5
" In a classic study of how names impact people’s experience on the job market, researchers show that, all other things being equal, job seekers with White-sounding first names received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than job seekers with Black-sounding names.5 They calculated that the racial gap was equivalent to eight years of relevant work experience, which White applicants did not actually have; and the gap persisted across occupations, industry, employer size – even when employers included the “equal opportunity” clause in their ads.6 With emerging technologies we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. For example, a study by a team of computer scientists at Princeton examined whether a popular algorithm, trained on human writing online, would exhibit the same biased tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. They found that the algorithm associated White-sounding names with “pleasant” words and Black-sounding names with “unpleasant” ones.7 Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era. "
― Ruha Benjamin , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
9
" Consider the court decision in the case against one Mr. Henry Davis, who was charged with destruction of property for bleeding on police uniforms after officers incorrectly identified him as having an outstanding warrant and then beat him into submission: On and/or about the 20th day of September 20, 2009 at or near 222 S. Florissant within the corporate limits of Ferguson, Missouri, the above-named defendant did then and there unlawfully commit the offense of “property damage” to wit did transfer blood to the uniform.80 When Davis sued the officers, the judge tossed out the case, saying: “a reasonable officer could have believed that beating a subdued and compliant Mr. Davis while causing a concussion, scalp lacerations, and bruising with almost no permanent damage, did not violate the Constitution. "
― Ruha Benjamin , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
14
" In The Enigma of Diversity, sociologist Ellen Berry explains how those who champion a flat conception of diversity have “redefined racial progress for the post-civil rights era, from a legal fight for equal rights to a celebration of cultural difference as a competitive advantage” in which everyone (theoretically) wins.24 More pointedly, the late political scientist Lee Ann Fujii reminds us that the lack of genuine diversity “maintains a racialized way of seeing the world. This lens of default Whiteness is assumed to be neutral, unraced, and ungendered, and therefore ‘scientifically’ sound. But Whiteness is anything but.”25 Finally, legal scholar Nancy Leong details how institutions commodify racial diversity for their own benefit, defining, in her analysis, racial capitalism as “the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person.”26 "
― Ruha Benjamin , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
19
" During an interview with Diversity Inc.’s director of research and product development, she walked me through a typical presentation used to pitch the value of the company’s software to prospective clients. I learned that their products are especially valuable to those industries not allowed to collect ethno-racial data directly from individuals because of civil rights legislation that attempts to curb how these data are used to discriminate. But now those who work in finance, housing, and healthcare can use predictive software programs to ascertain information that they cannot request directly. The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule, for example, strictly monitors the collection, storage, and communication of individuals’ “protected health information,” among other features of the law. This means that pharmaceutical companies, which market to different groups, need indirect methods to create customer profiles, because they cannot collect racial-ethnic data directly. This is where Diversity Inc. comes in. Its software programs target customers not only on the basis of race and ethnicity, but also on the basis of socioeconomic status, gender, and a growing list of other attributes. However, the company does not refer to “race” anywhere in their product descriptions. Everything is based on individuals’ names, we are told. “A person’s name is data,” according to the director of research and product development. She explains that her clients typically supply Diversity Inc. with a database of client names and her team builds knowledge around it. The process, she says, has a 96 percent accuracy rate, because so many last names are not shared across racial–ethnic groups – a phenomenon sociologists call “cultural segregation.”18 "
― Ruha Benjamin , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
