IT Blog

Americans’ introspective gaze is not what you’d call “unflinching.” The flinch, especially from matters of race and racism, is kind of our thing. But recently, even well-practiced flinchers have seen things that are hard to ignore.

We’ve noticed new maps showing local viral and thermal hot zones that traced the shadowy outlines of redlined neighborhoods from the century before. We’ve worried that facial recognition technology fails to resolve Black and brown faces, perpetuating and refreshing historic patterns of erasure and exploitation. We saw Jim Crow showing up in biased algorithmic decision-making from housing to online shopping to law enforcement—The New Jim Code, in Ruha Benjamin’s phrasing. Digital redlining, as Safiya Noble put it. Even a new book, Your Computer is on Fire, begins with the recently-self-evident prompt that it’s “time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into…