Systemic Racism and Algorithmic Bias
I distinctly recall the first time we got a computer in my house. It was one of those clunky, graceless, desktop Macbooks. But I loved it. The year was 2000 — it was a new millennium, and I was still in elementary school. Those of us who remember the internet in the early-aughts remember the pain of dial-up internet, of begging my mother to get off the phone so I could talk to my friends on MSN messenger. As a teenager, I would savor my time on LiveJournal — and later, in high school, my time on Tumblr, which is where I attribute my coming-to-consciousness.
Many of the conversations on these platforms were such that the mainstream discourse had not caught up to yet. The kind of dialectical thinking conducive to learning and earnest engagement doesn’t often happen on the internet. But the fact that people can be seen, irrespective of who they are, and say what they want is such an incendiary idea. I remember the internet being a space that felt free — especially for those of us who wanted the relative anonymity that the space gave us. It also became a space where you could find all kinds of knowledge and have it right at your fingertips, rather than having to sift through a library archive.
However, like anything that comes too easily, there are also innate downfalls. Who does society already serve, and how is that reflected in online spaces?
Who is depicted positively in Google searches, and who is demonized? For instance, what would someone find if they googled “Muslim woman”? What about “Black Muslim woman”?
Imagine someone didn’t have any cursory knowledge of Muslims and Islam, and they were looking to further their knowledge by using search engines. We need to interrogate why there are so many gaps, inaccuracies, and stereotypes on these powerful tools, especially since search engines are everyone’s go-to for knowledge.
As a part of coping with the pandemic and to make sure that I was reading in community and for personal accountability, I joined a book club that was reading Dr. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression. It is a book about how search engines are not neutral arbiters of information, as we are all taught, but actually reify the very oppression that exists outside of the internet. I have recently started to do work at RISE with social media, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the ever-elusive algorithm and what it means. The internet is shaped by already existing oppressive social relations and doesn’t exist outside of them as we are often led to think.
Along with the algorithm comes the reality of internet virality that so many social media users are constantly seeking. It’s a relevant concept for me to think about as I’m learning of ways to increase engagement in organic, sustained ways. I’m amazed at how ideas are popularized as people engage with them, and vice versa. I’m also weary of the ways that hypervisibility can translate into surveillance. I believe that being seen and being represented is very important, but in what ways are we being seen? And for what purposes? I am reminded of ‘sousveillance,’ which is a kind of counter-surveillance as a mode of resistance. It presupposes that we are not merely docile subjects that are being watched but that we can also watch back — often in the form of smartphone recordings of various Black men and women dying at the hands of the police. Sousveillance looks like Darnella Frazier, a teenager who filmed the murder of George Floyd (and is getting harassed for the bravery of her split-second action). Without her footage, there would likely not have been any arrests of the perpetrators.
After George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent uprisings in Minneapolis, I am thinking more than ever about systemic oppression and the ways it manifests itself. First and foremost, white supremacy and white supremacist ideas are ubiquitious. The time we are living in seems particularly important because all of the relics of white supremacy are being undone.
It is important to note that these ideas pervade every single space; whiteness is both the air and the dark matter.
I’m reminded that everything is permeated by white supremacy — it exists even in the places that we go to find camaraderie, in alternative spaces, and in the internet. I don’t think an entire forfeiture of the internet per se is necessary, but there should be more knowledge and critical awareness about existing and emerging technologies designed in the ecosystem of white supremacy. A common refrain we all hear is, “Don’t you have Google?!” — which is true, we all have access, but those who are in charge of the world wide web have the same biases as those outside of it. To change that reality, there has to be an interrogation of racist biases and an overhaul to understanding what is “the default.”
Racism isn’t merely something you will find in some places and/or some prejudices that some people have. It is something that absolutely can be seen in personal and interpersonal relationships, but it trickles down from systemic oppression. This means that anti-Blackness in particular is held up by institutional and structural apparatuses and is seen as ‘simply the way things are.’ This is the most deadly because normalcy is smothering the livelihoods of many Black and Brown people in a myriad of ways.
There has to be a reckoning that is holistic and addresses both the personal and interpersonal biases and believes that we are indoctrinated, and for me, this looks like undoing internalized oppression. This work is very non-linear, introspective, intrapersonal, and often quite painful. But it is worth it. I don’t know what a more equitable internet looks like, and in many ways, I think the internet’s heyday has passed. But I do believe that if we radically restructure society, the world wide web can reflect that new reality.