Automised Racism
Responsibility in warding out implicit bias
3-minute read time
Gogo Isolezwe (they/ them), sangoma, gender anarchist and pawerent queering life.
Artwork by @dinewo.co
Here’s a 4 question quiz for you:
Throw a penny in the pond every time you've been followed in a store
Had to make it abundantly clear you don't work at your local grocer
Struggled to have your palm recognised in the soap dispenser
An ad for the product you were just speaking about pop up on your Instagram feed?
Talking about media and the marketing we consume, it's comical how society will tell you exactly what it thinks of blackness. Come on barbie let's go, misrepresentations since it matters. In the craze of the new Barbie movie that premiered this past week, marketing around the movie has been working overtime filling every news cycle and dominating pop culture discourse. In an attempt to ride the wave of popular culture, Buzzfeed released an A to Z list profiling Barbies from each country. What they didn't count on is the impact of artificial intelligence(AI) revealing the unparalleled bias of systemic racism and racial profiling.
How can AI not be tied to the human experience when the human experience is the data that it's based on? How is my land of origin not devoid of years of oppression and continued unrest? At the design of capitalism and the demise of humanity.
If it's not violent, it's ambiguously black (read erasure). Im not sure which south african tribe is represented in the weird fashion fusion. In a land where uk’vunula is an essence of culture, custom, and an ode to ancestral practice, AI does nothing for the learning experience. Random beading undercuts the symbolism and protection of the skins, beads, feathers and that African people have practiced for generations.
What people seem to forget is having a disclaimer admitting the bias of AI, passed off as entertainment does little to remedy the impact. The internet lives forever.
The development of society is measured, for one using technological advancements to gauge society’s progression. The Fourth Industrial Revolution arguably offers us the opportunity to shape the conditions of how people live and work. It begs the question of ‘whom’ this perceived reality is being intentionally engineered. Technology as are people are not partial to implicit bias.
The actualization of the 4IR is significantly vested in infrastructural capacity, advanced technologies in medicine, digitization and computers, virtual realities and the ever-so-adored policing of deviant communities.
The reality is, many Black and Brown people have had the displeasure of being met with systemic racism. Technology is a product of evolution, what does that evolution look like when inequity in race, class, gender, resource access and opportunity? In societies where we are doubling down on the dubious pillars of patriarchy, what is in it for the Africana woman? When frankly speaking, there is simply no amount of marketability to combat institutionalised racism.
