The Black Agenda Book Summary - The Black Agenda Book explained in key points

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The Black Agenda summary

Name: The Black Agenda
Rating: 3.5 (167 reviews)
Author: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman

Bold Solutions for a Broken System

3.5 (167 ratings)

23 mins

Table of Contents

The Black Agenda
summarized in 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Putting Black expert knowledge front and center.

In March 2020, the world started hearing about this thing called the coronavirus, or COVID-19. As urgent reports poured in from Wuhan, and then northern Italy, and then the rest of the planet, there was panic but also a sense of solidarity.

People leaned out of their windows and clanged pots and pans to celebrate the medical professionals working on the frontlines. Headlines talked about how the world is united by the common experience of COVID.

But that’s not entirely true.

The common experience part, yes. That’s true. That is.

No one could have lived through this pandemic without being affected. But we’re not affected equally. Black people and people of color have borne the brunt of the pandemic.

Black communities have been getting sicker, while being less able to access good health care.

Institutional racism and decades of economic inequity also mean that Black people are more likely to be working in low-wage jobs which carry a higher risk of exposure than other jobs.

So, Black people carry the heaviest burden from the COVID pandemic.

But, strangely, Black experts aren’t asked about it, or invited to shape policy, or brief the public. Think about it. How many Black scientists, or sociologists, or doctors, or politicians have you seen on the news over the last two years? How many COVID-related panels have featured a Black researcher? This strange omission reflects just another facet of institutional racism. The erasure of Black experts. Experts who have the knowledge that’s needed to address some of the most urgent challenges of our times.

The Black Agenda is just one step toward addressing this erasure. It puts Black expert knowledge front and center. These blinks explore how this knowledge could transform two key areas that impact every aspect of the world: climate justice and the tech industry.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why you can’t fight for polar bears if you don’t fight for Black lives;
how facial recognition technologies are racist; and
what environmentalists can learn from the prison abolition movement.

You can’t fight for the climate without fighting for Black lives.

In the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter protests took place throughout the United States and across the world. It was a time of reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Similar murders had taken place at the hands of policemen, but this one evoked a different kind of protest. One that ignored geographic boundaries and spread across the world.

For climate activist Mary Annaïse Heglar, these protests were a long time coming. But she found it very confusing to suddenly see fellow environmentalists say that they needed to pause their fight for climate justice and focus on Black Lives Matter activism instead.

She was confused because, for her, it wasn’t an either/or proposition. She’d been fighting for climate justice for ten years. And she knew that the fight hinged on attacking systemic racism head-on. In other words, you can’t fight one issue without also, at the same time, fighting the other. Because they’re wrapped up together like toxic bedfellows.

In white environmental activist circles, there’s an enduring myth that Black people don’t care about animals and the environment. That’s not true, and there’s the data to prove it. But it is true that many Black people don’t relate to white environmentalists – the people who say that they care deeply about protecting people and the planet. Why? Because many of these people and organizations fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the struggle. They see racism and climate justice as being two separate issues, when, actually, they’re entwined.

To understand this better we need to introduce a key concept: intersectionality. This concept was first introduced by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. An intersectional approach is one that looks at how different marginal identities can impact each other. For example, intersectional feminism doesn’t just look at how being a woman can affect your opportunities in the world. It also looks at how being a Black woman, or a Black queer woman can magnify the discrimination you experience. It says, we can’t understand one struggle without understanding how those related struggles intersect and compound it.

Intersectionality is a key concept for understanding why the Black Agenda is essential for climate activism. Climate change has been called the "Great Equalizer." The logic being, the destruction of the planet affects everybody. That statement is true, but it’s incomplete. Because the thing is, climate change affects everybody, but it doesn’t affect everybody equally. In fact, as Annaïse Heglar says, instead of being an equalizer, climate change is actually the “Great Multiplier.” It takes any threat you were already under, and multiplies it.

Climate change multiplies existing threats to Black communities.

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.

Climate activists can learn from the playbook of prison abolitionists.

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.

Facial recognition technology is flawed and dangerous.

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.”

Algorithmic assaults pose a serious threat to Black communities.

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.

Black women lead the fight to hold tech companies accountable.

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.

Complex problems demand intersectional solutions.

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.

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What is The Black Agenda about?

The Black Agenda (2022) is a compilation of essays by Black experts reflecting the latest developments and challenges in diverse fields such as wellness, criminal justice, climate activism, and AI.

Who should read The Black Agenda?

Activists of all stripes
Anyone who wants to know how tech perpetuates racism
Anyone who wants to know how climate change and racial justice are linked

About the Author

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an award-winning Ghanaian-American researcher, entrepreneur, and author. She cofounded the Sadie Collective, a nonprofit highlighting the underrepresentation of Black women in economics, finance, and policy. She’s also the youngest recipient of the CEDAW Women’s Human Rights Award.

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