Today the United States is collapsing under the weight of two pandemics: COVID-19 and police brutality. Both inflict physical and psychological violence. Both disproportionately kill and debilitate people. Both use the technology we design, reuse, and develop – whether it’s contact tracing, facial recognition, or social media.
We often call on technology to help solve problems. But when society defines, frames, and represents “black people” as the problem, those solutions often do more harm than good. We’ve designed facial recognition technologies that target suspects based on skin color. We’ve trained automated risk-profiling systems that misidentify Latinos as illegal immigrants. We’ve devised algorithms that misidentify black people as risks and prevent them from buying homes, getting loans , or finding jobs.
Therefore, the question we must face is whether we will continue to design and develop tools that serve the interests of racism and “white supremacy.”.
Of course, this is not a new question that has arisen.
Reformulation of the problem
Racism against people of color continues to exist even in this day and age. At the beginning of the year, when the pandemic first emerged, we integrated technology even more into our lives. Coronavirus was our problem, and we began designing new surveillance technologies in the form of contact tracing, temperature , and threat mapping apps to help combat it.
But something strange and tragic happened. We found that black, Latino, and indigenous people were disproportionately infected and affected. Suddenly, racism entered the global agenda of the pandemic. This was exacerbated when the tragic killing of George Floyd by a white police officer sent thousands of protesters into the streets. When the looting and rioting began, black people were once again seen as a threat to law and order, a threat to a system that perpetuates white racial supremacy. It makes you wonder how long it will take law enforcement to deploy these technologies that we designed to combat COVID-19 to overcome the threat that black people supposedly pose to the safety of the nation.
If we don't want our technology to be used to perpetuate racism, then we need to make sure we don't conflate social problems like crime or violence or disease with black people. When we do that, we risk turning those people into the problems we use our technology to solve, the threat we design it to eliminate.
