Bronx, cape town, south africa, california, london, portland, oregon, germany, minneapolis and florida among other places around the world. Just want to thank you again so much for being here. My name is nisha bosley, im a writer and editor at haymarket books and honored to be hosting todays conversation. Im coming to you from the occupied lands of the state confederacy and pottawattamie nation. On behalf of everyone involved in the event, we want to acknowledge the keepers of the land and the Indigenous People living here today as we assumede theyll be ready with their sovereignty and their situation. Before i introduce doctor benjamin and doctor roberts, now more than ever it is critical that we support independent publishers and independent bookstores. We can do this in three ways. First buying books from haymarket and others directly, second by joining the club, and third if you were in a position to make a donation, no matter how small, there will be a card on the screen about how to do this in folks posting information in the chat as well and we appreciate any donations you can make. This will be recorded and shared on the channel. Please subscribe to the channel, like the video and share it with other folks. Basically i want to let you know about upcoming event. Tomorrow we have an equitable opening at july 9 at 6 00 eastern then the next week the end of zionism thats july 14 and july 21 at 5 00 p. M. Eastern and you can register for all of these events. A few housekeeping events before we get to the conversation we are moderating the chat but we cannot guarantee the guidelines so anyone who does violate one of their comments deleted as quickly as we are able. For folks who want to follow the chat we suggest using the top option rather than the live chats and with so many people joining the call, we need your patience if we have any technical issues. If youre image gets choppy it may help to refresh and we will give you tips on how to do this in the chat. If the feed is interrupted for any reason, you may need to navigate back to the youtube page and it should resume in case of any introduction. This will have live closedcaptioned standard instructions will be posted. With this in mind all of us will try to speak more slowly. Please give a special thank you to patty nelson for captioning this event for us. We should have time towards the end of the discussion for qanda. Please post your questions in the window and we will get to them later in the program. Okay that is all the housekeeping. Now it is my pleasure to bring you doctor benjamin and doctor roberts. Doctor Ruha Benjamin is a professor of africanamerican studies at Princeton University and author of the awardwinning book race after technology as well as editor of captivating technology. She is also the founder of the lab that brings together students, activists, and educators to develop the critical and creative approach to justice. Doctor Dorothy Roberts is a University Professor at the university of pennsylvania whose joint appointments in the law school and the departments of studies and sociology. Shes also the founding director of the program on race, science and society. Her books include hell science, politics and big business may create race in the 21st century, race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty and shattered upon this, the color of Child Welfare. Doctor benjamin and doctor roberts, thank you so much for being here. So happy to be here with both of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So, i will get right into it. I wanted to begin with history. Both of you have been critical voices in calling attention to a deeply rooted presence of racism and what is often seen as objective fields like science and medicine. This president has a long history especially in this country so i would love to hear a little bit about both of your entry points in the topics. Okay i will take it off. Thank you for that introduction and thank you so much to haymarket and so many other great programs on abolition and policing. Its a special thrill to participate in this one with my brilliant friend and comrade. Knowing that we would begin with stating our personal history that led us to writing about policing in the context of science and medicine, it made me think back more than i have in the past about my entry into this topic. I woke up in the middle of the night realizing that i didnt have a topic of policing long before i ever acknowledged in public. Iive actually never spoken abt this before. I dont know why it has escaped me for so long. Maybe because it was 40 years ago. I remember as a student in 1979 and 1980 in law school when i was 23yearsold i wrote my thesis on police surveillance. So this morning i went down into the bowels of my basement and found a paper and its entitled wolves in sheeps clothing uncovering the role of police as political intelligence agents. On criminal law and administration. I dont think ive looked at this paper for almost 40 years now. And i just want to read the purpose of the paper, my conclusion, briefly. I wrote the process is to present a critical analysis of the functioning of police and america by focusing on the role as political intelligence agents. As best intelligence operations have been ineffective and unrelated to the stated objective most significantly the cost of political intelligence showing unlawful political expression and destruction of innocent lives to outweigh any possible benefit. And then i wrote the 70 page paper on the harm caused by police and political surveillance and i concluded all the reforms were unrealistic and they wrote an approach to the problem of domestic political intelligence must acknowledge the institutions function to maintain the present social orders of the repression of political dissent because of its underlying purpose, the underlining purpose is repugnant to democratic governments that produces such devastating consequences, the institution should be abolished in all its forms. The whats fascinating to me reading those words is the largely reflect my approach today. If we take a realistic honest look at the functions, 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 its defending aa group of people we dont hear much about today. Both people that refuse to testify when subpoenaed before the grand jurys put political activists in prison. Basically they refuse to collaborate in the policing prison systems. I became involved in the struggle when my former husband was detained as a political prisoner in new york city in the 1980s at the same time i became interested in reproductive justice. Again, my entry was personal. Midwives were the first activists i knew before the term was coined and thats because i had my first three babies at home attended by midwives in 1982, 1984 and 1986 and my sisters in harlem that are political activists. I connected m to my home birth o my awareness of the commercialization of medical practice and injustices in the Health Care System. Around the same time, i began to feel alarmed by the persecution of blac black women for using ck cocaine while pregnant. And while i left the Legal Practice to become a professor in my First Research project investigating the policing and criminalization of black mothers for in article challenging the constitutionality of those prosecutions. I realized they were part of a much broader history of state regulation of black womens slavery to the present day and policing with lots mothers was crucial to reproductive and racial politics in america. As i ended up writing this it was also foundational to my work with women of color activists to build a movement for the reproductive justice that could be organizing at the forefront. While working on killing the black body i became familiar with the socalled welfare system and discovered that it was an even more widespread system of policing and punishing black mothers. A system that is designed to to traverse and destroy families in the name of protecting children and that led to my second book, the color of Child Welfare published 20 years ago almost in 2001. And then around that time i began reading about scientific studies that were seeking to find ways at the genetic level in searching for genetic differences between the races. I began to explore the origins of the concept of race and think about the manifestations over the last 400 years, and i wrote my latest book to explain why the race was invented and by its resurgence in science, medicine and biotechnology reinforces Structural Racism and white supremacy. So, whats ties those altogether . I will explain more as we go through the program, but there are all these projects about ways in which biological explanations of the racial order are reinforced by science, medicine and technology, and they make inequality seem natural rather than the result of unjust power arrangements. The black womens childbearing and parenting in particular have been made scapegoats for the social problems caused by Structural Racism. Policing people that are deemed to be naturally predisposed to bad outcomes is not only a way of justifying and controlling them also a way to legitimize the systems like police, prisons in foster care. Thank you for hosting, and i just want to get some virtual flowers to dorothy who as you get a glimpse sort of pleased the trail in the academy and Community Activism and i get to bask in the warmth of that trail. I was thinking i should have done that on paper, too. [laughter] as i was thinking, first time in terms of entry points, just growing up in a heavily policed neighborhoods, i wanted a sort of insight and side i already took questions of policing, modernity when you look at it from its underside, the particular insight in knowing the world that has been invaluable to me and so in terms of scholarly entry points, for me it started it underground spellman when i was looking and comparing medicine obstetrics in particular and the policing of childbirth. I was heavily influenced at that time i dorothys work co killing the black body, and thinking about the relationship between the knowledge and how they are instead rationalized and not just who is harmed by that, but more, who is benefiting in terms of what is produced by this system. Then i was comparing obstetrics to black midwives in georgia where then come and even now, the practice of midwives is nows outlaws and sis howwalt andersot when we have these systems, the forms of resistance and creative reimagining they are always there and so excavating fed and bringing that to light as part of the story. And i think how it connects to the conversation today is that the flesh and blood police and institution of policing is one of only many spaces policing happened in our society. So part of the motivation i think behind the conversation is to identify and understand the broad landscape of policing because if we narrowly focu focd on one institution and one set of practices where spectacular forms of violence are obvious, then we are going to miss a whole slew of other sites and logic and tools that allow the policing to continue. So its important because it is like the duke of profession so we think about policing on the one hand and medicine have a long history of racial embedded in it from this origin so what that tells us is if we find it fair we should expect to find it everywhere in this duke of profession, which left me then from my undergrad thesis at spellman i was trying drawdown the title when dorothy about that sort of classic undergrad title. It was a moment of conception, racism, patriarchy and capitalism converged in the uterus. [laughter] so its like no subtlety, and i love it. So then i went from spellman looking to biotechnology using some of these questions and i think, again, what motivates me is to question things that we are not supposed to question. If we think about science in a bubble or technology as sort of hovering above society, every day people dont feel like you have the right or the power to question it even though its impact in your life. If you do not have some specific expertise, you are somehow barred from raising questions about it. But your expertise is your experience in the technology. That medicine is a kind of knowledge we have to give a voice to. So my first book was around to biotechnology and looking at Stem Cell Research and then most recently those questions of power and inequality on the emerging technologies around the date of science is algorithmic decision systems, and again its really thinking about how racism and other systems of oppression or productive. If it is its not simply harmed is 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. We have more and more time to think about the social impact ethical impact and we need to look at the input, who is producing it with both logic and the value and worldview so we need to talk about part of the story, too and the last thing again thinking about the black midwives and the other part of my work and dorothy as well as understanding that imagination is a terrain of struggle. Whose imagination reigns . To understand the inequalities and injustices that we see is that many people are forced to live in somebody elses imagination so when we think about the Digital World being crafted for us and for spatial position of race and inequality, that is the materialization of someones imagination and part of democratizing and resisting the imposition of that imagination is also cultivating our own liberal imagination and is a its not like an afterthought. Its not a luxury or just something for the privileged but its a terrain of action and we have to begin to struggle and work towards materializing in the world in which we can authorize. Thank yo thank you both so much. I loved that. You both hit on a lot of planes i would like to draw out differently. I guess just on this 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 the system we are not seeing . We see the violent and brutal system at times but kind of whats going on behind that in some of the places we may not be as familiar with it he not be seeing. Its interesting its interesting, ruha brought up this contract between medicine and Law Enforcement or the police, and i think its interesting to think about how racism is built into predictive tools in different ways and both of those domains, so we can think about racism and predictive algorithms and one way to think about how widespread policing is and how it takes different forms is to think about the role of prediction in all of these different institutions and it helps you see that they are all about policing people. They are 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 bully us and punish people. So as ruha was saying, whose hands are they, who is imagining the world these systems are supposed to facilitate . Its actually a world that is static as it becomes more oppressive, but the point is to keep the status quo, not to allow imagination of something more equal and humane. There is a way that these rewired imagination or social change, because they embed within them the existing quality so whether we are talking about predictive algorithms in the Police Department or 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 technologies themselves operate. Its the common purpose to facilitate policing people in order to do lots of different things, deny them benefits, keep them away from resources, deny them care, deny them the freedom, funneling them into prisons and Detention Centers. So in medicine, diagnostic alphabet from explicitly used race to adjust their output because it is seen as acceptable to treat race as a biological trait. In Law Enforcement it happened in a different way. Racism gets put in without any explicit mention of race as a factor in so theres all these different ways that happens but what is critical, and this is something pointed out in the book on algorithm and public assistance and maybe somebody can help me. I am blanking on the name. Automating and equality. Thank you. I love the buck, but its remembering all these things. But she points out that in the past, the risky individuals were watched, identified and watched. It was a form of surveillance. The target emerges from the data and those people that are targeted or people that are already treated an equally so it is embedded in the data already. The data is already structured to maintain their inequalities of the state agencies ability to apply sophisticated analytical tools to the massive amounts of Data Collected has radically transformed the very nature of prediction so the prediction today is even more than it was in the past a way of maintaining a racist social order so now, reliance on these Big Data Analytics is critical to the expansion of the regime because the states aim is to control populations, rather than to actually adjudicate individual guilt or innocence. Managing social inequalities, not aiding people suffering social inequalities and so Risk Assessment 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, so thats why you get some of these Law Enforcement databases and algorithms that are predicting toddlers are going to be gang members. They havent done anything to 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 prediction is all about. Also, these predictive algorithms facilitate the States Mission in new ways, but i want to point out, and this goes back to so