The Technological Privilege of Whiteness

• In Event: Political Socialization in the Age of Digital Media

Abstract

Many scholars have pointed to the role played by race and technology in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Typically, they argue that social media made it possible to coalesce racial resentment amongst white middle- and lower-class American voters in the wake the Barak Obama’s presidency. Technology, in these readings, served as tool, exploited by the forces of populist conservatism in 2016 and after. This paper takes a different approach to race and technology by arguing for a deep entanglement between the technological present and the history of white supremacy. Given the increasing importance of algorithms and Big Data to the production of public life—for example, by controlling the production and distribution of news and media content, determining the distribution of public services, operating financial markets, and executing scientific research, etc.—this paper argues against the view that such “tools” operate as neutral techne that can be corrected for bias by braking open the black box of the code. Rather, by undertaking a genealogy that traces the kinds of investments, metaphors and logics that underwrite the production of algorithmic knowledge, I argue that technology (specifically, as data driven algorithm) serves as a prop of the privileges of whiteness—the myth of individualism, the capacity to bring order to chaos, and, especially, by sustaining the dangerous belief in dominion over the world’s productive capacities. Specifically, this paper traces, what I call, technological whiteness to the plantation where slaves were treated as machines of production, activated by the sovereign will of the master. Though the work of Sylvia Wynter and W.E.B. DuBois, I argue that the white-middle-class identity that began to form in the decades before the civil war adapted this relationship to “the machine of production” on the plantation to technological modernity of the factory: artificial machines replaced human ones, and the privileges of whiteness were sustained in a white non-slave holding identity.
I suggest that tracking American political movements through race will be better served by situating such research within the changing technological landscape, especially, I show, when those technologies implicate the organization of the economy. Thus, I situate technology within what Michael Dawson calls racial capitalism, as a material site where the forces of accumulation are articulated with the generation of difference—algorithms, I argue, extend the status quo by utilizing past data so as to ensure the continuation of the same relationships into the future, in the process, “correct” those that appear as anomaly, or “spike the algorithm.” The very concept of “raw data,” then, serves to mask the hidden privileges of whiteness and extends them into the data-driven future.

Author

• Nicholas Fiori, The New School For Social Research