Overserved

If we look strictly at the technical features of, say, automated soap dispensers and predictive crime algorithms, we may be tempted to hone in on their differences. When we consider the stakes, too, we might dismiss the former as relatively harmless, and even a distraction from the dangers posed by the latter. But rather than starting with these distinctions, perhaps there is something to be gained by putting them in the same frame to tease out possible relationships. For instance, the very idea of hygiene – cleaning one’s hands and “cleaning up” a neighborhood – echoes a racialized vocabulary. Like the Beauty AI competition, many advertisements for soap conflate darker skin tones with unattractiveness and more specifically with dirtiness, as did an ad from the 1940s where a White child turns to a Black child and asks, “Why doesn’t your mama wash you with fairy soap?” Or another one, from 2017, where a Black woman changes into a White woman after using Dove soap. The idea of hygiene, in other words, has been consistently racialized, all the way from marketing to public policy. In fact the most common euphemism for eugenics was “racial hygiene”: ridding the body politic of unwanted populations would be akin to ridding the body of unwanted germs. Nowadays we often associate racial hygienists with the Nazi holocaust, but many early proponents were the American progressives who understood eugenics to work as a social uplift and a form of Americanization. The ancient Greek etymon, eugeneia (ε γένεια), meant “good birth,” and this etymological association should remind us how promises of goodness often hide harmful practices. As Margaret Atwood writes, “Better never means better for everyone … It always means worse, for some.”

Take a seemingly mundane tool for enforcing segregation – separate water fountains – which is now an iconic symbol for the larger system of Jim Crow. In isolation from the broader context of racial classification and political oppression, a “colored” water fountain could be considered trivial, though in many cases the path from segregated public facilities to routine public lynching was not very long. Similarly, it is tempting to view a “Whites only” soap dispenser as a trivial inconvenience. In a viral video of two individuals, White and Black, who show that their hotel soap dispenser does not work for the latter, they are giggling as they expose the problem. But when we situate in a broader racial context what appears to be an innocent oversight, the path from restroom to courtroom might be shorter than we expect.