FINDING THE FALSE NEGATIVE IN THE INVISIBILIZING EFFECTS OF ANTI-BLACKNESS & AFROPHOBIA IN TECH: OUR LANGUAGES AS CYBERSECURITY
I have found myself thinking about the multiple and layered ways in which anti-blackness and Afrophobia manifest in the site that is the digital. How it is transposed from the structural and quotidian to form and perpetuate digitally mediated prejudice. As a phenomenon, it is evidenced in multiple ways. The structural in the lack of diversity and inclusion in Big Tech companies and startups, and the legislations that underpin their dominance and governance. The quotidian in the absence of translations and images that holistically represent ourselves, our languages and culture. The digital racisms that include ‘blackfishing’[1], the weaponization of AAVE and Black slang (see ‘woke’ as a pejorative in the UK), as well as “viral memes circulating via social media platforms; the swarming of online users targeting a person of colour; the hidden bias of algorithmic sorting, or; the licentious racial profiling of policing and surveillance systems”[2].
I then wondered how we, as a Black people — continental and diasporic — may exploit this racial bias in technology for our own safety and security online. How to turn digitally enabled racism to our advantage. The answer came in the form of embracing our language and vernacular; seeing our tongue as subversive and as resistance; and treating othering as empowering. In one way at least.
Cybersecurity demands the proactive practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks. Most laypersons make the mental association of basic cyber protection with passwords. Many techies and experts see this as a potential vulnerability, especially as i) this is not the only measure that should be employed, and ii) the regular person is known to use the same passcode or word for multiple accounts. Cybersec professionals have called for the use of encryption applications or for two-factor authentification among a host of other measures to protect one’s information online. One method that has been encouraged is the adoption of passphrases or password complexity. Indeed, the best technique is to not only use a combination of letters and numbers in your passphrase, but to do so in a language other than English.
To undermine the prejudiced effects of tech, as an industry and space that is at best ‘colourblind’ and at worst outrightly racist, what best way and place to carve out a little corner of resistance than in the personal? — in the site that houses our secrets and stories and selves. Our digital vault.
Lorde* knows that the structural battle is Sisyphean. And passphrases in our slang or vernacular may appear to be basic online safety protocol and practice. But in its own minute way, this pushback may serve as preservation that then hopefully habituates us into practicing an afrocentric cyber ethos and future that folds and moulds tech into our culture and not the other way round.
But first, a look into what defines anti-black racism and Afrophobia, and how they manifest in tech. I am particularly interested in their invisibilizing effects.
The term racism which refers to that bias against ethnic minorities doesn’t sufficiently describe the experience by black people. Anti-blackness is the name for the particular racial prejudice directed towards black people. Afrophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings (irrational fear, with the implication of antipathy, contempt and aversion[3]) towards black people or people of African Descent around the world and their culture. To be exact, anti-blackness is an epistemological space which then defines the ontology of Afrophobia. The former speaks to “how to form the question” while the latter describes “how the mouth shapes the words”.
Racial discrimination is evident in tech in many everyday ways, with deep historical roots. It is critical to acknowledge that “data is not neutral, data can not be neutralized, and data will always bear the marks of its history”. We must understand this history and what it means for the tech systems being built. For instance, the use of facial recognition technology in policing has been shown to be biased against people of colour in the US[4] and in the UK[5]. It has led to numerous cases of misidentification because it simply cannot tell black and brown people apart at times[6]. When it does, it may not process features correctly, such as was the case when @elainebabey was attempting to use the UK’s online passport system but her photo did not “meet the rules” as it ‘read’ her mouth as open, when in fact it was not[7]. Other times, the tech does not see us as human at all, such as when Google’s AI mis-labelled black people’s faces as gorillas two years ago[8].
The invisibilizing effect is also made apparent through lack of diversity and inclusion: not only are minorities under-represented in decision making roles in BigTech, hiring algorithms have been known to be biased against non- ‘white sounding names’. It is also seen in the lack of language translation options on platforms and sites for ethnic languages, which includes most African tongues.
Afrophobia and anti-blackness is a creature and construct which generates othering (under-ing if I may). It begets an experience of stigmatization in layered ways — both benign and hostile yet equally harmful.
Take, for instance, the gentleman who was at Schiphol Airport who discovered that the soap dispensers were incapable of ‘seeing’ black skin[9]. He (@jimchuchu) narrated “I looked up, confused, and another black guy a few sinks across caught my eye. He was also waving his dry palms under the tap in vain, and we realized the unfortunate truth at the same time. The automated dispensers and taps couldn’t see our skin.”[10]
Reading about this I recalled the introduction from Ellison’s seminal work, Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison brings out the dichotomy and paradox of simultaneous visibility and invisibility at the start of the novel when the book’s hero observes: I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or fragments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.
One of the features and bugs of being black is bearing an ability to adapt our awareness level and consequent comfort depending on whether, in our environment, we experience a shift between hyper visibility and stark invisibility in the societal hard, distorting glass.
As Arundhati Roy discerned, there is no such thing as the voiceless, only the deliberately silenced or preferably unheard. Similarly, there are no unseen or invisible — only the disappeared and the invisibilized. The latter phrasing, however, is more apt as it refuses passive language and names an act, a doer and a consequence — a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system.
We are made invisible in the sense that the historical and current structural barriers stemming from colonialism and slavery such as public policies, laws, norms and practices that exist to prop up this reality are not immediately or physically apparent. There are invisible processes that create systems and institutions whose function is neglect, fear, denial and indifference of and to the black person.
This system has profound and far reaching metaphysical, psychological, and moral aspects. Indeed, when other non-black people are psychologically and spiritually socialized and habituated into not seeing the black person and body as human, it relegates us to a lower status in the hierarchy of value, it gradually becomes effortless to not physically see us, and further, to psychologically minimize or dismiss us. If we are seen, it is not as whole, authentic human beings[11].
We are invisible as human in social situations; fighting an intrapersonal battle with a society that devalues us and what defines us — our belief systems and culture — and even our aptitude and capability — all having an impact on our sense of self-worth.
Yet, paradoxically, highly visible because we look different. The fact that we stand out because of our skin creates a mental association in others with negative stereotypes; if and when we are seen, it is through the lens of harmful tropes and preconceptions. We are visible when we are pathologized because they need a poster child for poverty, crime, war and all round dysfunction; to tick the box of tokenistic diversity; or in THE article about Africa. We are visible when, to combat white guilt and their racism of lowered expectations, they perform praise or the mythical exceptional Black (see #BlackExcellence[12]).
Whether through portrayals and narratives such as Africa rising, the dark continent or Africa-is-a-country, we see limited imaginaries and perceptions of what we can do, what we have done or what we are. This says a lot about the singular story others tell and are told, and nothing about us and/or our diversity. It denies a nuanced reading of the effects of imperialism and conquest and of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Africa’s colonization heralded an era of ‘global homogeneity that solidified a global political (the nation-state) and economic (capitalism) template that has so dominated the global imaginary of the following 150 years that it secures nearly impossible to imagine alternatives to it.’[13]
This is why we can’t divorce the past from the present. It is not only relevant but necessary for a proper reading and analysis of this phenomenon, and an informed vision of our futures. Our here and beyond. Based on this geo-history, Blackness and Africanness in my experience is situated in a liminal space; one occupies the place between past and present; seen and unseen. This is reflected not only in our daily lives but in the digital sphere as well.
Insofar as it is an expression of ideas about our environment, and is useful in understanding ourselves and our relation to society, language can be a bridge between past, present and future. Languages are brought to life through speech, sound, symbols and signals which are assigned meaning. Our people are made seen and heard through words. In a very Cartesian ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of way, suppression or willful neglect of certain languages and their delegation as inferior has the opposite effect of being life affirming and is instead a very denial of being.
But we can and should find the false negative in others’ limited imaginations of us and the capabilities of our languages; it could be a bulwark for our present safety and hopefully future techno- and cyber- culture.
Examining the power of language I am reminded of bell hooks’ Language: teaching new worlds/new words[14]. Here, she recalls the visceral reaction she had to a line in a poem she read by Adrienne Rich. She speaks to how she was moved and disturbed by the sentence ‘this is the oppressors’ language yet I need it to talk to you”. She reflected that she knew that it is not the English language that hurts her or us, but what the oppressors do with it. She talks of the terror she imagined that displaced, enslaved Africans experienced when forced to inhabit the unfamiliar architecture of plantations. How “their language was rendered meaningless”, their voices deemed foreign could not be spoken, were outlawed tongues, renegade speech; how they were dismissed as merely grunts or gibberish. She resisted the notion that the oppressors be allowed to disempower us through this language of conquest and domination. She marveled at how her ancestors reinvented and remade, altered and transformed the alien tongue that was the lingua franca of the New World. How they subverted the imposition of English and substituted the incorrect usage and placement of words, “in the spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance”. “Using English in a way that ruptured standard use and meaning”.
There was a similar clarion call by renowned Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to reclaim our languages as black people on African soil. He has written and spoken extensively about how the concomitant imposition of English and suppression of native languages functioned as a tool of cultural imperialism and colonizing violence. English was touted as “the language of power, rationality, and intelligence; Gĩkũyũ, which Ngũgĩ would write in later, signified backwardness — an Africanness that, for the good of its carriers, had to be exorcized”[15] and the people who spoke them forcefully ‘civilized’. In Decolonizing the Mind, he explained the relationship between language and power; of the insidious faculty that the replacement of local tongues and dialects in favour of English created. He explicated that its impact served to entrench the colonial project by enmeshing the settlers’ ways in a bottom up/ top down manner when it was crafting the State that we now know and inhabit: from language and culture to governance structures and laws. In one interview, expounding on the psychological effect of silencing local languages, song, culture and art, he noted that they were suppressed and degraded due to their innate ability to nourish the imagination and fuel hope. He said “the problem with repressive regimes is that they like to starve the imagination. They don’t want you to think or imagine the possibilities of a different future.”[16]
This links back beautifully and seamlessly with the title of hooks’ work on language, how it can play a transformative role — in building new worlds rooted in and routed through our new words. Expounding on Thiongo’s observation, language and words bring peoples together and that has a ripple effect on organizing and creation of communities of resistance. Whether through the subversion of formerly hurtful terms or reclamation of hitherto ‘uncivilised’ tongues.
Resistance usually starts from a grumble before it becomes a growl, and ultimately a roar culminating in an attack that destabilizes the status quo. The grumble is in the individual. The political starts with and is situated in the personal. The personal is political.
Can our grumble be embracing our languages in our personal digital sites? Can we subvert this invisibilizing of us and our languages by using them almost exclusively? Can shutting out attacks in cyberspace by only using passphrases in vernacular, sheng, patois or AAVE be its own resistance through linguistic reclamation and welcoming othering as empowerment? An exploitation of the limited imaginaries of how we engage with tech? A celebration of the long degraded ‘clicks, grunts and gibberish’ as signs and symbols which guard our secrets through praxis as and/of cybersecurity. And, can we create new worlds and spaces such as those imagined by Ann Daramola (@anndaramola) when she noted and wondered “this internet was not made for any way of being that comes out of the Africas. So, of course, I’ve been imagining what an internet designed after Africans’ lived experiences looks and feels like.”[17]
In imagining what an afrocentric digital space and practice would look like I defer to André Brock in his piece Black technoculture as afrofuturism. He described how the meaning of a holistic ‘digital’ refers to the assemblage we call ‘the internet’; it serves as an encompassing reference for the materials, code, protocols, content, institutions, audiences, and users powering computers, online media, social networking services, and even digital tools such as Twitch streaming or podcasting. Digital practice …. comprises the activities conducted via/of the digital, or a web of human activities surrounding the computational artifact[18].
Describing the digital in this way melds the temporal and current, seen and unseen, lived and ethereal, opens up the imagination and the what-if realm of possibility. Brock describes black technoculture as that which incorporates the materiality, temporality, and meaning-making capacities of the Black digital and its practitioners as a technological mediation of the Black ‘post-present’.
In imagining an afrocentric digital future, I envision it guided by a cyber ethos that centres us and our culture™: both the mundane (e.g. pop culture discussions and everyday banter) and the powerful (e.g. digital movements and online petitions). One that prioritizes and is characterized by principles of safety, care and community. This entails security, privacy and data protection which manifests in freedom from acts such as racist trolling, harassment, doxxing and online violence.
Digital spaces generally[19] and social media specifically have always been rife with anti-black trolling and trauma for minorities, even as black people have “populated these spaces with (their) ingenuity and fanatic participation”[20]. As a result, some black people have sought refuge in more controlled spaces, as detailed in this piece on the history of Black Twitter. On the continent, Google searches for African related content returns results mainly from the Global North such as the US and France, resulting in “a form of digital hegemony, whereby producers in a few countries get to define what is read by others”[21]. In response, desperate for African representation and local content on popular search engines, we have created some of our own, with little success[22].
Beyond these attempts, I wonder, what would an internet and/or digital world for us, by us look like?
Even as we imagine safe digital worlds in the future, this is what we do know, here and now. Technology is not inherently neutral, in the same way that the law is not always moral or ethical — both can and have been infused with bias. I conclude with the question half-posed by the inimitable Ntozake Shange when she queried whether ‘computers can speak black vernacular’[23]. I know that if they can, they must be taught. But do we want them to?
As we dream digital freedom dreams and imagine this space on a meta- level, let’s begin with honouring our languages and vernacular in our personal, political places that are our passwords and phrases.
[2] https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613950/Digital-Racism-Networks-Algorithms-Power-Laws
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/27/facial-recognition-cameras-technology-police
[6] https://gal-dem.com/facial-recognition-racism-uk-inaccurate-met-police/
[7] https://twitter.com/elainebabey/status/1232333491607625728?lang=en
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/12/google-racism-ban-gorilla-black-people
[9] https://twitter.com/jimchuchu/status/1230120606114467840
[10] https://twitter.com/jimchuchu/status/1230120626683166720
[11] https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=twlj
[12] https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a27540970/black-women-talk-on-pressure-excellent/
[14] https://rhetoricreadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/bell-hooks_rrg.pdf
[15] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/06/ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-the-tyranny-of-language/
[17] https://twitter.com/anndaramola/status/1179168411701563392
[18] https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/extr.2020.3?journalCode=extr
[19] Sites such as Twitch, Reddit, 4 and 8 Chan have been known to have notoriously racist content
[20] https://theundefeated.com/features/a-blessing-and-a-curse-the-rich-history-behind-black-twitter/
[22] Access a list from 2010 here https://www.oafrica.com/web/uniquely-african-search-engines/
[23] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/nyregion/a-poet-with-words-trapped-inside.html
