Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

The recounts an episode from the TV sitcom Better off Ted: a corporation installs automatic technology, but a glitch in the sensors mean they do not respond to people with dark skin. The episode demonstrates how efficiency and productivity often take precedent over equity as companies seek to protect their bottom line. While such technologies overlook Black people, others, such as surveillance technology, make Blackness hypervisible. This exposure also evokes film and the ways that photography has historically been used to depict and substantiate racial classifications. While exposure implies visibility it often implies misreading, where racialized individuals are “constantly exposed as something [they] are not” (101). Some respond to aesthetic judgments by insisting on their beauty, while other scholars, such as Mia Mingus, call for an assertion of one’s own aesthetic value that is not concerned with beauty at all.

In the late twentieth century, exposure techniques for photography did not adequately account for a variety of skin tones, leaving darker-skinned subjects blurred. On the other hand, Polaroid’s ID2 camera faced backlash for implementing an added flash to improve pictures of Black South Africans for their passbooks, documents used to restrict the movement of Black people during apartheid.