McIlwain 2020
McIlwain, Charlton D. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Black America dragged Jim Crow to its deathbed in the 1960s. Still, the nation’s elite science and engineering institutions—the ones that were developing the first digital computers—locked black Americans out of their ranks.
Back in 1964, this moved scholars from talking merely about technologi- cal systems and relationships between people and machines to talking about information societies. 13This was not an insignificant concept. Societies have citizens. Societies have politics. But at the same time the folks at the lab began to think about information societies, they failed to think about what kind of society they were building. Who was included and who was deliber- ately excluded from that society? They failed to think about, much less grasp, the consequence of building a new technological society in which Negroes were educationally and technologically both separate and unequal. During that 1963–1964 academic year, MIT’s faculty wrote and spoke a lot about “the Negro,” and the complex urban areas where they lived. They built and studied new machines that facilitated new connections to people, and public and private institutions. But they never connected the two. No one asked how developing computer networking systems might impact so- called urban problems. Would it exacerbate them? Could the computer help solve them?
MIT decided that spring of 1964 that a single-digit number of Negroes was as many as the institute could handle. The folks at MIT, and those like them, were building a new information society. They, like officials at most elite science and engineering institutions at the time, made the de facto decision to exclude Negroes from designing, building, or deciding what computing systems would be built. This would have devastating consequences.
MIT’s actions impacted a generation of Negroes who would never have a chance to take the reins of the new computer revolution.
IBM had devel- oped the first such test in the industry, what it called its “Programmer Aptitude Test.” More than anything else, the test itself, and its widespread use, reinforced the idea that computer programmers were born not made. Blacks who failed to pass the test were seen as unteachable.
IBM’s outreach to black and minority communities appeared to respond to the federal government’s new equal opportunity demands. However, IBM’s heavy-handed description of the jobs it offered made it clear that it had merely substituted its aptitude tests with job descriptions it knew would weed out a large proportion of potential black applicants.
IBM extended its reach into black communities. But it, and companies like it in the expanding computing industry, publicized these positions at a time when the college and university science and engineering pipeline pro- duced very few Negro graduates. Yes, IBM needed scientists, designers, engi- neers, mathematicians, and physicists. But the reality was that the nation’s top scientific and engineering minds, pipelined through its elite science and engineering universities, had already flooded IBM’s scientific ranks.
A new kind of black software began to take shape in the early 1980s. It started with a handshake. A connection. Not between two computers, but between a computer and the black community. Derrick had made that connection when he realized that he could and should use his engineering knowledge and com- puter application prowess to help other black brothers and sisters achieve their dreams. William would have to leave IBM before he could make that connec- tion. He would have to travel to, and settle in, a place steeped in bitter racial pol- itics and racial justice activism. William made his handshake. He found a way to use the skills that he developed at IBM to connect and uplift his community.
Students had come to MIT to be transformed into what the institute promised to make them: leaders, capable of, and charged with, fashioning better tools and machines to support and extend America’s political and eco- nomic standing in the world. They were building the technologies and machines that would soon begin to govern the nation. And they did it with little care or concern for black people, either within the greater Boston area or throughout the United States. This epic lack of concern would make it palatable, easier for MIT to lend its knowledge, its computing resources, its computational innovations, and its ties to industry and government—a gov- ernment that began to see black America as an enemy target for the coun- try’s new computing machines.
In the late 1970s, and in earnest by the 1980s, a torrent of black technophiles began making moves. They shifted the relationship that had made their parents and grandparents technology’s victims. And they propped themselves up to be more than just spectators in the coming computer revolution. They were the Vanguard. They were different people, with different prep- aration, pursuing different interests. They would discover one another soon enough but at that time they were each on their own journeys.
They did not know they were leading a revolution.
The early 1990s Internet had become a cafeteria, filled with the text-based musings and rantings produced by the generations of Usenet and BBS users from which the Internet evolved. It had become a place where you could find and sample expressions on just about everything you wanted. Porn. Politics. Suicide. Aliens. African Americans. Anarchists plotting world dom- ination. And from day one, this environment was hostile to black people.
The Universal Black Pages (UBP) became the first black-oriented Internet search directory. By typing in a word, people could find information on cul- tural events, businesses, organizations, and more. Black users created web- sites with black-oriented content at lightning pace. UBP became both a map and a transportation vehicle.
Back in 1994 at the CBCF conference, everyone raved about the informa- tion superhighway. Less than a decade later, its first on-ramps, interchanges, and meaningful exit points for black folks started to crack and crumble. And, the related, but larger question still loomed. This was the question that Congresswoman Waters prompted when she reminded them that the nation’s enduring legacy of slavery and white supremacy shaped everything about black life, from the drug war to the tech wars. The Vanguard had to grapple with the question, What would and should black America’s relation- ship to technology, to computers, to the Internet be as we approach the beginning of a new century?
For most of her life, Anita had been a secretary. But by the end of it she had become the architect of a movement still waiting to peak. Everybody had their own agenda, their own idea of what needed to happen, a plan for what would make all things right with the world. But it was Anita—some- one with so little ego or money invested—who sat back, looked out onto the whole Internet world, and realized one, single-most important truth: a twenty-first-century revolution had to start with a revolution of technology. Anita was the one who realized that black people needed to reposition ourselves not just to one another, to capital, or to the realities of white dom- inance. She realized that we must reposition ourselves to the technological tools that served to either support or resist white racial dominance. Anita realized that the revolution needed to be digitized and networked—not monetized—and that it must include citizens, government, educational institutions, and corporations.
Powell believed that America’s racial politics, not the computer, would dictate automation’s imperative and determine its impact.
…* Adam Clayton Powell Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin openly lamented what they thought automation would bring to black America. They also warned about the dangers of “cybernation.” But for each of them, automation and cybernation occupied one side of a single coi…
Cybernation” referred to the mechanized production of goods, aided by a computer. It included the automated processing of data. Cybernation referred to the systemic and regulatory communication and control rela- tionship between human beings and computers. A “cybernated” system— again, simply put—included a production process governed by a computer. The machine can process production data. It could “learn” from that data (i.e., memorize, interpret, and analyze). It could use what it “learned” to reg- ulate a continuous production process with minimal human intervention.
IBM had begun to solidify its brand as the company that could identify and find computational, automated solu- tions to the world’s most challenging problems. Taming the natural environ- ment or taming the political problems spurred by a backward race? IBM made no distinction.
The Kerner Report detailed the tragic outcome that white racism wrought on black America. It also showed the nation a way forward. But the nation brushed it aside. The greater tragedy, however, was that Washington, and the emerging computing research and development establishment, tipped their hand. They would increasingly harness the computers’ hardware and soft- ware capabilities to further oppress, rather than liberate, the Negro.
Simulmatics had been wildly successful, even though its results were ulti- mately buried alongside the commission’s report. Using Simulmatics for this work, however, legitimized and normalized the principles on which it was based: the idea that the computer could model, and therefore manipulate, human systems and behavior. It once was theory. It soon became policy. Black people would continue to remain its subject for experimentation. Computing power would be used on them.
From one perspective, Wilkins’s computer was race neutral, merely per- forming the task it was designed to do. From another vantage point, com- puters were doing work traditionally done by Negroes. As far as Wilkins was concerned, both led to the unemployment line. The predicament, Wilkins acknowledged, was both personal and struc- tural. In one breath, Wilkins would admonish the next generation to get an education. He warned that if they did not, computers may be tossing most of the race to the slag heap by 1990.
In any case, the story made Wilkins fearful about how the computer would be used. He knew that white America associated black people with crime. He was afraid that that association, and data that confirmed it, would be fed into, ingested in, and processed by a powerful new computer sys- tem—one that stored, connected, and distributed large amounts of deci- sion-driving data that could negatively impact black people’s lives.
What was the computer to black people? Black people, by and large, did not have access to the tech- nology being used to profile, target, and forecast their tendency toward
criminality. Black people were not hired as technicians to process the data input in the machine. Black people certainly did not design the systems. Black people were not at the table to contribute to conversations about how to deploy the outputs. Black people were not represented among the indus- try consultants who showcased the computer’s capabilities, developed its use cases, or had the technical skills to know how to build in necessary con- straints. Black people were scarce in the ranks of students at higher-education institutions that provided the pipeline to government agencies and industries that were so invested in this work.
What was the computer to black people throughout the 1960s and early 1970s? They certainly never saw themselves pictured in an IBM advertise- ment utilizing one of the new machines for all kinds of business purposes. To black people by and large the computer was an alien technology destined to go to work on them the way all prior US technologies had—to grind them into submission and exert racial power over their entire existence.
And what were black people to the 1960s and 1970s computer system? ALERT II and the rise of criminal justice information systems more broadly began the long-standing process of turning black people—people with bod- ies and experiences, hopes and interests, aspirations and legitimate griev- ances against their government—into abstract data. Computers process and manipulate data. Whether they anticipated it or not (and all evidence points to not), once law enforcement officials invested in computing as a law enforcement, problem-solving tool, they also invested in the value of data as an enterprise. The “data” produced the model, and the model became the territory. Crime became something committed by people with whom one has no relationship—certainly not one rooted in mutuality, common expe- rience, common goods or interests, shared responsibility, or, in many cases, even basic humanity.