Africa, california, london, portland oregon, germany, minneapolis and florida among other places around the world. I just want to thank you so much for being here. My name is nisha bolsey im a writer and editor for haymarket books. Im coming to you from occupied land of the confederacy, pottawatomie nations, and we want to acknowledge the original keepers of the lands that were on and Indigenous People today and for their struggle for sovereignty and selfdetermination. And i want to thank the organizer of this, haymarket books. Now more than ever its critical that we support independent publishers and book stores. You can do that in three ways, first buy books from haymarkets and others directly and joining the book club and third if youre in a position to make a donation, no matter how small, via venmo there will be information to do this and we appreciate any donations. The video, this video will be recorded and afterwards it will be shared on haymarket books Youtube Channel. Please subscribe to the channel, like the video and share with other folks that you know. And i want to let you know about some Upcoming Events in the live stream series. Tomorrow we have the struggle to Police Schools and an equitable safe reopening, thats july 9th. Tomorrow at 6 00 eastern and then next week, we have the end of zionism, some thoughts and next steps. Thats july 14th at 5 00 eastern. And from u. S. To palestine, 5 p. M. Eastern and you can register for the events i listed. Before we get to the presentation, were moderating the chat, so anyone who violates the guidelines will have their comments deleted as quickly as were able. And anyone who wants to use the chat, use the top chat option rather than live chat. With so many on the call, if its choppy it may reduce the quality. Haymarket will have instructions how to do this during the chat. And you may have to go back to the haymarket books page and the feed should resume there. This event will have live closed captions and instructions for the captions will be posted in the chat. With all of this, in mind, all of us will try to speak more slowly. Thank you to patty nelson for live captions this event for us. We should have time toward the end of our discussion for question q a for the audience and please post them to the Youtube Channel and well have them later in the program. And thats housekeeping. And its my pleasure to bring in dr. Benjamin, associate professor of africanamerican studies at princeton and author of the Award Winning book, editor of Captivating Technology and the founder of the data lab which brings together students, activists, artists and educators who develop a critical and creative approach to data justice. Dr. Dorothy roberts is a University Professor at university of pennsylvania with joint appointments in the law school and studies. And the founding director of the penn program on race, science and society and her books include fatal invention how science, politics and business recreate race in the 21st century, the black body, race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty and shattered bonds, the color of Child Welfare. Thank you so much for being here. So happy to be here with both of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So ill get right into it. I wanted to begin with history. Both of you have been critical voices in calling attention to the deeply rooted presence of racism in what are often seen as objective fields, right, likes science and medicine. This president this presence has a long history in this country. And i would like it hear about your entry point writing about these topics, okay, well, ill kick it off then. Thank you for that introduction and thanks so much to haymarket for hosting this and so many other great programs on abolition and policing. Its really a special thrill to participate in this one with my brilliant friend and comrade. Knowing that wed begin with stating our personal histories that led us to writing about policing in the context of science and medicine, it made me think more that than i have in the past about what was my entry into this topic and last night i woke up in the middle of the night, realizing that id written on the topic of policing long before id ever acknowledged in public. Id actually never spoken about it before. I dont know why it has escaped me for so long maybe because it was 40 years ago. I remembered that as a third year student in 1979 and 1980 in law school when i was 23 years old, i wrote my thesis on police surveillance. So, this morning i ent went down into the bowels of my basement and foun the paper its entitled wolf in sheeps clothing uncovering the police for intelligence agents. 1980 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 very briefly. I wrote the purpose this have paper is to present a critical analysis of the function of police in america by focusing on their role as political intelligence agents. At best, intelligence operations have been ineffective and unrelated to the stated objective of preventing crime. Most significantly, the cause of political intelligence, chilling of lawful political expression and the destruction of innocent lives far outweigh any possible benefits. And then i wrote the 70 page paper on all the harms caused by police in political surveillance. And i concluded that all the reforms were unrealistic and i wrote a realistic approach to the problem of political Domestic Intelligence and acknowledged the institutions function to maintaining the present social order through the repression of political dissent. Because of this underlying purpose, because this underlying purpose is repugnent to democratic government and produces such devastating consequences, the institution should be abolished in all of its forms. I think thats probably the first time ive used abolition and connection with policing when i was 23. Whats fascinating to me, rereading those words is that they largely reflect my approach today. If we take a realistic, honest look at the function and outcomes of policing, we have to come to the conclusion that abolition is the only answer to the problem. After i graduated from law school, i practiced in new york city and spent a number of years organizing with and defending a group of people we dont hear much about today. Grand jury resistors and those are people who refuse to testify, once they convene to put political activists in prison. Basically, they refuse to collaborate in policing and the prison system. And i became involved in that struggle when my former husband was detained as a political prisoner in new york city in the early 1980s. So, i had, at a young age, an Early Education by fire about policing and prisons. At the same time, i became interested in reproductive justice, again, my entry was personal, midwives were the first reproductive justice activists i knew before the term was coined and that was because i had my first three babies at home, attended exclusively by midwives in 1982, 1984, 1986 and my which had wives were two puerto rican sisters in harlem who are political activists i had met in my work and i connected my home birth to my awareness of the commercialization of medical practice and injustices in the health care system. Now, around the same time, i began to be alarmed by the prosecutions of black women for using crack cocaine while pregnant and while i left Legal Practice then to become a professor, my First Research project was investigating the policing and criminalization of black mothers for an article challenging the constitutionality of those prosecutio prosecutions. I realized the prosecutions are akking at policing child bearing to the present day and i ended up writing killing the black body which was foundational to my work for women of color activist to build a movement for reproductive justice that put black women organizing at the forefront. While working on killing the black body, i became familiar with the socalled Child Welfare system. And discovered that it hadnt was even more widespread system of policing and finishing black mothers, a system thats designed to terrorize and destroy families in the name of protecting children and led to my book, shattered bonds published 20 years ago almost in 2001. And around that time, i began reading about scientific studies that were seeking to find race as a genetic level and searching for genetic differences between races. I began to explore the origins of the biological concept of race and think of the manifestations over the last 400 years and wrote my latest book fatal invention to explain why race was invented and why its resurgence in science, medicine and biotechnology reinforces Structural Racism and white supremacy. So what tied this altogether . Ill explain more as we go through the program, but theyre all all of these projects are 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. Black womens child bearing and parenting in particular have been made the scapegoats for social problems that are caused by Structural Racism. Policing people who are deemed to be naturally predisposed to bad outcomes is not only a way of justifying controlling them, but also a way to legitimize oppressive systems like police, prisons and foster care. Should i jump in . [laughter] thank you so much, nisha for moderating and haymarket for this, and i want to give virtual flowers it dorothy who you got a glimpse blazed the trail in the Community Activism and i get to bask in the warmth of that trail that she has blazed. I was thinking, i should have dug up a paper, too. [laughter] as i was thinking, first i was thinking in terms of entry point. Just growing up in a heavily policed neighborhood gives one a sort of insight and a kind of side eye already to questions of policing modernity. When you look at it from its underside it gives awe particular insight in the way of knowing the world that has been valuable to me and so in terms of scholarly entry points, for me, it really started in undergraduate at sellman where i was looking and comparing medicine, obstetrics in particular and sort of the policing of childbirth there and i was heavily influenced at that time by dorothys work in killing the black body and thinking about the relationship between authoritative forms of knowledge, how theyre institutionalized and not just whos harmed by that, but one who is benefitting as a sort of theme, what is produced by oppressive systems and i was comparing obstetrics to black midwives in georgia and where the practice is outlawed. And when we have the oppressive systems, the forms of resistance and creative reimagining thats always there. And so, excavating that and bringing that to light as part of the story. And i think how it connects to our conversation today is that the question police and institution of policing is only one of many places that policing happens in our society and part of the motivation, i think, behind our conversation is to identify and to understand the broader landscape of policing because if we too narrowly focus on one institution and one set of practices where spectacular forms of violence are obvious, then were going to miss a whole slew of other sights and logics and tools that allow policing to continue. And so for me, bringing medicine into that is important because medicine is like the dogooding profession, right . So we think about policing on one end, and medicine has a long history of racial violence in that invented from its origins. We tell if we find it there, then we should expect to find it everywhere in this dogooding profession. Which led me then from my undergrad thesis and i was trying to jot the title down, when dorothy brought her classic up. It was a classic undergrad title, a moment of conception, racism, patriarcpatriarchy in the uterus, no subtlety, i love it. And i was looking at some of these questions and again, what motivates me is to question things that were not supposed to question. And so if we think about science in a bubble or technology as sort of hovering above society, then everyday people dont feel you have the right or the power to question it, even though its impacting your life. If you dont have some credential or some specific expertise, youre somehow barred from raising questions about it. But your expertise is your experience with that technology. Oh, that medicine, that is a kind of knowledge that we have to give voice to and so, my first book was around biotechnologies, it was looking at Stem Cell Research and most recently, being that those questions of power and equality to bear on the emerging technologies around date it science, algorithmic discrimination and auto systems and again, its really think how racism and other sims of oppression are productive. Its not simply who is harmed, but who is benefitting not only financially, but in many other ways from the maintenance of these oppressive systems, its thinking about the race and technology in particular. You know, more and more primed to think about the social and ethical impact of technology, who its affecting and we need to look at the input. Who is producing it, with what logics and world views and we need to tell that part of the story, too, and then the last thing, again, thinking about the black midwives in the early part of my work dorothys as well. Its understanding that imagination is it a terrain of struggle, whose imagination reigns. And were thinking about the Digital World crafted for us, the digital spacialization of equality, and thats the materialization of someones imagination, someones imagination and trying to democratizing that and cultivating our own liberatory, its we begin to have to struggle and work towards materializing a world in which we can all thrive. Thank you both so much. I love that. I think that really, you both hit on a lot of points that id love to sort of draw out different sets. I guess just, you know, on the cultural system, i want to talk about what Role Technology plays when it comes to Law Enforcement, and you know, kind of what are some of the parts of the system that were not seeing. Were seeing the brutal and violent work of the system all the time. But kind of whats going on behind that. The places that we might not be as familiar with, might not be seeing, so, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, its interesting, we have brought up this contrast between medicine and Law Enforcement, or the police and i think its very interesting to think about how racism is built into predictive tools in denver ways, in both those domains. So we can think about racism in predictive algorithms in policing across multiple systems. In fact, one way to think about how widespread policing is and how it takes so many different storms is to think abouted role of prediction in all of these different institutions and it helps you see that theyre all about policing people. And theyre not about helping people. Even systems like the Child Welfare system or the health care system, that is supposed to be benevolent and supportive are actually designed to police or finish people. And in whose hands are they. Who is imagining the world that these systems are supposed to facilitate . Its actually a world static or becomes more oppressive, but the point of it is to keep the status quo, not to allow imagination of something more equal and humane. It theres a way in which these predictive algorithms thwart imagination because they embed within them qualities. So whether were talking about predictive algorithm and, you know, the Police Department or in family regulation or education, public assistance, programs, medicine. Race gets embedded in a way that maintains the current racial order and its not so much how the technologies themselves operate, its their common purpose to facilitate policing, marginalize people in order to do lots of different things. Deny them benefits, keep them away from resources, keep resources out of their hands, deny them care, deny them freedom, funneling them into prisons and Detention Centers. So, in medicine, diagnostic algorithms expoliplicitly use as output because its seen as acceptable to see that as a biological trait. In Law Enforcement it happens in a different way, racism gets built in without any explicit mention of race as a factor. And so theres all of these different ways that happens, but whats critical and this is something that virginia eubanks points out in her book on algorithms and public assistance programs, and maybe somebody can help me, im blanking on the name. Automating inequality. Automating inequality. Thank you. I reviewed the book, i love the book, but its just remembering all of these things. But she points out that in the past the risky individuals will watch, like they were identified and then watched. And thats a form of surveillance, but new data bases, the target emerges from the data and so the people who are targeted are people who are already have been treated unequally and so, their inequality is embedded in the data already. The datas already structured to maintain their inequality. And so, state agencies ability to apply sophisticated analytical tools to massive amounts of Data Collected through sweeping surveillance has prediction today 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. Its managing social inequalities, not aiding people who are suffering from 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. And so, thats why you get some of these Law Enforcement data bases and algorithms that are already predicting