While reading the “Data Feminism” chapter called “Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach” a few things stuck out to me. At first, I thought that the chapter was going to just be about Feminism and how to challenge that oppression. But then the chapter started out talking about Black children’s deaths on a proactive map. This map was made by Detroit Geographic and Institute (DGEI) in 1971. It showed that White commuters were running over black children on the way to their destinations. As I read on throughout the chapter the Author kept saying reasons why certain things kept going to white people over black people.
One thing Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klien bring up is relining. Now the text describes redlining as: “a term used to describe how banks rated the risk of granting loans to potential homeowners on the basis of neighborhood demographics (specifically race and ethnicity), rather than individual creditworthiness.” Now that would explain the reason why people of color more specifically black people seem to always get the short end of the stick, and it is because of redlining.
Why Is Being Black All It Takes?
Also the fact that a lot of reasons why jobs or algorithms that we use today think the way they do is because they use the past to do their calculations. Algorithms use the same biases as humans do when talking about different races.
For instance, in the chapter the author talks about an experiment in the prison system. “Her team found that white defendants are more often mislabeled as low risk than Black defendants and, conversely, that Black defendants are mislabeled as high risk more often than white defendants.” These findings reminded me of what we talked about in our last class. Professor Friend was talking about how an AI on Amazon was doing a job search for a COO position (I might be mistaken). What it ended up doing was denying any applicants that had black sounding names. While on keeping all the names that were white or sounding.
This is what they call the New Jim Code. These AIs and algorithms are using past data and information to cast judgement on people. No matter how prejudice it might seem. Hence, why shouldn’t we be leaving everything up to algorithims or AI. They are using how hateful people think which puts us back years and helps only rich white men. The fact that being a black person on your own or being a person of color already makes you a criminal is absolutely disgusting. It is even heartbreaking to see that all people will see us as.
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