The Black Agenda summary

To understand how this works, there’s another important concept we need to talk about. It was introduced by meteorologist James Marshall Shepherd. Environmental vulnerability. Some communities are especially at risk from climate change. And not just any communities. Black communities. Indigenous communities. People of color. Institutional racism has meant that Black communities are structurally vulnerable to the effects of air and soil pollution, contaminated water supplies, and rising temperatures.

For example, in the United States, African American communities are much more likely to live in urban heat islands – areas of the city that are hotter than other places because of the abundance of asphalt and lack of vegetation. They’re also more likely to live in homes with bad ventilation that are placed closer to dumping grounds, power plants, and toxic waste sites.

The intersectional perspective on climate change illuminates how fighting for climate justice without acknowledging racism only deals with one part of the problem. But an intersectional lens also points the way towards possible solutions.

The fight to stop the Keystone Pipeline from pumping oil from Canada to the United States is a good example of that. The protest was led by Indigenous climate activists whose communities were directly affected by the pipeline, and supported by a wide base of other environmentalists and political allies. The protest was effective in stopping the pipeline from operating, which was an enormous win both for Indigenous communities and for the climate.

Days before his forty-second birthday, Robert Williams was aggressively arrested in front of his daughter, and dragged off to jail. The reason? Facial recognition cameras had falsely identified him as a criminal. The same thing happened to Nijeer Parks, who spent ten traumatizing days in prison and $5,000 on his defense after he was also misidentified.

These arrests are exactly what computer scientists Deborah Raji and Joy Buolamwini had predicted. They’d conducted an external audit of Amazon’s facial recognition software. Their study found that the software was much less accurate when trying to identify people with darker skin tones. Thirty percent less accurate, to be exact. But when they published their study, Amazon was quick to dismiss it as being “false and misleading.”

Despite what you may have heard, there’s nothing neutral about AI, or artificial intelligence. AI has been hailed as a technology that can transform industries like policing, education, and commerce. It digitizes and automates tasks that can be completed with the help of decision-making algorithms. Already, jobs that were traditionally done by humans, like approving an insurance claim, or sorting through job applicants are now being done entirely by an algorithm. Tech companies have proclaimed this means those decisions are now more democratic – the fact that they’re done by a machine suggests that a cold rationality will be applied, that’s free from any human prejudice.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Because there’s nothing neutral about how algorithms are created. They’re made by overwhelmingly white tech computer scientists in white tech companies with no real collaboration or consultation with Black experts. This means that the products – just like the Amazon facial recognition software – will be faulty, and Black people will pay the price. Professor Brandeis Marshall has described this phenomenon as an algorithmic assault where institutional racism is reproduced in the digital sphere. Machines, programmed with the prejudices of their makers, take on the job of excluding Black people from jobs and home loans and insurance policies. What’s worse is that there’s no accountability for how these decisions are made. Responsibility is passed off onto the “objective” algorithm which operates in a sort of black box. No one knows exactly how it came to the decision, which makes it very difficult to refute.

In spite of being vastly underrepresented in the technology fields, Black women are leading the way in pointing to the dangerous limitations of AI, and the potential for algorithmic violence to reproduce racist violence in everyday life. But it’s difficult work, made more difficult by the fact that companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft don’t want to hear about it. In fact, in 2020, in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests, Google fired Timnit Gebru, a distinguished AI researcher who expressed concern about a lack of transparency in the company. As we’ve already heard, Amazon went to great lengths to discredit work by Black women researchers. And it was prepared to spend huge sums of money on lobbyists to help the passage of facial recognition technology bills, instead of making its product more accurate and therefore safer.

Black computer scientists, researchers, and auditors do their work in the context of these multiple attacks and pervasive silencing. They’re not invited to consult at internal meetings, or to the latest tech conferences, or to give evidence in congress. Their work is dismissed as being prejudiced, or the result of “militant liberalism.” In this hostile environment, these experts need institutional support to be able to do their work. Audits such as the one carried out by Raji and Buolamwini should be legally mandated. Companies should be forced to cooperate and give access to the relevant data.

These brief explorations of climate change activism and the development of AI software have shown definitively that these are racial justice issues. So why do we pretend that they’re not? Why do we pretend that fighting for the climate means putting polar bears above Black lives, and that algorithms are “fair” or “neutral”? Or, to put it more bluntly, why do white people pretend that? The answer is what it’s always been. Because it suits them. White people benefit from racist systems and they have done so for hundreds of years. They’re not motivated to find the solutions to the social crises that are caused by racist policies and practices. Or, even if they are motivated, they often lack the specific skills and lived experience that would allow them to find the solutions we need.

To return, again, to the outbreak of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Long before official data revealed that COVID was disproportionately affecting Black communities, Black researchers and activists were sounding the alarm. That’s because they were witnessing the devastation firsthand. Furthermore, they knew very well how structurally vulnerable Black communities are to a health-care crisis. But, as you already know, those Black experts weren’t the ones you were seeing on the news. They weren’t invited to panels or given fat grants to do research. That has to change. Complex societal challenges demand intersectional solutions. The kinds of solutions made possible when centering the Black Agenda.