Mixed Race Studies

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Polity
May 2019
172 pages
138 x 216 mm / 5 x 9 in
Hardback ISBN: 9781509526390
Paperback ISBN: 9781509526406
Open eBook ISBN: 9781509526437

Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies
Princeton University

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Far from a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, Benjamin argues that automation has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of tool – a technology designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice that is part of the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.

How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics

BuzzFeed
2018-03-30

Micah Baldwin / Via Flickr: micahb37

Race has long been a potent way of defining differences between human beings. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum.

This open letter was produced by a group of 68 scientists and researchers. The full list of signatories can be found below.

In his newly published book Who We Are and How We Got Here, geneticist David Reich engages with the complex and often fraught intersections of genetics with our understandings of human differences — most prominently, race.

He admirably challenges misrepresentations about race and genetics made by the likes of former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and Nobel Laureate James Watson. As an eminent scientist, Reich clearly has experience with the genetics side of this relationship. But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.

As a group of 68 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, we would like to make it clear that Reich’s understanding of “race” — most recently in a Times column warning that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — is seriously flawed…

Read the entire letter here.

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out

Inanna Publications
November 2010
250 pages
ISBN-10: 1926708148
ISBN-13: 978-1-926708-14-0

Edited by

Adebe De Rango-Adem (Adebe D. A.)

Andrea Thompson

This anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. The anthology also serves as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, and what racial identity has come to mean today.

Adebe De Rango-Adem recently completed a research writing fellowship at the Applied Research Center in New York, where she wrote for ColorLines, America’s primary magazine on race politics. She has served as Assistant Editor for the literary journal Existere, and is a founding member of s.t.e.p.u.p.—a poetry collective dedicated to helping young writers develop their spoken word skills. Her poetry has been featured in journals such as Canadian Woman Studies, The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature, and cv2. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate, and is the author of a chapbook entitled Sea Change (2007). Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, will be published in early 2010.

Andrea Thompson is a performance poet who has been featured on film, radio, and television, with her work published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Her debut collection, Eating the Seed (2000), has been featured on reading lists at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design, and her spoken word CD, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award in 2005. A pioneer of slam poetry in Canada, Thompson has also hosted Heart of a Poet on Bravo tv, CiTr Radio’s spoken word show, Hearsay. In 2008, she toured her Spoken Word/Play Mating Rituals of the Urban Cougar across the country, and in 2009 was the Poet of Honour at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.

Table of Contents (Thanks to Nicole Asong Nfonoyim)

• Acknowledgements
• Preface – Carol Camper
• Introduction – Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson1
• RULES/ROLES
  • Enigma – Andrea Thompson
  • Blond- Natasha Trethewey
  • Mixed- Sandra Kasturi
  • pick one – Chistine Sy and Aja
  • My Sista, Mi Hermana – Phoenix Rising
  • little half-black-breed – Tasha Beeds
  • “White Mask” – Jordan Clarke
  • “Nothing is just black or white” – Jordan Clarke
  • Roll Call – Kirya Traber
  • What Am I? – Marijane Castillo
  • Casting Call: Looking for White Girls and Latinas – D.Cole Ossandon
  • Conversations of Confrontation – Natasha Morris
  • “why i don’t say i’m white”- Alexis Kienlen
  • “Confession #8” – Mica Lee Anders
  • “Other Female” – Mica Lee Anders
  • “MMA and MLA” – Mica Lee Anders
  • The Pieces/Peace(is) in Me – monica rosas
  • Generation Gap (Hawaiian Style) – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • The Incident that Never Happened – Ann Phillips
  • In the Dark – Anajli Enjeti-Sydow
  • ananse vs. anasi (2007) – Rea McNamara
  • Contamination-  Amber Jamilla Musser
  • A Mixed Journey From the Outside In – Liberty Hultberg
  • What Are You? – Kali Fajardo-Anstine
  • One Being Brown – Tru Leverette
  • One for Everyday of the Week – Michelle Lopez Mulllins
  • Savage Stasis – Gena Chang-Campbell
  • The Half-Breed’s Guide to Answering the Question – M. C. Shumaker
  • My Definition – Kay’la Fraser
  • Pop Quiz – Erin Kobayashi
• ROOTS/ROUTES
  • Melanomial – Sonnet L’Abbe
  • half-breed – Jonina Kirton
  • “Inca/Jew” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • Open Letter – Adebe DeRango Adem
  • Prism Woman – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Southern Gothic – Natasha Trethewey
  • The Drinking Gourd- Miranda Martini
  • Reflection – Jonina Kirton
  • “Untitled” White Sequence – Cassie Mulheron
  • “Untitled” Black Sequence – Cassie Mulheron
  • Mapping Identities – Gail Prasad
  • Whose Child Are You? – Amy Pimentel
  • From the Tree – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • My sister’s hair – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • I, too, hear the dreams – Peta Gaye-Nash
  • Learning to Love Me – Michelle Jean-Paul
  • A Conversation among Friends – Nicole Salter
  • The Combination of the Two – Rachel Afi Quinn
  • “Loving Series: Elena Rubin” – Laura Kina
  • On the Train – Naomi Angel
  • Coloured – Sheila Addiscott
  • Of Two Worlds – Christina Brobby
  • What is my Culture? – Karen Hill
  • mo’oku’auhau (Genealogy) – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • Siouxjewgermanscotblack [cultural software instructions] – Robin M. Chandler
  • “Loving Series: Shoshanna Weinberger” – Laura Kina
  • A Hairy Situation – Saedhlinn B. Stweart-Laing
  • “Pot Vida” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • Songs Feet Can Get – Rage Hezekiah
  • Opposite of Fence – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • Applique – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • Blanqueamiento – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • The Land – Farideh de Bossett
  • Native Speaker: Daring to Name Ourselves – Nicole Asong Nfonoyim
• REVELATIONS
  • Colour Lesson I – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Concealed Things – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Serendipity – Priscila Uppal
  • “Ultramarine” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • before i was this – Katherena Vermette
  • Firebelly – Andrea Thompson
  • From Chopsticks to Meatloaf and Back Again – Jasmine Moy
  • My Power – Sonnet L’Abbe
  • Whitewashed – Kathryn McMillan
  • Actually, I’m Black – Marcelite Failla
  • “Self” – Lisa Walker
  • Grey (A Bi-racial Poem) – Sonya Littlejohn
  • Nubia’s Dream – Mica Valdez
  • both sides – Jonina Kirton
  • Mulatto Nation – Marika Schwandt
  • Colour Lesson II – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • racially queer femme – Kimberly Dree Hudson
  • mypeople – Ruha Benjamin
  • My Life in Pieces – Jennifer Adese
  • Burden of Proof: From Colon-Eyes to Kaleidoscope – Angela Dosalmas
  • Recipe for mixing – Tomie Hahn
  • Metamorphosis – Gena Chang-Campbell
  • The Land Knows – Shandra Spears Bombay
  • Land in Place: Mapping the Grandmother – Joanne Arnott
  • “I am the leaf, you are the leaf” – Lisa Walker
  • Language and the Ethics of Mixed Race – Debra Thompson
  • Hybrid Identity and Writing of Presence – Jackie Wang
• Contributors Notes