family regulation or education are public assistance or medicine race is embedded in a way to maintain the current racial order. Its not so much how the technologies themselves operate but the common purpose to facilitate policing marginalized people to do lots of different things. To keep resources out of their hands deny them care and freedom funneling them into prisons and Detention Centers. So in the diagnostic algorithm explicitly uses race to adjust their output because it is seen as acceptable to see race as a biological trait. Now and Law Enforcement it happens in a different way racism is built into the algorithm without a specific mention of race as a factor. There are all the these different ways that happens. But what is critical with the book on algorithms and public assistance programs. Automating inequalities. Thank you. Just remembering all these things but she points out that in the past the individuals would watch and identify that the new database surveillance word emerge from the data so those that are targeted are those that were already who had been treated on weekly so that is embedded in the data already that is already structured to maintain inequality. So the state agencies ability for the massive amounts of Data Collected have radically transformed the nature of prediction so today its even more than it was in the past as a way of maintaining a racist social order. So the Big Data Analytics is critical to the expansion of the regime to control populations and it is managing social inequality not those that are suffering from social inequality so the Risk Assessment is no longer no longer determining if an individual will do somethin something, its if the individual belongs to a population that the state wants to manage. Thats why you get the lawenforcement database so that they will be gaining members. And not be a risk to anybody is not the individual characteristic but the population that needs to be managed and thats what it is all about. Also to facilitate the States Mission in new ways and this goes back to my introductory comments that racism has always been about predicting and making certain racial groups seem as if they are predisposed to do bad things and therefore justify controlling them. So race itself is a categorization that they claim to project their behavior and their character. So the stereotypes to rationalize state control of whole groups of people on their race. So those are some of the ways in which prediction operates across multiple institutions to make race seem and as if it is a predictive factor. So it can be the basis of state control and intervention and violence. All of these tools are based on that racist ideology whether the risk of disease or criminality. It cuts across these domains that are tied together by the notion of prediction that embeds and reinforces the current state of inequality. Thank you so much for that. I want to bring in doctor benjamin as well. So one some of these technologies. I cannot emphasize this point enough with the idea even before you get to the hardware and Software Technology to understand race as a Predictive Technology historically been used to control and subordinate. It doesnt matter if you dont understand the intricacies. But you can understand your experience of being profiled and predicted what the stakes are in this conversation. With this idea of the new jim crow to understand innovation goes handinhand with containment. Often times we conflate technology with social progress we have so much evidence to counter that conflation but to produce new forms and by using this idea of the new jim crow it is a reality from the perspective of those that are harmed from these fancy new developments. Think of marketing and the promises that they hide the reality. The new jim crow is the way to understand and name things from the experience how they experience it. So to think about the conversation last week was so crucial how we could reduce oppression because we are not getting to the heart of it. That doesnt tackle exactly what dorothy articulated. So the history and the technology, that has always been part of the arsenal. So to lay out that social history and that technology was a lantern. That forced black people to carry a lantern to be easy identified after dark. Thats why the genealogy of facial recognition now. That was a technology of identification that goes back pretty far. So there is a spectrum from the most obvious forms of jim crow but we can see his rv on obviously harmful to the most insidious with all of the bells and whistles and to fix social problems. We want to understand that spectrum thats not the most harmful that we should care about whether we talk about those recommendations like if we open netflix over the last two weeks now the black movies are recommended to you in this moment. Thats a predictor Recommendation System based on the data it is collecting on you not just harmless but beneficial so now you could have these more are targeted experiences but that means in the same way you can be included you can also be excluded to targeted marketing allows those that sell goods and services to exclude certain demographics weve seen that with housing ads on social media that says i dont want elderly people or black people to see this so now there are classaction lawsuits against Housing Developers using that to exclude so now its not white only that knowledge through the back door of technology and marketing weve talked about facial recognition but also how you walk and emotion recognition every single biometric detail is being used as analysis and that way we shouldnt just focus on facial recognition although in the last few weeks weve talked about stopping those types of systems. I will give a concrete example on how this could go sideways very easily. One of the first schools to announce it would automate the people walking onto campus with facial recognition to tell the campus authorities if you belonged or not if you were student or faculty. Ucla was about to roll this out. Nonprofit called by for the future had an audit on the recognition system and it used 400 photos of members of the Campus Community 58 false positive linking students to people with criminal records. The vast majority of those for people of color. So now imagine that being triggered Campus Police being called, lapd and the domino effect all based on this supposedly neutral system. So the last point i want to emphasize is not just topdown and big institutions adopting the systems that are out of our reach but how we use every day absent Technology VariousNeighborhood Watch groups we went to think how we are implicated and how we perpetuate policing rather than just focusing on the institution how do we internalize the logic that these actually make us safer . We want to identify our responsibility and role and in the proces