Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Race And Technology 20240712

Africa, california, london, portland oregon, germany, minneapolis and florida among other places around the world. I just want to thank you so much for being here. My name is nisha bolsey im a writer and editor for haymarket books. Im coming to you from occupied land of the confederacy, pottawatomie nations, and we want to acknowledge the original keepers of the lands that were on and Indigenous People today and for their struggle for sovereignty and selfdetermination. And i want to thank the organizer of this, haymarket books. Now more than ever its critical that we support independent publishers and book stores. You can do that in three ways, first buy books from haymarkets and others directly and joining the book club and third if youre in a position to make a donation, no matter how small, via venmo there will be information to do this and we appreciate any donations. The video, this video will be recorded and afterwards it will be shared on haymarket books Youtube Channel. Please subscribe to the channel, like the video and share with other folks that you know. And i want to let you know about some Upcoming Events in the live stream series. Tomorrow we have the struggle to Police Schools and an equitable safe reopening, thats july 9th. Tomorrow at 6 00 eastern and then next week, we have the end of zionism, some thoughts and next steps. Thats july 14th at 5 00 eastern. And from u. S. To palestine, 5 p. M. Eastern and you can register for the events i listed. Before we get to the presentation, were moderating the chat, so anyone who violates the guidelines will have their comments deleted as quickly as were able. And anyone who wants to use the chat, use the top chat option rather than live chat. With so many on the call, if its choppy it may reduce the quality. Haymarket will have instructions how to do this during the chat. And you may have to go back to the haymarket books page and the feed should resume there. This event will have live closed captions and instructions for the captions will be posted in the chat. With all of this, in mind, all of us will try to speak more slowly. Thank you to patty nelson for live captions this event for us. We should have time toward the end of our discussion for question q a for the audience and please post them to the Youtube Channel and well have them later in the program. And thats housekeeping. And its my pleasure to bring in dr. Benjamin, associate professor of africanamerican studies at princeton and author of the Award Winning book, editor of Captivating Technology and the founder of the data lab which brings together students, activists, artists and educators who develop a critical and creative approach to data justice. Dr. Dorothy roberts is a University Professor at university of pennsylvania with joint appointments in the law school and studies. And the founding director of the penn program on race, science and society and her books include fatal invention how science, politics and business recreate race in the 21st century, the black body, race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty and shattered bonds, the color of Child Welfare. Thank you so much for being here. So happy to be here with both of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So ill get right into it. I wanted to begin with history. Both of you have been critical voices in calling attention to the deeply rooted presence of racism in what are often seen as objective fields, right, likes science and medicine. This president this presence has a long history in this country. And i would like it hear about your entry point writing about these topics, okay, well, ill kick it off then. Thank you for that introduction and thanks so much to haymarket for hosting this and so many other great programs on abolition and policing. Its really a special thrill to participate in this one with my brilliant friend and comrade. Knowing that wed begin with stating our personal histories that led us to writing about policing in the context of science and medicine, it made me think more that than i have in the past about what was my entry into this topic and last night i woke up in the middle of the night, realizing that id written on the topic of policing long before id ever acknowledged in public. Id actually never spoken about it before. I dont know why it has escaped me for so long maybe because it was 40 years ago. I remembered that as a third year student in 1979 and 1980 in law school when i was 23 years old, i wrote my thesis on police surveillance. So, this morning i ent went down into the bowels of my basement and foun the paper its entitled wolf in sheeps clothing uncovering the police for intelligence agents. 1980 on criminal law and administration. I dont think ive looked at this paper for almost 40 years now. And i just want to read the purpose of the paper, my conclusion very briefly. I wrote the purpose this have paper is to present a critical analysis of the function of police in america by focusing on their role as political intelligence agents. At best, intelligence operations have been ineffective and unrelated to the stated objective of preventing crime. Most significantly, the cause of political intelligence, chilling of lawful political expression and the destruction of innocent lives far outweigh any possible benefits. And then i wrote the 70 page paper on all the harms caused by police in political surveillance. And i concluded that all the reforms were unrealistic and i wrote a realistic approach to the problem of political Domestic Intelligence and acknowledged the institutions function to maintaining the present social order through the repression of political dissent. Because of this underlying purpose, because this underlying purpose is repugnent to democratic government and produces such devastating consequences, the institution should be abolished in all of its forms. I think thats probably the first time ive used abolition and connection with policing when i was 23. Whats fascinating to me, rereading those words is that they largely reflect my approach today. If we take a realistic, honest look at the function and outcomes of policing, we have to come to the conclusion that abolition is the only answer to the problem. After i graduated from law school, i practiced in new york city and spent a number of years organizing with and defending a group of people we dont hear much about today. Grand jury resistors and those are people who refuse to testify, once they convene to put political activists in prison. Basically, they refuse to collaborate in policing and the prison system. And i became involved in that struggle when my former husband was detained as a political prisoner in new york city in the early 1980s. So, i had, at a young age, an Early Education by fire about policing and prisons. At the same time, i became interested in reproductive justice, again, my entry was personal, midwives were the first reproductive justice activists i knew before the term was coined and that was because i had my first three babies at home, attended exclusively by midwives in 1982, 1984, 1986 and my which had wives were two puerto rican sisters in harlem who are political activists i had met in my work and i connected my home birth to my awareness of the commercialization of medical practice and injustices in the health care system. Now, around the same time, i began to be alarmed by the prosecutions of black women for using crack cocaine while pregnant and while i left Legal Practice then to become a professor, my First Research project was investigating the policing and criminalization of black mothers for an article challenging the constitutionality of those prosecutio prosecutions. I realized the prosecutions are akking at policing child bearing to the present day and i ended up writing killing the black body which was foundational to my work for women of color activist to build a movement for reproductive justice that put black women organizing at the forefront. While working on killing the black body, i became familiar with the socalled Child Welfare system. And discovered that it hadnt was even more widespread system of policing and finishing black mothers, a system thats designed to terrorize and destroy families in the name of protecting children and led to my book, shattered bonds published 20 years ago almost in 2001. And around that time, i began reading about scientific studies that were seeking to find race as a genetic level and searching for genetic differences between races. I began to explore the origins of the biological concept of race and think of the manifestations over the last 400 years and wrote my latest book fatal invention to explain why race was invented and why its resurgence in science, medicine and biotechnology reinforces Structural Racism and white supremacy. So what tied this altogether . Ill explain more as we go through the program, but theyre all all of these projects are ways in which biological explanations of the racial order are reinforced by science, medicine and technology, and they make inequality seem natural rather than the result of unjust power arrangements. Black womens child bearing and parenting in particular have been made the scapegoats for social problems that are caused by Structural Racism. Policing people who are deemed to be naturally predisposed to bad outcomes is not only a way of justifying controlling them, but also a way to legitimize oppressive systems like police, prisons and foster care. Should i jump in . [laughter] thank you so much, nisha for moderating and haymarket for this, and i want to give virtual flowers it dorothy who you got a glimpse blazed the trail in the Community Activism and i get to bask in the warmth of that trail that she has blazed. I was thinking, i should have dug up a paper, too. [laughter] as i was thinking, first i was thinking in terms of entry point. Just growing up in a heavily policed neighborhood gives one a sort of insight and a kind of side eye already to questions of policing modernity. When you look at it from its underside it gives awe particular insight in the way of knowing the world that has been valuable to me and so in terms of scholarly entry points, for me, it really started in undergraduate at sellman where i was looking and comparing medicine, obstetrics in particular and sort of the policing of childbirth there and i was heavily influenced at that time by dorothys work in killing the black body and thinking about the relationship between authoritative forms of knowledge, how theyre institutionalized and not just whos harmed by that, but one who is benefitting as a sort of theme, what is produced by oppressive systems and i was comparing obstetrics to black midwives in georgia and where the practice is outlawed. And when we have the oppressive systems, the forms of resistance and creative reimagining thats always there. And so, excavating that and bringing that to light as part of the story. And i think how it connects to our conversation today is that the question police and institution of policing is only one of many places that policing happens in our society and part of the motivation, i think, behind our conversation is to identify and to understand the broader landscape of policing because if we too narrowly focus on one institution and one set of practices where spectacular forms of violence are obvious, then were going to miss a whole slew of other sights and logics and tools that allow policing to continue. And so for me, bringing medicine into that is important because medicine is like the dogooding profession, right . So we think about policing on one end, and medicine has a long history of racial violence in that invented from its origins. We tell if we find it there, then we should expect to find it everywhere in this dogooding profession. Which led me then from my undergrad thesis and i was trying to jot the title down, when dorothy brought her classic up. It was a classic undergrad title, a moment of conception, racism, patriarcpatriarchy in the uterus, no subtlety, i love it. And i was looking at some of these questions and again, what motivates me is to question things that were not supposed to question. And so if we think about science in a bubble or technology as sort of hovering above society, then everyday people dont feel you have the right or the power to question it, even though its impacting your life. If you dont have some credential or some specific expertise, youre somehow barred from raising questions about it. But your expertise is your experience with that technology. Oh, that medicine, that is a kind of knowledge that we have to give voice to and so, my first book was around biotechnologies, it was looking at Stem Cell Research and most recently, being that those questions of power and equality to bear on the emerging technologies around date it science, algorithmic discrimination and auto systems and again, its really think how racism and other sims of oppression are productive. Its not simply who is harmed, but who is benefitting not only financially, but in many other ways from the maintenance of these oppressive systems, its thinking about the race and technology in particular. You know, more and more primed to think about the social and ethical impact of technology, who its affecting and we need to look at the input. Who is producing it, with what logics and world views and we need to tell that part of the story, too, and then the last thing, again, thinking about the black midwives in the early part of my work dorothys as well. Its understanding that imagination is it a terrain of struggle, whose imagination reigns. And were thinking about the Digital World crafted for us, the digital spacialization of equality, and thats the materialization of someones imagination, someones imagination and trying to democratizing that and cultivating our own liberatory, its we begin to have to struggle and work towards materializing a world in which we can all thrive. Thank you both so much. I love that. I think that really, you both hit on a lot of points that id love to sort of draw out different sets. I guess just, you know, on the cultural system, i want to talk about what Role Technology plays when it comes to Law Enforcement, and you know, kind of what are some of the parts of the system that were not seeing. Were seeing the brutal and violent work of the system all the time. But kind of whats going on behind that. The places that we might not be as familiar with, might not be seeing, so, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, its interesting, we have brought up this contrast between medicine and Law Enforcement, or the police and i think its very interesting to think about how racism is built into predictive tools in denver ways, in both those domains. So we can think about racism in predictive algorithms in policing across multiple systems. In fact, one way to think about how widespread policing is and how it takes so many different storms is to think abouted role of prediction in all of these different institutions and it helps you see that theyre all about policing people. And theyre not about helping people. Even systems like the Child Welfare system or the health care system, that is supposed to be benevolent and supportive are actually designed to police or finish people. And in whose hands are they. Who is imagining the world that these systems are supposed to facilitate . Its actually a world static or becomes more oppressive, but the point of it is to keep the status quo, not to allow imagination of something more equal and humane. It theres a way in which these predictive algorithms thwart imagination because they embed within them qualities. So whether were talking about predictive algorithm and, you know, the Police Department or in family regulation or education, public assistance, programs, medicine. Race gets embedded in a way that maintains the current racial order and its not so much how the technologies themselves operate, its their common purpose to facilitate policing, marginalize people in order to do lots of different things. Deny them benefits, keep them away from resources, keep resources out of their hands, deny them care, deny them freedom, funneling them into prisons and Detention Centers. So, in medicine, diagnostic algorithms expoliplicitly use as output because its seen as acceptable to see that as a biological trait. In Law Enforcement it happens in a different way, racism gets built in without any explicit mention of race as a factor. And so theres all of these different ways that happens, but whats critical and this is something that virginia eubanks points out in her book on algorithms and public assistance programs, and maybe somebody can help me, im blanking on the name. Automating inequality. Automating inequality. Thank you. I reviewed the book, i love the book, but its just remembering all of these things. But she points out that in the past the risky individuals will watch, like they were identified and then watched. And thats a form of surveillance, but new data bases, the target emerges from the data and so the people who are targeted are people who are already have been treated unequally and so, their inequality is embedded in the data already. The datas already structured to maintain their inequality. And so, state agencies ability to apply sophisticated analytical tools to massive amounts of Data Collected through sweeping surveillance has prediction today even more than it was in the past, a way of maintaining a racist social order. So now reliance on these Big Data Analytics is critical to the expansion of the regime because the states aim is to control populations rather than to actually adjudicate individual guilt or innocence. Its managing social inequalities, not aiding people who are suffering from social inequalities. And so Risk Assessment is no longer about actually determining whether an individual is going to do something, its about whether the individual belongs to a population that the state wants to manage. And so, thats why you get some of these Law Enforcement data bases and algorithms that are already predicting that toddlers are going to be gang members. They havent done anything to be a risk to anybody, but its not their individual characteristics, its that theyre in a population that needs to be managed and thats what the prediction is all about. Also, big data predictive algorithms facilitate the States Mission in new ways, but i want to point out, and this is goes back to some of what i was saying in my introductory comments, that racism has always been about predicting, about making certain racial groups seem as if they are predisposed to do bad things, and therefore, justify controlling them. So race itself is a form of state categorization that claims to predict their character and so these stereotypes have been justified helped to justify for excuse or rationalize state control of whole groups of people based on their race. And so thats just some of the ways in which predictions operate across multiple institutions to make race seem as if itself is a predictive factor. So that it can be the basis of state control, state intervention, state violence. All of these tools are based on the racist ideology that black race itself is a risk, whether were talking about the risk of disease or the risk of criminality. It cuts across all of these seemingly domains that are tied together by this prediction that em beds and reinforces a current state of inequality. It doesnt matter if you dont understand the intricacies of some new hightech thing. You can understand through your lived experience of being profiled and predicted against what the stakes are in this conversation. With that i really also wanted this idea of the new jim crow, understand innovation goes handinhand with containment, but oftentimes we conflate innovation in terms of technology with social progress but we had so much evidence to counter that conflation, that we should understand that it just as well produces new forms of containment and by using the subject of the new jim grow its renaming the reality from the perspective of those who are harmed by all of these fancy new developments. Went to think about the marketing of one to after another, and the promises embedded in even the names of these things, they really hide the reality from those who are harmed. The new jim crow is with understanding the power of naming and naming things from the perspective that one experiences it. With that i want, i can think about the conversation last week was so crucial how they laid out how reforms reproduce oppressio oppression. Because were not really getting to the heart of it. Were creating some new tweak and fix the doesnt tackle exactly what dorothy articulated. If we think about the history of this, the technology, use of new tools and technologies, that has once always been part of the arsenal of oppression. I think you about my colleague simone brown, late at the social history. One of the oldschool technologies or lanterns and new york city having lanterns lost the forced black people to carry about lanterns so they can be easily identified after dark. Thats like part of the genealogy of facial Recognition Systems now. Using the lantern. That was the technology of identification and rationalization that goes back pretty far. Check out some modems work and understand theres a spectrum from the most obvious forms of the new jim code, things because youre obviously harmful to the more insidious, the stuff that comes at as promised and wrapped in progress with all of the bells and whistles of benevolence and fixing social problems. We want to understand on a spectrum but its not just the most harmful once we should really care about, whether were talking about those Recommendation Systems come when you open netflix pickle last few weeks youll probably noticed all the black news being recommended to a netflix in this moment. That a predicted Recommendation System thats based on the data that is collecting on you which seems not just harmless but beneficial, iq glad you dont have to wade through all of the movies ever and you can have these more targeted experiences. What that means is in the same way you can be you can be excluded. Targeted marketing allows people who are selling goods and services or advertising to exclude certain demographic here weve seen that with the housing ads on facebook and other social media that said i dont want elderly people to see this. What black and latinx people to see this so they are now some class action lawsuits against Housing Developers that use that targeted advertising to exclude. You dont have whites only sign up anymore thats obvious. Now it is through the backdoor of technology and marketing. When weve heard a lot over the last few weeks that facial recognition but theres also gait recognition, you walk, emotion recognition. Every single biometric detail that could be an object of analysis is being used in that way. We should just focus on facial recognition however important that is and there have been some wins in the last few weeks in terms of those systems which we can talk about in just a minute. Ill provide a really quick concrete example of how this can go sideways very easily. One of the first schools to announce is going to automate its vetting of people when you walk on the campus of facial recognition system that would tell the campus authorities whether you belonged or not, whether you are a student or staff faculty. Ucla was about to roll this out, and did not profit called fight for the future did an audit on the recognition system produced by amazon and it used 400 photos of publicly available photos of members of ucla Campus Community and found it got back 58 false positive matches that link students to people with criminal records. The vast majority of those matches were people of color. Imagine being that triggered computing a student or faculty, Campus Police being called, lapd being called and the domino effect all based on the supposedly neutral system. The last point i really want to emphasize is that this is not just a topdown process. This is not just big institutions adopting systems that are out of our reach. Its also about how we use everyday apps and technologies and we think about things like the citizen outcome various Neighborhood Watch groups and apps. We want to think about how we are implicated as deputies of the police. How we perpetuate policing. Rather than just focusing on the institution, how do we internalize the logic that these things make us safer. We want to identify our responsibility and role in this, and in the process begin to think about and imagine other alternatives that would make us safer and have a more cohesive sort of community and society that we would like to live in. Thank you so much. Theres a lot in there that i also want to pull out but i guess before get into some more of this about some of these technologies, i want to dwell on the intersection of healthcare. The question of racism in medicine may be coming like from doctors versus the question of racism in technology in the healthcare industry. I wanted to both of your takes on that intersection. Dorothy, do you want to sure. When we think about the way in which rates gets embedded race gets embedded in medicine and science more broadly as if it were a biological trait, as if it were a natural risk factor, we have to go back to the very invention of race. I found as i worked on this did not just call race a social construction because people will say its a biological category that is socially constructed. But to emphasize that it was invented, and it keeps getting reinvented. It was invented during the enlightenment age likely by scientist, by european scientists who start to classify human beings based on a racial hierarchy that they wanted to say was natural but it was in order to justify european disposition of Indigenous People and enslavement of african people. As with think about all the innovations that are going on in medicine on the enlightenment h2 today, there have been lots of that but they have held on to the basic actual premodern concept that some Natural Force divided all human beings into races and that science can predict all sorts of things about people based on their race. Enlightenment itself was an innovation of theological thinking that god created the races. Instead they felt nature created the races. Today Scientists Say evolution created the races. Those are all innovations of the same concept. All theyve done is reinforced this idea, now we have more enlightened, more advanced technologies to prove it. So when the 1800s Samuel Morton proved his racial hierarchy he said by the advanced technology of crane yamauchi, and he collected 1000 schools from all over the world and measured the volume and said this proves what people have the larger skull so they are the most intelligent. Black people have the most small so that the most they could today neuroimaging can because the brains of children who grew up in poverty and claim the reason they cant escape poverty is because the brains have been physically damaged by the effects of poverty. Or socio genomics claiming that genes can predict things like education attainment, now more accurately and precisely because of big dna databases and computer and analysis. But its still the same basic idea that is dressed up new technology. Also jumping off of a really important point about benevolence can hiding oppression. This is what medicine does so perfectly because, and the scientists left onto that so they just say were doing this racial research to improve minority health. We are treating patients by race in order to make sure that the yolian ortiz of their diseases peculiarities to give gee right diagnosis, the right treatment. That is embedded into medical technology through something thats called race correction. As i said before they dont hide it because medicine is supposed to be benevolent altruistic reasons. But because they have good intention, they are supposed to be exempt from any scrutiny about how they are using race. So raise correction actually is embedded into all sorts of a critical calculators that automatically adjust the output by race. So, for example, Risk Assessment tools of cardiovascular disease, rest get to, bone fractures, or vaginal birth after cesarean come something both ruha and i talked about Reproductive Health and working. These technologies for hypertension, they all import race as an automatic adjustment and its mainly so that black patients are treated differently. In every case based dear steer medical care away from black patients. I will just talk briefly about, just want to give you an idea of how embed this is and how harmful it is and how it is based on a racist ideology that doctors dont want to see, and that something called the estimate for this really important indicator of kidney function. Its automatically adjusted upward for black patients. Any black patient, whatever this protein is in the blood, whatever that amount is if the black patient africanamerican patient, it adjusted upwards. Any of the human being its a different number. This has serious implication because the higher the estimate, the less likely you will be referred for specialty care, and the more likely you will be ineligible to be waitlisted for a kidney transplant. There are these concrete harms to black peoples and i could go on with harper every single one of them come as just one example, that are a result of this technology that embeds with and it the belief that race is a biological trait and that black people have bodies that are peculiar and different from any other human being. So antiracism in medicine requires more than just reading out bias in the minded individual positions. Also requires abolishing these ways in which medicine is a structured to promote racist ideas, policies and practices. And again i am emphasize in medicine, and we could talk about this across the board with these predictive analytics, its racism, not race that puts black people at risk. What i think is so crucial about what you shared, dorothy, and this intersection of technology in medicine is oftentimes technology is invoked as an antidote for dealing with human buys and prejudice. It grows, again its like a reform, it grows out of an acknowledgment that we know this racism exists, we know for example, that medical students take the black people feel less pain than white people. You get a study like that that demonstrates that and for many people they go to fix this lets find a technology can do it because it will be less biased, not interesting that someone had to create that, there was dated that had to be said that to teach any kind of Automated System how to make a decision. Just last fall some colleagues of mine did a study on the healthcare algorithm that affects millions of patients around the country. Its basically like a digital triaging system that is trying to identify patients that are predicted, more likely to get sick in the near term so the idea is lets identify them so we can give them more attention and resources now so that they dont get sick, to keep them out of the hospital. It is digital triaging. What my colleagues found is that the racial bias in the medical algorithm favored white patients over sicker black patients. It was this idea that those who designed the algorithm used this idea of cost, how much we spent on people in the past, as a way to predict how much it would eat in the future. We dont spend a still need, and so whether its our insurance structure, whether its everyday racism in the healthcare system, people in it are often not given the resources. If youre using that cost metric in order to predict the future then you are essentially reproducing their Health Disparities that it existed in the past. The danger is that it is hidden behind a veneer of neutrality. You cant point to the racist doctor or nurse was denying care youre looking at a computer screen that says you dont measure up computer get this particular outpatient treatment. What does that mean in the context of the pandemic . Many Healthcare Organizations are using algorithms of all sorts, more oldschool type of algorithm or more automated advanced types. With these we know, for example, the basis of that algorithm is designed which many are, for example, we decide who is going to get a ventilator or not. If that algorithm that is designed to ensure that the person who gets the ventilator is someone who is more likely to survive by giving them the ventilator, so using the person who is healthier and more likely to survive and building that understanding into this algorithm, so essentially automating new gen x. It is ablest, racist, classist pics of wealthier wider abler patients are more likely to get that scarce resource so we have to be very and were now more than ever that when were automated, automating decisions and those decisions are predicated on the unfiltered a value of some kinds of people over others, we are essentially reproducing very dangerous status quo, in this case a eugenic understanding of who deserves care or not. So we have to understand that this is really, the stakes are even higher now. Absolutely. I want to go back to this idea of techno benevolence because its very important, and i want to get both of your come more thoughts on that also particularly talk limit about the family regulation system as you call it, dr. Roberts. So both think about that idea techno benevolence but also how thats kind of intersecting. Do you want to jump in . Yeah, yeah. I just have to Say Something though, ruha, which are talk about ventilators as i just finished working on an article on that question because you are absolutely right come in guidelines that are already being used in other contexts, the idea is that its more efficient, you know, or utilitarian to give the scarce ventilators to people who are more likely to survive, and the way in which they measure that, determined that isnt algorithm that puts in these factors that systematically disadvantage black patients. And working on it though, i had to keep emphasizing that its not just the technology. Its not even just the factors that are going into it. Its a very value of, number one, inking that utility and equity are opposing and we have to choose one or the other, and utility should win. And then even thinking what is utility . What is it a more just society a benefit for everybody . It is actually. But so often our arguments about social justice, especially in this sphere of medicine and science, gets seen as pure ideology thats not important because way to deal with the more important questions of utopia and facts and reality, as if science isnt from the very beginning totally seat in the value judgments. Its everything weve been talking about is a a value judgment, its an ideology that science is following. Its so infuriating. Thats social justice. Youre just talked about ideology, you sociologist. We dont have to listen to you. But back to the questioner should be answering, i want, talking about the family regulation system, which i didnt coin the term but its a very helpful term to replace Child Welfare or Child Protection, or even foster care, to understand that the systems are not designed at all to care for anybody, to protect anybody or for anyones welfare. And they are designed to police and regulate and punish. Family distractions would also be a good term for it. I want to just for a moment i have a tendency to do this, is go back and look at the origins of these ideas. I could talk for a long time about the origin of the socalled Child Welfare system in the united states, i do want to point out one aspect of the origin of policing black mothers in particular because black mothers and also indigenous mothers are at the most risk of having the children taken away from them by this system. Its important to note the ideological foundations of the state policing of black mothers. One law that shows this so clearly and also shows the invention of race is one of the very first laws in the colonies passed in 1662 in virginia that gave children born to enslave black women who were raped by white men the status of their mother so that the children also could be enslaved. A lot of people say of course that would happen, but they could have also been given the status of white people since their fathers were white. We also used to now the idea of course is a black children and, of course, they would have the status of black children. But it was a law that created this idea that black women gave birth to enslave all children even if the fathers were white. I think that law passed black womens wounds as the producers of their children subjugated condition, and that ideology still supports race policy institutions today. So politicians and researchers and the media have treated black womens childbearing as an urgent social problem that has to be fixed in all the ways ruha has talked about fixing social problems. They routinely circulate these stereotypes about lack maternal irresponsibility to support all sorts of policy, with control policies come welfare reform policies can foster care policies, Law Enforcement policies that are all designed to police and punish black women childbearing and child raising. And i mentioned as one of a very first issues i wrote about, active around, the huskies and the black was being charged with fetal crime. And the way that Child Welfare authorities took newborns from thousands and thousands of black women because they tested positive for drugs. The images of the mythical lack welfare queen that was so powerful that they fueled congresses abolition of entitlement to welfare, like states to pass laws that are deliberately aimed at deterring women receiving public assistance from having more babies. And all of these policies pretend that its black mothers who are the cause of what actually structural inequalities, and thats whats at the heart of the family distraction system. Its blaming parents, mostly single mothers living in poor neighborhoods for not being able to care for their children, instead of dealing with, addressing and ending the structural inequalities that are whats harming their children. I think now we have the idea of benevolence, his failure to understand that the system is an integral part of the u. S. Regime because many people still think it is somehow a system that helps children and families in some way, even if it is terrible, its better than where the children came from. That, in fact, regulating industry black, brown and engages families in the name of Child Protection has been essential to the white supremacist nation from its very origins as much as prisons and police have been. Like the bridget desha complex, the foster desha complex as a multibilliondollar government apparatus that regulates millions of marginalized people, with some of nokia undergo sometimes accompanied by police and taking your children away from you then monitoring families, forcibly keeping them in foster care or group homes or what is called therapeutic Detention Centers more recently black teenagers have been killed, and the vast majority of these investigations and by the way, over half of black children are subjected to these investigations, involved allegations of neglect related to poverty. Black families and indigenous families are targeted the most for this disruption. Just as police dont make communities safe, Child Protective Services affirmatively harms children and their families and doesnt address the structural causes. So residents of black neighborhoods live in fear of state agents entering their homes, interrogating them and taking their children as much as they fear Police Harassing them in the streets. I just want to say one more thing because ruha said lets not be deputy of the police. The Child Welfare system and mandatory reporting make people deputies of these state agents, mandate them under penalty of law to turn people that if they suspect that their parents are now treating the children so that the children now get sucked up, the whole family, sucked up into the system. We really need to rethink what is supposed to be a benevolent system and the ways in which it props up all the other aspects of the system as well. One other thing i was thinking about connecting to last weeks conversation is how what you just outlined is not a call to the dorm harms that are done. Its about completely coming up with a new paradigm in which to address those harms. Exactly. And understand the origins of them as not the sort of origin of individual deviance and benevolence, but to understand what produces it in a much broader sense. Its the more accurate diagnosis so that we can offer something that actually works and so that requires changing the paradigm. But quickly i will just say, i was asked about techno benevolence. So adding to the conversation about benevolence, where does Technology Fall in . I think we have two main stories that we are taught about technology that we can continue to reproduce and we need to come up with a new story, a new paradigm in which to understand our relationship with technology. One story in technology that technology will save us from the canada techno utopian version that Silicon Valley produces day in and day out that there is the story that technology will slyness, take, jobs, the source of all people, the terminator story, hollywood loves to tell us that story. Although on the surface these seem like opposing stories, one is a helpful one come once harmful in terms of technology, they share an underlying logic which is technology is in the driver seat. We are just affected by it. We are either harmed or help but we need to push those stories to the side and look at whats happening behind this scene. The technology rent is a product of human agency. Nevertheless, there are people working overtime to sell us the idea that the technology that we have is inevitable and we just have to either live with it or find ways to tweak the edges but we cant demand a fundamentally different set of tools that are lifeaffirming and create a more habitable world. Together, we have to begin to articulate more than just one alternative but a myriad other stories that are putting the power analysis back into it, the agency of people back into it, and to recognize right now only a small sliver of humanity is imagining and materializing the world they want, and the rest of us are living in that. What were talking about is a much more democratic participatory, a fundamentally different way by the Senate Technology but it cant be produced by these, this concert will and power, the kind of silicon six as my colleagues have written about which avoids up to and what is it, 155 million billion dollars with the taxes between 20102019. Meanwhile, we are told they are helping out but they are avoiding ingesting in the public good, systematically. When we hear benevolence and the kind of technologies, we need to look at the facts and the fact that people producing it, the companies producing it are avoiding the responsibility of sustaining and investing in the public good. When it comes to Public Health and covid, this is created a context in which the same purveyors of at the democratic tools, these purveyors of this information, these producers of discriminatory disinformation are not jumping in to tell us they will save us from both the pandemic and from Police Violence through apps, to Contact Tracing come through all of the rest and they dont have a track record to back that sweeney to look to something fundamentally different as what is likely going to be the source of her health and wellbeing rather than look for tech fixes to get us out of this. Yeah, some want to ask another question along the lines of where you are heading you have a number of excellent audience questions of what to get to, so but before i will asses before we get there. But given the moment we are in, the pandemic, the fact that we are using Technology Much more, many of Us Using Technology more than we normally would, and we know these technologies are made by people who are in some cases by actively doing harm in search of profit. I guess im wondering in the specific context, some strategies for pushing back on that, for how we exist in this moment knowing that technology is a large part of our life but also we are pushing back at the same time. What are some strategies we can do that or at least question the technologies we are using . Shall i open . One way to begin that come again thats a part to kind of conversation. We will give you a little taste. Its really thinking through every route in which art is produced, that is also a potential site for think about alternatives. At the individual, at the Community Level in terms of the wider body politic, i will mention three buckets of things we can be thinking about contributing to. One, we hinted at already in terms of the legal and policy contact. We do think that as the ecosystem in which technology is developed or tweaking and deep biasing went to will not help us although that may be useful, for example, if you receive go zoom announce people use zoom for free, that the data could be shared with Law Enforcement. People who paid, the data would be encrypted and protected. Within a few days there was such an outcry that the reverse that position. Thats an example of a very specific tool that all of us are using now in which people said no, like they would be mass exit. They very quickly reversed course. That has its place but we have to think about the larger ecosystem in which we keep seeing often over people. We keep seeing the exploitation of data and the use of data. That whole idea that policy and legal ecosystem, theres a lot of great things happening people can plug into im thinking about in new york there was a when a couple weeks ago, new york City Surveillance Oversight Technology project stopped. Actually, the Newark City Council just voted for a new build the required nypd could disclose whatever surveillance tools they are using and create an oversight system, that this is something that that project was working for for some figures. But in this climate, mass posttest works. In this climate the council finally passed this bill. In l. A. Theres an Amazing Organization people should support and plug into, lapd stopped Fine Coalition. One of the things i love about them is the popular education model. This is not just for a select few people with degrees or who have the technology noma. If it affects you and your community can you get to be involved and you get to have a say. One of the great tools that stop lapd Fine Coalition has developed is a amassing up with a call the stock or state. Hopefully will add that in the chat but it shows you all of the tentacles come all the ways in which people are surveilled and data is collected and their developing an updated version thats looking specifically at Contact Tracing and the data shared across sectors in terms of Contact Tracing apps. These are just two places in new york and delhi but also in the midwest. Theres a lot of Great Community and policy work happening in st. A few years ago through something called the Innovation Project that Public Schools and the police joined forces to basically predict atrisk youth in the city. Community oryx galvanized of thing youre a thing down. We saw in the last few weeks the success in the Funding Police and moving resources. All across the country in every locale there are these Community Policy Legal Initiatives happening. Theres data for black flies the if youre somewhat intact, and again rather than thinking you are going to come up with some new solution, the ideas to plug into the ecosystem, support organizations that are been working for social justice and data for black flies is a wonderful Umbrella Organization that allows those collaborations to happen. The last bucket of things we can think about contributing and supporting our created and subversive uses of technology. Its not just that we refuse technologies that harm us we can create Digital Tools that are working for communities, David Justice tools. One example i always invoke is the whitecollar Early Warning system which flips the script and crates a heat map of city blocks or financial crimes are likely to occur and it even has a facial recognition system based on the linkedin profiles of 500 ceos or Something Like that. Again come to get us to question what are the assumptions when we think of crime, where i would looking, what are we predicting. It gets us in a very subversive way to begin to question that. Another version of that that is helping with housing discrimination is the antieviction mapping project which is using Digital Tools rather than predicting the most vulnerable by the summer is going to default or not pay the rent or mortgage, its looking at landlords, looking at property owners. Its taking the digital vans and turning it back on those who wield power and authority and its mapping in different cities that eviction process and updating that for covid eviction. If that just about giving as the david but its an organizing tool for people of that data could then target various kinds of laws and things on the ground. There are so many buckets. The very last thing i will say in terms of education, the equitable internet and just should have, working in detroit come in europe and other places building up Community Power to grow digital equity. Theres a great case study that was just published you should take a look at and adapted to their locale. You can take a look at the resources page of my personal website and it offers a lot more but essentially theres so many different ways to get involved base of which are passionate about and where you can get to fit in and say but has a role to play. So are we kind of wrapping up down . Im wondering if i should shift to sort of my closing thoughts or speeches we have a bit more time. I was going to take some ideas questions, if thats okay, but i definitely, i can definitely leave sometime for closing thoughts as well. Well, in terms of thinking about the family regulation or distraction system and how it relates destruction system, and how it relates to calls to defund the police, i just want to make a point about that and make sure that that out and ani dont know if this is a good time to do it. Absolutely. Okay. I have been concerned about first of all let me just say, everything that ruha recommended also be beneficial to organizing around abolishing the family regulation system. It isnt as technologically sophisticated or as longstanding or as organized as some other movements are. But its all about creating a different way of meeting peoples needs that doesnt rely on removing children from their homes, putting children in Detention Centers, locking up adults in prison. And so everything that ruha mentioned would also be beneficial to the movement to abolish foster care or family regulation. But i but i did want to make a t about the way in which some people have been recommending that in defunding the police, the money be transferred from police to health and Human Services. Because health and Human Service agencies are the ones that had a Child Protective Services. I think we have to be very careful not to take money and resources and authority from one oppressive institution or system and put into another one. First of all, police and Child Protective Services work handinhand. You are not really moving it to some separate benevolent system at all. And also building up the already billions of dollars are spent on taking children away from their families and putting them in some kind of substitute government custody is not going to benefit anybody. Its not going to achieve what we are working to achieve. Giving welfare authorities more money and power would only result in even more state surveillance and control of black and indigenous communitie communities. Theres a small but growing movement to radically transform or abolish the family regulation system. Its been a ignited by black mothers have been separated from their children come joined by former foster youth, social justice activist Legal Services providers, nonprofit organizations and scholars. I do want to contrast that from libertarian calls to keep the government out of families, and this goes to the point that this isnt a movement to ignore harms or hardships to children. Its the movement to deal with them in a way that actually makes families safe and provide for their needs. But libertarians dont want that to happen. They just want government out, but they are not thinking about a radically different kind of society that supports families. Our goal isnt just to dismantle the current system. Its to imagine and create better ways of caring for children, and families needs and preventing domestic violence. So the abolition includes diverting billions of dollars spent on separating children from the families to cash assistance, healthcare, housing, other Material Support provided directly and not coercively to families who need them. Again, the kinds of networks and movements that we see happening in the movement to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex are very much in tune and collaborate and cooperate with we had the same mission. I dont know if its at a point which hard to say, is it the same movement, but at least i would say that there is the same vision to collectively build a new society that supports rather than destroys families and communities. I would hold up as two organizations that are doing great work in this area that people should connect with. One is movement for family power. That just issued a really important report on how the war on drugs is connected to this. And also the National Coalition for Child Protection reform which collects a lot of really useful information and connects people who are working in this area. I hope that if people want to know more about this movement they will look to those two sources. Thank you so much for bringing that up because i think there is this really important question about reforms that actually appear and exacerbate the very problems and the very things we are trying to dismantle our then sort of rebuild elsewhere. I did want to linger on that for just the second and ask you that you had anything else to say about kind of other examples where that may be the case, reforms that opposing as reforms but are not, jenna, are sort of keeping us within the same paradigm and the same sort of oppressive framework without i think a lot of the examples that we pointed to in terms of tech mediated fixes, but also when we think about the protest chant, like no money for police, money for schools. The schools are another site of we think about the fact that the School Resource officer, the police in many places are funded by the department of education. You take money from police and give more to the department of education. Theres nothing from preventing them hiring more police. So again its all of these institutions are infected with this car strohl imagination and these tools for imposing social and racial control, that means its not just about shifting money around. Its about completely bending the foundations up ending the foundation reimagined. Of course what education and healthcare and families, and so part of what we need to do as collectives and as a moment is to devote as much energy into feeding those alternatives as we do in terms of critiquing the status quo. Not just imagining them but experimenting with them. In many ways what we are saying of mutual aid groups around the world, in many cases, not all but in many cases, those are experiments with mutuality, with solidarity, with completely reanalyzing source of harm and, therefore, the source of life affirming practices. We are actually building right now, expanding with alternatives to the many ways of mutuality and many of them dont require some new fancy tech fix. Thats part of it, is that what will be the new paradigm is and what we were promised the new shiny thing is going to be. Many times whats new is going back to some of our roots as well in terms of mutuality to mutual aid wasnt invented in the last ten or 100 years. Its something that is grounded in indigenous communities, communities all over the world have been smothered by a capitalist paradigm, by races isa premised paradigm. Partly what is new is a line what is been there to flourish again, its okay lets think about not discounting these small, again end quote, experiments, right . And not waiting for some just topdown fix but the big ecosystem policy, thats important. But the stuff we could do yesterday that could begin to grow. Even in her own imagination we think we put a just in front of it. It is just this little thing. It is just me and my friend doing x, y and z. Party what it takes is to peel the out of our own thinking and not discount what it means to build the world, a small world in which based on a different set of values, right, based on a different way of seeing one another. Its a different understanding what is power, you know . We are fed a very particular notion of power and, therefore, we reject it. But then what other forms of empowerment and power are we cultivating . What is wealth . You only associate wealth with certain things . We have to redefine, its like starting everything and new. This is the time to do it. We have to rethink all of our starting categories and are starting principles to ensure that whatever we create is not infected with these ways that continue to be reproduced again and again because we created change without actually get what is inside. Thank you so much. Yeah, i think thats an incredible point, and to bring in a couple of ideas questions. Theres a number of different threads im going to try and bring them into one question. Do it, do it. Theres a couple, from a couple different fields, people are wondering how to sort operate from an abolitionist framework. We have on the one hand, we have s. T. E. M. Fields. In this case specifically s. T. E. M. Fields that dont directly contribute to tech, to mr. Physics, how to be in that field and how to do research and ensure that your work is not reproducing these kinds of ideologies and then on the other side workers in tech thinking about, and a know you both have already pointed to some great organizations and great resources but i wanted to draw this out a little bit in terms of what folks who are watching who may be in those particular industries can think about and do in their work. Well, i could start with maybe a different kind of industry that i most familiar with, and thats biomedical research. I get the question lot which is similar to this question from iowa medical researchers, or medical students also who are being trained by people who believe in the biological concept of race and think that its essential to doing medicine or to understanding human bodies. There are so many people who couldnt possibly do that without dividing people into biological races and predicting everything about them thats relevant to the study or to the disease based on their race. And what can medical students or postdocs in a genomics lab, what can they do . Sometimes they are also confused about how do we deal with race . Accounts we are being taught, all we know is this biological concept. I think one thing that is important is to keep in mind that race is invented and reinvented, and to think about how it is being used in any particular context. Is it being treated as if it were a biological, natural category . Or is it being used for what it is, a system of governing people that have always been promoted in a hierarchical fashion by dominant science and people in power . Also to realize that you cant do this on your own. You have to have solidarity with other students, try to find people. Again unthinking in the academic context, its different in the corporate world but there are always going to be people who are higher ups who have more authority that you can work with. I would just keep you an example of race correction now where there are now about four or five hospitals that it ended it and in every case its because of students organizing to end it. In the context of an antiracism demand for a new kind of education about race and racism, one that takes into account Structural Racism and doesnt rely on the biological concepts. They had won so many exciting victories lately. It can be done. Sometimes you have to form a group outside of the structure that you are working in, its a working group or more of an activist group. Thats important as well. It can be done and it has to be done because if we dont change the way in which these paradigms are being reproduced by people who havent bought into vignette, theres no hope, but there is hope in people who, the students, you know, i do want to say its all just young people and older people are helpless. I found its the students, its the people come in who are willing to change the very value, structures and paradigms that can make a change. Absolutely. To that i would add for anyone whether urine chemistry or in the tech industry, know your history. In terms of your not the first to be concerned about this, so built on the history of organizing in your particular locale. I love the organizations, engineers and technicians going back so long in terms of understanding that theyre not just individuals, they are not just with the titles of the profession but they have a larger responsibility. If you are the first one seeing the development of some unfulfilled thing for the ignoring of some horrible thing, you have a responsibility to blow the whistle and work with others. Also thinking about the relationship between people and their professions and communities that are ultimately impacted, and how to create as part of the ecosystem the connections between the arena before something hits the fan, right . Im thinking i want to recommend the Design Justice Network and the design justice principles as one of those guides for people in different sectors to use. So think about how to cultivate those relationships way, way, way upstream in any process. And then finally began to understand the hierarchies in your own backyard. Its somewhat easier to see the problem when its in the distance, but right in your own backyard if youre in academia, the hierarchies of knowledge and academia that make us a a peope can graduate from s. T. E. M. Fields and have no historical literacy, have no sociological literacy, and yet be producing things that will have his wife sweeping impact the that hierarchy of knowledge that makes it so you can think that your educated and proficient in a particular field without some basic insights from other disciplines, thats built into the structure of what knowledge is valuable or not. You can do what you want to do so that hierarchy of knowledge creates an ecosystem that allows things to continue to be reproduced so do thathomework in your own backyard. Know your history. No power analysis in yourown concept. Thank you both so much. I feel like i have so many more things to ask you but unfortunately we are out of time. I know, i feel like this went so fast. Well, thank you so much both of you, doctor benjamin and doctor roberts. Its been an incredible conversation. I feel like theres so much more to say and my gratitude to both of youfor sharing such critical perspectives and wisdom with us today. Before we close, i have a few closingannouncements. Thank you to everyone for joining us. We appreciate your questions and for being here with us. I want to let you know abouta couple of events coming up soon. Tomorrow is the four preschools and equitable safe opening at 7 00 eastern time and next week we have that end of zionism and fox next steps on july 14 at 5 00 eastern. Then on july 20 we have the incarceration from the us to palestine, that at 5 00 just check those out and signup on events right if you havent already. I want to thank patty again for livecaptioning this event. I want to thank haymarket books for organizing this live stream. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you to everyone who joined us all and we will seeyou next time. Thanks a market. Tanks everybody thanks dorothy. Are watching the tv on cspan2 with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created byamericas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television providers. Tv continues now on cspan2, television for seriousreaders. Joining us now on book tv is senator joni ernst, a republican from iowa. Shes written a new memoir calleddaughter of the heartland. Senator ernst, what prompted you towrite this book at this time . Guest thank you peter so