Listening to Black Women: The Innovation Tech Can't Figure Out

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.wired.com/story/listening-to-black-women-the-innovation-tech-cant-figure-out/

When tech media is not accustomed to listening to Black women, tech users fail to realize when Black women are not real. MSNBC recently revealed that Russian operatives had been posing as Black people to spread misinformation. Black women have been chronicling this fakery for years. Even though Black women were the first to expose the alt right six years ago, their work and the alarms they’ve rung consistently remain uncredited and unheard. Platforms often take weeks to intercept targeted harassment of Black women, to the point where other users simply describing the abuse and delay of intervention are targeted.

There becomes a pseudo Overton Window lock: Harmful behavior toward Black women isn’t enough to inspire change until others are harmed, but the original harms are often lost by journalists tasked with covering tech. The power and rhetoric that went unchecked becomes common. And the tactics used against Black women for “lulz” become weapons used in the conspiracies destabilizing the very nature of truth, from the swarming of victims to posing as Black women to destabilizing communities (or countries). Defining the systemic abuse becomes a frustrating exercise of describing an empty space that no one believes is there. If we can follow, surveil, and automate everyone, how could we miss anything important? And if it is important it is only important for how it changes the mythical “standard user” no matter how many are hurt before.

Another way this plays out: While the radicalization of “standard users” (i.e., white men) who perform racist actions is considered intrinsically part of tech’s story, the lens is often not extended to the targets of that racism. After Demetria Hester was attacked by a man named Jeremy Christian on Portland’s Trimet transportation in 2017, Christian was not even questioned. Not long after, he was charged with murdering two men who were defending two Black teens from his racist Islamophobic attacks. During the summer 2020 protests in Portland, Hester was arrested for organizing with Mothers United for Black Lives Matter. There are some 200 million Google results for Jeremy Christian, including taxonomies of his hate speech and denials by right wing groups of their connections to him. There are 200,000 results for Demetria Hester. Not one appears to connect her experience to the abuse of Black women online, even after studies like Amnesty’s had come out. Hester, who went viral after Christian threatened her at his sentencing, spoke of being ignored when she tried to warn cops about Christian and others who were targeting her. Authorities were not listening when she needed help, but they were when they wanted her silent. Christian’s radicalization is much discussed and seen as inherently digital, yet the surveillance and real life consequences for Hester are only digital as far as they are covered, a pattern repeated over and over.

Black women have been chronicling this phenomenon as long as they’ve been online. In the forward to #HashtagActivism, Genie Lauren notes that hashtags were originally derided as “repeated resistance”: The taking of often myopic reporting of vital Black issues and raising their attention while grounding them in their impact on Black people. Lauren, whose work was instrumental in stopping a juror on the Trayvon Martin murder trial from making a macabre profit grab of a book deal, reveals she had her entire Twitter account deleted for a still unclear transgression. Even the term coined to describe this specific discrimination of Black women, misogynoir, is often used, but usually without mention of its creator, Moya Bailey.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Kick.

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2. K&R

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R