Data for Black Lives is a new group of “activists, organizers, and mathematicians” co-founded by Yeshimabeit Milner and Lucas Mason-Brown, with the mission of “using data science to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people.” As a staff member of Daily Kos, a software developer, a poet and playwright, I joined the Data for Black Lives conference in Cambridge to question data as part of our social machinery, data as language and storytelling, storytelling as a route to justice and racial equity.
The opening keynote speaker of the conference was sociologist Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Benjamin came of age in the South Pacific, where she witnessed the engineered inequities of military bases modeled after American suburbs juxtaposed against the poverty and public health challenges among Pacific Islanders displaced by atomic bomb tests. These observations came at a time when Benjamin was avidly watching Star Trek, contemplating what ethics should shape different relationships between species.
Her keynote speech offers answers to the questions: “How can we can develop something like ‘design justice’?...how to create just data?”
- Social Literacy: In discussing the 14-year-old student Ahmed Mohammed, who was arrested for building a clock, Benjamin posits social literacy as a counterpoint: “We have this phrase in popular discourse—isolated incident….Social literacy requires that we look at the larger pattern, the context….part of that context is that the fact that one in two Americans believe that Arab Americans should carry special ID cards….In this way we think about: who gets to experiment?”
- Historical Literacy in the awareness “the past is not past.” A feature in targeted advertising allowing advertisers to exclude certain groups makes it possible to perpetuate redlining when advertisers of housing can choose to exclude African Americans from seeing their ads. Congress had to write to Zuckerberg to remove ethnic affinity labels from Facebook.
Emotional intelligence, or affective insight. Benjamin evokes the “heart-brain,” how the heart, with its neural circuits, speaks to the brain. “What we know in our hearts—it's a source of knowledge about the world we have to reckon with—it’s not a separate conversation.” In a study around race and criminal justice, Stanford researchers published findings contrary to their expectations: “Exposure to extreme racial disparities may make the white public more punitive and less responsive to attempts to lessen the severity of policies that help maintain those disparities.”
Linguistic reflexivity. Reflecting on labels, classification and group making, Benjamin posits: there’s a rich, there’s a poor, there’s an underserved, there’s an over served, yet “overserved” is not recognized as a word in word processing. “We really have an impoverished language to understand one side of this phenomenon—those who are unduly benefitting from our unjust designs. Until…we can develop a language around that, it’s going to be very hard to study that, much less produce data around it, if we don’t even have a word for it….”
Technological humility is to cultivate a more reciprocal understanding of co-production, how technology and society are co-produced--one doesn’t precede the other. One example is typing in “three black teenagers” in Google one or two years ago, we saw mug shots; typing in “three white teenagers” gave us Gap stock images. Technology is learning from us…there’s so much uncertainty about how to intervene and how this was produced. “We want to explore the uncertainties involved...experiment, challenge and produce new ways of designing and relating with our technical infrastructure.”
Some of these themes recurred in subsequent speeches and the hackathon, including the use of the word ‘forgiveness’ as experienced by whites in the criminal justice system, the search for data to identify and close racial gaps in civic representation, and in the closing keynote speech, the creation of a fair system to review and overturn unjust convictions.