Oerrepresentation of Black People
Whether owing to the overrepresentation of Black people in TV news reports of criminal suspects or to the decision of media outlets to use more “thuggish” photos when reporting on Black victims, racism runs all the way through the visual representation of crime and victimization.60 Style, comportment, and context become the codes through which mass audiences are hailed in the Fanonian sense of “Look, a Negro!” But, through social media technologies, the hashtag phenomenon allows people to decode and recode these mediated hails astutely and collectively,61 demonstrating how popular representations criminalize Black victims of state-sanctioned violence and revealing, through visual performance, how racialized distortions continue apace, even when they have no explicit mentions of race to rely on.
Exposing Privacy Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks reverberates through the work of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who discovered that the facial recognition technology with which she was working could detect the contours of her face only when she put on a White mask. This is what she calls the “coded gaze.” Buolamwini established the Algorithmic Justice League as part of her quest for “full spectrum inclusion,” to counter the bias she experienced.62 She asks: “If we do not improve the systems and they continue to be used, what are the implications of having innocent people identified as criminal suspects?”
