Digitizing Antiblackness: The Politics of Black Education in the Digital Economy

• In Event: The Racialized Political Economy of Education: Explorations of Antiblackness Across K–16

Abstract

Sharpe (2016) and Dumas (2018) suggest that schools operate as sites of Black suffering. McKittrick (2017) further explains that, in our contemporary moment, this orthography of suffering is increasingly structured around the encounter between Black children and algorithmic technologies. As the use of these technologies moves towards ubiquity within an economic framework of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), how do we come to understand contemporary logics of anti-blackness as they are shaped by the forces of schooling and the digital economy? How do we make sense of the resistances, and world-making practices, that Black children articulate in opposition to these forms of 21st century miseducation (Woodson, 1933)?

This paper addresses these questions by bringing together scholarship from the fields of information studies, Black studies, and education. In this paper, the author argues that contemporary instantiations of anti-blackness in schools are, in part, the result of the economic logic of the “surveillance of blackness” (Browne, 2015). Specifically, the paper argues that, due to their reliance on the collection and analysis of behavioral and psychometric data, educational technologies create an environment where the everyday experiences of Black children are rendered into a scalable subject (Stark, 2018). Through this process of rendering and subjectification, digital technologies reinforce modalities of antiblack violence that originate in historical practices of racializing surveillance. Furthermore, the paper addresses Black student’s opposition to both digital technologies and their collection of biometric information. On this matter, the paper concludes that the student’s oppositions should be interpreted as the basis of a critical biometric consciousness (Browne, 2015; 2010) in education.

Author

• Daniel Vargas, University of California - Berkeley