Stigma

Some may argue that stigma is a small price to pay for access to the much-needed medicine and attention. Indeed, this is the allure of tech fixes. They offer pragmatic inclusion in place of political and social transformation. The medical means justify the social ends, we are led to believe. But too often the means are the end. New Jim Code fixes are a permanent placeholder for bolder change. Sure, some people may live longer, but they are still living in neighborhoods and schools that those in power are less motivated to spot and fix. Medical inclusion, in short, can be a lucrative stand-in for social and political justice. To its credit, the Camden coalition has expressed commitment to a more holistic approach than most healthcare systems, attentive to the “non-medical needs that affect health: housing, mental health, substance abuse, emotional support.”36 Even so, those who adopt a hotspotting method may not necessarily embrace such a far-reaching vision.

Detecting Fixes As the analogy with technological systems suggests, racial logics are readily embedded in social systems when underlying normative assumptions and social biases are ignored. The denial of racial–ethnic categories may very well lead to some of the most sinister and systemic forms of racism, with very little recourse. This is especially the case when people refuse to acknowledge and to challenge how such logics structure the development and deployment of technoscience and, by extension, access to resources and the rights associated with such initiatives. Likewise, as Chapter 2 argued, in thinking about the function of racialized codes within algorithms, it is important not to assume that they are simply unintended glitches.37 The “productive” (in the generic sense of producing things, not in the normative sense of necessarily beneficial) function of race within technical systems should not be underestimated. That is, computer programs that are not “tuned in” to the racism of the humans with whom they are meant to interact are akin to children who do not speak the language of their parents.