Computer Programmers
The fact that computer programmers and others in the tech industry are beginning to recognize their complicity in making the New Jim Code possible is a worthwhile development. It also suggests that design is intentional and that political protest matters in shaping internal debates and conflicts within companies. This kind of “informed refusal” expressed by Google and Microsoft employees is certainly necessary as we build a movement to counter the New Jim Code, but we cannot wait for worker sympathies to sway the industry.
Where, after all, is the public outrage over the systematic terror exercised by police in Black neighborhoods with or without the aid of novel technologies? Where are the open letters and employee petitions refusing to build crime production models that entrap racialized communities? Why is there no comparable public fury directed at the surveillance techniques, from the prison system to the foster system, that have torn Black families apart long before Trump’s administration? The selective outrage follows long-standing patterns of neglect and normalizes anti-Blackness as the weather, as Christina Sharpe notes, whereas non-Black suffering is treated as a disaster. This is why we cannot wait for the tech industry to regulate itself on the basis of popular sympathies.
Audits and Other Abolitionist Tools To cultivate the ongoing practice of unflinching accountability, a number of organizations are encouraging the development and implementation of coded equity audits for all new and existing technologies (see Appendix). “Auditing” is most commonly associated with the world of finance, but audit experiments have also been used to demonstrate continued discrimination in real estate and hiring practices in the post civil rights era. It is also an established methodology in the social sciences, where researchers set up field experiments that expose the persistence of racial discrimination in employment. “Equity audits,” too, are employed in educational settings, in which teachers and administrators use established criteria for determining whether equity standards are being met in schools and classrooms.
