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 some of what i was saying in my introductory comments that racism has always been about predicting, about making search certain racial groups feel they are predisposed to do bad things and therefore justify controlling them. So, race itself is a form of state categorization that links people they supposedly traits that are claimed to predict their behavior and character. So these stereotypes are then justified or rationalize state control of whole groups of people. So that is some of the ways in which prediction operates across multiple institutions to make race seem as if it itself is a predictive factor so that it can be the basis of state control and state intervention in state violence. All of these tools are based on the racist ideology that black race itself is a risk whether we are talking about the risk of disease or the risk of criminality, it cuts across all of these domains that are tied together by this notion of prediction that embeds and reinforces a current state of inequality. Thank you so much for that. I want to bring in doctor benjamin as well to talk about some of the things you mentioned and also just maybe some of these technologies and giving us some more on that. I cannot emphasize the point made enough, the idea that even before you get to the hardware and software technology, understanding race as a kind of Predictive Technology that has historically been used to controlling the subordinate. It doesnt matter if you dont understand the intricacies of some new hightech thing, you can understand your lived experience of being profiled and what the stakes are in this conversation. With that i also want to win this idea of the new code and understand innovation goes handinhand with containment, often times we contemplate innovation in terms of technology with social progress. We have so much evidence to counter that completion that we should understand that it just as well produces new forms of containment and by using this idea it is renaming the reality from the perspective of those who are harmed by all of these fancy new develop its. We have to think about the marketing of one after another and the promise i thomas is embn the names of these things. They hide the reality from those who are harmed, so the new way is understanding the power of naming things from the perspective that one experiences it. And so with that, and begin thinkincommand againthinking abn last week was so crucial how they laid out how reforms reproduced depression because we are not really getting to the heart of it. We are creating a new fix that doesnt tackle exactly what dorothy articulated. If we think about the history of this, the new tools and technologies, that has always been part of the arsenal of oppression. And i think here about my colleagues were sort of laying out the social history, and one of the kind of oldschool technologies new york city having lantern laws that forced black people to carry around lanterns so they could be easily identified after dark. Thats part of the genealogy of the facial recognition system now, using the lantern. So that was a technology of the identificatioidentification andl waystation that goes back pretty far. So, check out samoans were and understand there is a spectrum from the most obvious forms of the new jim crow, the things we can sort of see are obviously harmful to the more insidious, the stuff that comes at us wrapped in progress with all of the bells and whistles of benevolence and fixing social problems. So, we want to understand it on the spectrum but its not just the most harmful ones we should really care about. Whether we are talking about those Recommendation Systems you know, when you open netflix over the last few weeks youll probably noticed the black movies being recommended to you on netflix in this moment. So thats a predictive Recommendation System based on the idea that it is collecting which seems not just harmless but kind of beneficial. Like youre glad you dont have to go through all the movies and you can sort of have these more targeted experiences, but what that means is that in the same way that you can be included and seen by this technology, you can be excluded. For targeted marketing allows people who are selling goods and services or advertising to expose certain demographics. We see that with housing ads on facebook and other social media thats a i dont want elderly people to see this so there are no classaction lawsuits against Housing Developers that have used that for targeted advertising to exclude said you dont have to sign up anymore that is so obvious that its in the Vector Technology and marketing. Weve heard a lot of that over the last few weeks up the facial recognition, but theres also state recognition how you walk into emotional recognition. Every biometric detail that could be an object of analysis is being used in that way so to focus on facial recognition however important it is and in terms of those systems that we can talk about in just a minute others provide a concrete example of how this can go sideways very easily. One that is going to automate it would tell them whether you were a student, staff or faculty. They were about to roll this out and a nonprofit did a kind of audit on the recognition system produced and used 400 photos of publicly available photos of the community and found it got 58 false positive matches that leaked to those with a criminal record vast majority of the records matched with people of color for now imagine being a student or faculty into the kind of domino effect based on this neutral system. The last point i want to emphasize this isnt just big institutions adopting systems that are out of our reach. Its also about how we use these every day technologies and think about things like the citizen at, Neighborhood Watch groups. We want to think about how we are implicated, how we perpetuate policing rather than just focusing on the institution, how do we internalize the logic of things and make us safer so we sort of want to identify our responsibility and go in this and in the process began to think about and imagine other alternatives that would make us safer and have a more Cohesive Society that we would like to live in. Thank you so much. There is a lot in there that i also want to pull out but before we get into more of this about some of these technologies, i want to dwell on the intersection around healthcare. The question of racism in medicine may be coming from doctors versus the question of racism and technology in the healthcare industry. So i wanted to hear both of your takes on that. Sure. When we think about the way in which race gets embedded in medicine and science more broadly as if it were a biological trait, as if it were a natural risk factor, we have to go back to the very invention of race. I found it is helpful to not just call race a social construction because people will say its a biological character that is socially constructed. But to emphasize that it was invented, and it keeps getting reinvented during the enlightenment age by scientists who started to classify human beings based on the racial hierarchy that they wanted to see was natural that it was in order to justify the disposition of Indigenous People and enslavement of african people. From the enlightenment age to today, thereve been lots of them but theyve held off to the premodern concept of todays scientists are saying evolution created the race and those are all innovations of the same concept all it does is reinforce this idea. Now we have more advanced technology to prove it so in the 18 hundreds, they proved this racial hierarchy and collected them all over the world and measured the volume of a. Genes can predict things like educational attainment. Now more accurately and precisely because of the databases and computerized analysis, but its still the same basic idea dressed up with new technology. And also jumping off of the really important point about hiding oppression, this is what that is and does so perfectly because and the scientists latched on to that and say we are doing this racial research to improve Minority Health or treating patients by race in order to make sure that the peculiarities of the diseases are attended to and we give the right diagnosis and treatment. Well, that is embedded into medical technology through something called race correction. As i said before, they dont hide it because it is supposed to be for benevolent altruistic reasons that because of their good intentions they are supposed to be exempt from any scrutiny about how they are using race, so it is embedded into all sorts of critical calculators that automatically adjust the output so for example, Risk Assessment tools for breast cancer, bone fractures were necessary in, weve talked about health and birthing. These technologies test for hypertension. They all import race and automatic adjustments and its mainly so that they are treated differently and in every case they steer carefully from the patients. I will talk briefly to give you an idea of how embedded this is and how it is based on a racist ideology that doctors dont want to see and its automatically adjusted up or. Any black patient, whatever this protein is in the blood, whatever the amount is, it is adjusted and a different number. These have serious implications because the higher the estimate, the less likely you will be for Specialty Care and the more likely you will be ineligible to be waitlisted for a kidney transplant so there are these concrete harms the black patients that i could go on, but that is one example of the result of this technology that is embedded within it race is a biological trait and black people have bodies that are peculiar and different from any other human being. So, antiracism in medicine requires more than just a individual positions. It also requires abolishing these ways in which medicine is structured to promote racist ideas, policies and practices. And again, i will emphasize in medicine and we can talk about this across the board with these predictive analytics, it is racism, not race that pits put people at risk. What is so crucial about what youve shared in this intersection of technology and medicine is often Times Technology is the antidote for dealing with human bias and prejudice so again its like a reform. It grows out of an acknowledgment we know that it exists and we know for example medical students think black people feel less pain so you get a study like that that demonstrates that and then for many people, the technology can do it because it would be not understanding someone had to create that, there was data that was to teach any kind of Automated System and just last fall some colleagues of mine actually did a study on this healthcare algorithm that affects millions of patients around the country. Its basically like a digital triaging system trying to identify patients predicted to be more likely to get sick in the near term. So the idea is lets identify them so we can give them more attention and resources now so that they dont get sick, to keep them out of the hospital. So its digital triaging. With my colleagues found over my and his team is the racial bias and medical algorithms favored white patients over six black patients treated so the nurse that designed the algorithm used this idea of costs. How much we spend on people in the past as a way to pick how much they would need in the future. That we dont spend based on need. So whether its for insurance structure, everyday racism in the healthcare system, people who need it are often not getting the resources. So, if you are using that cost metric to predict the future, then you are a centrally reproducing the Health Disparities that have existed in the past. The danger now is that it is hidden behind the neutrality so you cant point to the racist or a nurse, you are looking at a computer screen that says you dont measure up. You dont get this particular outpatient treatment. So, what does that mean in the context of the pandemic . Many Healthcare Organizations are using algorithms of all sort. More oldschool types of algorithms or automated advanced types. With these we know for example the basis of the algorithm is defined which many are. Who is going to get a ventilator or not and if that algorithm is designed to ensure the person that gets the ventilator is someone that is more likely to survive by giving them the ventilator so you are using the persons that are healthier and more likely to survive and you are building that understanding into this algorithm so it is essentially automating eugenics. Its a place, racist, class. So these patients are more likely to get that scarce resource so we have to be very aware now more than ever that when we are automating these decisions and they are predicated on the value of some kind of people over others, we are a centrally reproducing very dangerous status quo is and in this case the eugenic understanding of who deserves care and thought so we have to understand the stakes are even higher now. Absolutely. I want to go back to this idea of the benevolence because it is very important and i want to get both of your thoughts on that and also particularly talk a little bit about the family regulation system as we called it, doctor roberts. So thinking about that idea of techno benevolence and habits affecting the system. You want to jump in . I just have to Say Something about what you were just talking about with ventilators, because i just finished working on an article with a doctor at penn and a bioethicist on that question because youre absolutely right. In guidelines that are already being used in other contexts, the idea is that its more efficient, utilitarian to give the scarce into theaters to people who are more likely to survive and the way in which they measure that were determined that is an algorithm that pits in these factors that systematically disadvantage black patients. And working on it i have to keep emphasizing that its not just the technology or the fact hers they are going into. Its the very value of number one, thinking that utility and equity are opposing and we have to choose one or the other and utility shed when. Then, even thinking what is utility. Why isnt a more just society a benefit for everybody . It is actually. So often our arguments about social justice, especially in the cf medicine and science gets seen as just pure ideology thats not important because we have to deal with the more important questions and facts and reality as if science isnt going to seem kinseys judgments. Everything weve been talking about is a value judgment, its an ideology that science is following and its so infuriating you are just talking about ideology. They dont have to listen to you. [laughter] but to get back to one of the questions i should be answering, i didnt claim that term, but i think that its a very hopeful term to replace Child Welfare or protection or foster care which i understand these systems are not designed at all to care for anybody or protect anybody or for anyones welfare and they are designed to police and regulate and punish. I have a tendency to do this i want to go back and look at the origins of these ideas. I could talk for a long time about the socalled Child Welfare system in the united states, but i want to point out one aspect of the origin of policing black voters in mothern particular because black mothers and also indigenous mothers are at the most risk of having their children taken away from them by this system the Ideological Foundation of the state policing of black mothers. One law that shows us so clearly and the invention of race is one of the very first in the colonies passed in 62 in virginia that gave children more for those that were raped by white men, the status of their mothers so that the children also could be enslaved. A lot of people say of course that would happen, but they could have also been given the status of white people since their fathers were white. We are so used to now the idea but of course they would have the status of black children, but it was the law that created these ideas got black women gave birth to children to be enslaved even if their fathers were white, and i think that podcast block womens wombs as the producer of their children subjugated condition and that ideology still supports these institutions today so politicians and researchers into the media have treated them as an urgent social problem that has to be thick as. Weve talked about fixing social problems. So they routinely circulate these stereotypes about this complex maternal responsibility to support all sorts of policies, birth control, welfare reform, foster care policies, Law Enforcement policies that are all designed to police and punish black women, child bearing and child raising. And they mentioned as one of the first issues i wrote about. Active around the prosecutions of black mothers being charged with crime and the way Child Welfare authorities took newborns, thousands and thousands because they tested positive for drugs. The images of the mythical black welfare queens i was so powerful that they fueled congress is abolition of the entitlement to welfare as allowing states now to pass the laws that are deliberately aimed at deterring women receiving public assistance from having more babies and all of these policies pretend that if black mothers who are the cause of what is actually structural and quality and that is what is at the heart of the family destruction system. Explaining pairings, mostly single mothers living in poor neighborhoods, for not being able to care for their children instead of dealing with, addressing and ending the structural inequalities that are actually what is harming their children. And i think that this goes to the idea of benevolence, this failure to understand the system is an integral part because many people still think that its somehow a system that helps children and families in some way even if it is terrible, its better than where the children came from but in fact regulating and destroying plaques, brown bd indigenous families in the name of protection has been a essential to the white supremacist nation from its very origins as much as prisons and police have been. Like the prison industrial complex, it is a multibillion dollar government apparatus that regulates millions of marginalized people to the most intrusive investigations with someone knocking on your door and taking your children away from you then monitoring families, forcibly keeping them in foster care into group homes or therapeutic Detention Centers where black teenagers have been killed and its vast majority of these investigations that by the way have over half of black children are subjected to these investigations into allegations of neglect related to poverty. A blacblack families and indiges families are targeted the most part this disruption and just as policplease dont make communits safe, Child Protective Services harm children and their families and doesnt address the structural causes to meet their needs. Residents of black neighborhoods lived in fear of state agent and having their homes, interrogating them and taking their children as much as they fear Police Harassing them in the streets. And i want to say one more thing because ruha said lets not be deputies of the police. The Child Welfare system and mandatory reporting make people deputies of these state agents, mandate them under penalty of law to turn people and if they suspect that their parents are now treating the children, so that the children now get sucked up into the system. So we would really need to rethink what is supposed to be a benevolent system and the ways in which it props up all these other aspects of the system as well. Dorothy and understand the origins of them is not the sort of origin of individual deviance and provid. But is in a much broader sense, more accurate diagnosis prince of that we can actually offer something that actually works. That requires changing the paradigm. Ruha i wish you would ask me about benevolence prince out into conversations about benevolence, and wherein is Technology Feeling pretty good i think you have two main stories that we are taught about technology. And we need to sort of again, come up with a new story paradigm in which to understand the relationship with technology. If something is going to save us. This a kind of techno use version and silicone valley produces. Day in and day out. It is the story the technology, is going to take all of the jobs as a source of all evil. It is the terminator story. And although on the surface, this seems like opposing stories, one is a helpful and one is harmful in terms of technology. Theres a sharing of underlying logic which technology is in the driver seat. Where is the affective bias. What is armor help. We need to push the stories to the side and actually look at what is happening behind the screen. The Technology Three that we have, remember, people working overtime to sell is the idea that technology that we have is inevitable. We either have to live within or find ways to treat the edges. But that we cannot demand a fundamentally different set of tools that actually are like confirming. Together, we have to begin to articulate more than just one alternative went other stories that are putting the power analysis back into it. The agency of people back into it and recognize the right now only a small sliver of humanity is imagining the world that they want and the rest us are living in that. And what we are talking about is a much more democratic participatory fundamentally different understanding of technology that cannot be produced by this constant wealth and power. The kind of silicone valley. And its up to what is this 155 million or billion dollars with taxes between 2010 and 2019. Meanwhile, the helping us but their avoiding actually injecting in the public good. It systematically. So this thing, when we hear benevolence the kind of technology is going to save a spread we need to look at the facts. In the fact that the people producing it, the companies producing in our avoiding actually the responsibility of sustaining and investing in the public good. So when it comes Public Health and covid19. This is actually created, context in which the same prepares of antidemocratic tools, is much it disinformation, these producers discourse. Terry systems, their seeming us from the pandemic and Police Violence is what theyre saying. The Contact Tracing braided they dont have the track record to back that up. So we need to look to something fundamentally different as to what is actually going to be the source of her health and wellbeing of the nationally look at the tech fix to get test out of this. I wanted to ask another question. We do have excellent audience questions i want to get to very soon. I will asses before we get there. Given the moment that we are income of the pandemic and the fact that were using technology, much more than we normally would and we know that these technologies are made by people who are in some cases, doing harm. And bias. I guess i am wondering in a specific context, strategies for pushing back on that strategy for how we sit in this moment. Knowing that technology moves a larger part of her lives but also pushing back at the same time. What is the strategies that we can kind of do that are least question the technologies that we are using. Would like to begin that, that is part to kind of conversation. Ill just be a little taste. For every route in which it is produced, is also potential site for thinking about alternatives. So as individual, the Community Level in terms of the politics. I mentioned three buckets of things we can be thinking about and contributing to braided so in terms of the policy context. Anything about it is the ecosystem in which technolog tey has developed. Its really not going to help us although that may be useful for example, few weeks ago, zoom announced they have used it for free, that their data could be shared with Law Enforcement. People obeyed, their data would be encrypted and protected and within a few days, there are such outcries, that there was removing themselves from that position. Thats an example of a very specific tool that all of us are using on which people said no. Like there would be mass exit. Nisha so they very quickly removed that pretty soon as his place. But we have to think about the larger ecosystem in which we keep saying profit over people. We keep saying, the exploitation of data. And the use of data. So the whole idea that these ecosystems, a lot of great things happening the people can plug into. Im thinking about in new york. Just a couple of weeks ago, new york City Surveillance Oversight Technology project stopped. And actually was at that near cat city council, they just voted for a new bill that requires nypd to disclose whatever surveillance tools they are using and put it into an oversight system. This is something that we were working towards but in this climate, that protest works in this climate. I cancel finally pass this bill. And la, theres an Amazing Organization that people should support and plug into. Lapd has spying coalition. One of the things i love about them is the education model. This is not just for a select few people. This is, if it affects you are in your community. Then you get to be involved. You to have a safe. One of the great tools undefined coalition has developed is a mapping of what they call the stalker. And hopefully will it and in the chapter. But it shows you all of the ways in which people are surveilled. In the data is collected different in the developing updated version thats looking specifically at Contact Tracing the data shared. These are just two places in new york and la but also the midwest. There is a lot of great things on community and policy words happening. In a few years ago, there was something called innovation project. The Public Schools in the police join forces. They basically predict at risk kids. Within a year the show the thing down. We saw in just the last few weeks they were defending police. And so all across the country, and every locale, theres this time Community Policy and legal sort of initiative happening. Theres data for black lives pretty fear somebody again. Rather than thinking that you will come up with some of the solutions, the idea is to plug into the ecosystem. Support the organizations that are working on social justice. A black lives is a wonderful Umbrella Organization that allows corporations to happen. In the last kind of step in the bucket of things we can think about, contributing are creative and subversive usage of technology. Is not just that we kind of refused technologies that harm us but we can also create Digital Tools that are working for communities. They do pools. One example that i always invoke as a whitecollar Early Warning system. And it puts it into a heat map of financial crimes are likely to occur. And a facial recognition system based on the profiles of the top 500 ceos or Something Like that. Again to get us the question prayed where the assumptions. When we think of crime and what are we looking for and what are we predicting. This is a very subversive fight to begin to question that. Another version of that that is actually happening with housing of discrimination is a anti eviction mapping project which is using Digital Tools rather than predicting the most vulnerable. Whether somebody is going to default were not either rent or mortgage, is looking at landlords. And property owners. Taking the digital lens and turning it back on those who actually have power and authority mapping in different cities of the eviction process. In updating that for covid19 eviction spread is not just about giving up the data but actually organizing tool for people to have that data to be able to then target various kinds of laws and things on the ground. And again, the very last thing that i will say in terms of education, the equitable internet initiative, they are working in detroit new york and in the places. Building of community power. The digital equities. Theres a great case study of this that was just published that people should take a look at and adapt to the locale. Take a look at the resource page of my personal website. Offers a lot more. Essentially, theres many different ways to get involved in plugin based on what youre passionate about and what you can get this, a role to play. Nisha we kind of wrapping up now. Im wondering if i should shift and bite closing thoughts. Ruha my closing thoughts. Nisha i would like to get some audience questions if that is okay. But i definitely, i can definitely leave time for thoughts. Ruha pull in terms of thinking about the family regulation systems and how it relates to cause to defend the police. I just wanted to make a point about that. Make sure the god that out. I dont know if this is a good time to do it. Nisha . Absolutely. Ruha i have been concerned about invisible me state that everything that they recommended, but also be beneficial to organizing and abolishing the family relation 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 it doesnt rely on removing children from their homes. Putting children into Detention Centers locking up adults in prison. Everything that they 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 defending the police, the money be transferred from police to health and Human Services. Because of the Human Services agencies are the ones that handle Child Protective Services. I think we have to be very careful not to take money and resources and authority from one institution or system and put it into another one. First of all, police and Child Services work handinhand. So youre not really moving it to some separate benevolence at all. Building up the already billions of dollars are spent on taking children away from their families and putting them in some kind of substitute government custody, is not going to benefit anybody. It is not going to achieve what we are working to achieve. So given welfare authorities more money and power, would result in even more state surveillance and control and of black and indigenous communities. So there is a small but growing movement to radically transform or abolish the family regulation system. It is been ignited by black mothers who have been separated from their children. Enjoyed by former foster youth and social justice, active business and service provider, nonprofit organizations of scholars. I do want to contrast that from the libertarians calls to keep the government out of families. In this goes to the point that this is not a movement. To give more hardships to children. Its a movement to deal with them in a way that actually make families safe and provides for their needs. The libertarians do not want that to happen. They just want government out. But theyre not thinking about a radically different kind of society that supports families. So our goal is not just to dismantle the current system. Its to imagine and pray better ways of caring for children an meeting family needs and preventing domestic violence. And it includes governing the billions of dollars spent on separating children from their families. To healthcare housing, the sport provided directly and on coercively to families. Need them. And so again, the kinds of networks and movements that we see happening in the movement to abolish industrial complex, are very much in tune and collaborate and cooperate with. Its on the point where its hard to say that is the same movement. But i would say the same vision to collectively build a new society the sports rather than destroys families and communities. I would hold up as to organizations that are doing great work in this area. What is movement for family power just issued a very important report on how they are connected to this. And also National Coalition for child director reform which collects a lot of useful information and connects people who are working in this area. I hope the people want to know more about this moment, they will look to those sources. Nisha thank you so much for bringing that up. I think there is the important question about kind of reforms that actually sort of appear but actually exasperate the very things that were trying to dismantle or the sort of rebuilt elsewhere. I did want to linger on that for one second. If either of you have anything else to say about the other examples for the may be the case. And they arent, sort of keeping us within the same paradigm in the same sort of oppressive framework. Dorothy i think we think about the protests like no money for police. The schools are another site. We think about the fact that the School Resource officer some of the school police. And many times they are funded by the schools than by the department of education. The make money from police, and there is nothing preventing them from hiring more. The school police. So again, its all of these institutions, their infected with his imagination and these tools imposing social racial control, and that means is not about shifting money around. Its about completely upending the foundations and reimagining. So of course with what education and healthcare and families. And so part of what we need to do as collectives and is movement is to devote as much energy into seeing those alternatives as we do in terms of critiquing status quo. And i just imagining them but experimenting with them. And many times what we are saying of mutual aid groups around the world, in many cases, not all but in many cases, those are experiments with mutuality. Solidarity. Its completely be analyzing the source of harm. Therefore the source of life affirming practices. Some were actually experimenting with alternatives through these many ways of mutuality spread many of them dont require fancy tactics. Thats part of it is what will be the new paradigm for this. In the promise of the new shiny thing will be. Will the new shiny thing be. Many times going back to her roots as well in terms of mutuality. Mutually was invented in the last 2010 or 100 years. Is something that is grounded at and indigenous communities when the communities all over the world that have been smothered by a capitalist capitalist and white supremacist paradigm. Allowing been there, to forest again. And so again, list think about not discounting small again, experiment. Not waiting for topdown checks. Within the ecosystem policy for their something we can do yesterday. I can begin to grow and see the world that we want but i think even in our own imagination, we put a just in front of it. Its just this little thing. Just me and my friends doing x, y, and z so partly what this takes is to peel that out the wrong thinking. And what it means build worlds based on a different set of values. In sink one another. An understanding what empowers. We are very particular notion of power and therefore we reject it. Then other forms are we associating with. Only associating with a certain things. So we country defined. It is like starting everything anew. Evewe have to rethink all of our starting principles and categories to ensure that whatever we create, is not infected with these ways to continue to be reproduced again and again. Because we need to actually look what at what is inside. Nisha thank you so much. I think that is an incredible point. To bring in a couple of audience questions. There are a number of different threats. Theres a couple of different kind of fields that people are wondering how to sort of operate an abolitionist framework. On one hand we have stem fields. And specifically stem fields adult directly contribute to check like chemistry or physics. Ill be in the field and do research and ensure that the work is not reproducing these kind of ideologies. And then in the other side, workers in tech. And i know you have all pointed to great resources but i just kinda wanted to draw this out a little bit in terms of what folks who are watching who may be in those particular industries can think about into a network. Ruha i can start with maybe a different kind of industry that im most familiar with. Notice biomedical research. I get the question a lot which is very similar to this question from biomedical researchers for medical students also are being trained by people who believe in the biological race and think its a sensual to doing medicine or understanding human bodies. So many things that you could possibly do that without dividing people into biological races in predicting everything about them that is relevant to the study or to the disease based on race. What can medical students or in genomics lab, what can they do. Sometimes there also confused about how we do with race. Were being taught, all we know is biological process. And i think the one thing that is important is to keep in mind that races invented and reinvented think about how it is being used in any particular context isnt being treated as if it were a biological natural category. Or if its 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 realize that you cant do this on your own you have to have solidarity with other students and try to find to find people and im thinking in the academic context. Its different in the corporate world but there always going to be people higher up you have more authority that you can work with. Ill just give you an example of race correction now. Within now about four or five hospitals that have ended it. In every case, the students organizing to end it. In the context of it of the intake racism demands for new kind of education about race and racism when that takes into account Structural Racism. It is my life on biological concept. They have one so many exciting things lately. As can be done. Sometimes you have to form a group outside of the structure that you are working in. With its working group or more of an activist group. Thats important as well. We can be done and has to be done. 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. The students and i dont want to say that it is all just young people in orde other people. I found that is it was students, people coming in who are willing to change the very values of structures and paradigms they can make a change. Nisha absolutely and to that i would add, whether youre in chemistry or tech industry. Know your history. In terms of your not the first to be concerned about this. Also build on the history organizing in your particular locale. Excavate that history of engineers and technicians in going back so long in terms of understanding not just individuals. Not just the titles of the professions but they have a larger responsibility. If you are the first one of the development of some harmful thing for ignoring it. You have a responsibility to ashley blow the whistle and work with others. Also became of the relationship between people in the professions and communities that are ultimately and have the create the echo system, the connections. Before something is the fan. Im thinking that i want to recommend the design justice network. And design justice principles is one of those guides to people in different sectors to use to think about how to cultivate those relationships. Way way way ups dream in any process. And then finally, begin to understand these things in your backyard. It was so much easier to see the problem when its in a distance. Right in your own backyard, fear and academia. The higher knowledge and academia the basis of the people can graduate from these ideals who have no historical literacy or sociological literacy. Yet they are producing things that are going to have these great impacts. That knowledge, makes it so they can think that you are educated and sufficient in a particular field without some basic insight from other disciplines. Its into the structure of what knowledge is valuable or not. Likewise when you think about these Tech Companies did most of these places have their social scientists. But again who has the last say. Who spent her thinking is actually given the most value. You have a disciplinary the best in the world. But you dont have to listen to nothing. You can do is you want to do. So that hierarchy of knowledge, actually creates an ecosystem that allows these things to continue to be reproduced. To do that homework in your own back guard. Know the power analysis in your own context. Nisha inc. You both so much. I feel like i have so many more things about you but unfortunately, we are out of time. I feel like this went so fast. So thank you both so much. This is been an incredible conversation. Like theres so much more to say. Just like gratitude to both of you for sharing such critical perspectives and wisdom today. Before we close, i just have a few announcements. Thank you to everyone for joining us. We appreciate your great questions. In your being here with us. I wanted let you know by the couple of events coming up soon. Tomorrow is the struggle for these three schools. In same three openings. Thus at 6 00 oclock eastern time. In the next week, we have some, on july 14th at 5 00 oclock eastern. And then on july 2026. Thats a 5 00 oclock eastern. Sign up on the website when youre ready. And i want to thank patty again so much for captioning this event. No one think haymarket books. For organizing this lifestream. Thank you both so much for joining me. You to everyone for joining us on the skull. We will see you next time. Ruha thank you haymarket and thank you everybody. Thank you dorothy. Weeknights this month lower featuring book tv programs the preview what is available every weekend on cspan2. Thursday, beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, msnbc political analyst, jolene a maxwell, offers her thoughts on identity politics and how to create a more inclusive democratic party. Then political consultants, on the hill and ryan to dusky, discussed the rise of nationalist, populist movements in the u. S. And abroad. And later, Senior Advisor for former Vice President joe biden 2020 president ial campaign, simone sanders, speaks about how americans can use their voices for change. Enjoy book tv on cspan2. Binge watch book tv this summer, saturday evenings at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Settle and watch several hours of your favorite authors. Saturday were featuring programs of the late Award Winning author 20 arson is books include so solemsomean. Roche next saturday august 22nd is the future programs with awardwinning biographer. Binge watch book tv, all summer on cspan2. Washington journal, every day were taking calls live in the air. On the news of the day. We will discuss policy issues that impact you. Coming up thursday morning, with the announcement of Kamala Harris as the Vice President nominee. Well talk about the campaign 2020. As the major parties head into their perspective areas. 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