The As-Is Architecture of Racism
Okay, so I've asked you to consider Racism as Technology and proposed that the purpose of racism as technology is to create surplus leisure and wealth for white people. How does it do that? We can observe that the system of racism facilitates white (and in come cases, whiter people) to steal (or at least have structural advantage to take) wealth, work, property and power from non-white or less white people.
Notice that I’m not talking in the past tense. Technologies are a right here, right now phenomenon.
What questions does that raise?
For me it’s: How does the technology of racism work? How does it function? Where does it exist? What continues to bring it into existence? How is it maintained? Why is it so pervasive?
I stipulate that these questions reveal my own professional biases. These are the exact same questions we ask when we sunset regressive, out-of-date, costly, hurtful technologies for complex enterprises.
In technologist speak, we want to discover: what is the “As-Is Architecture” of the technology of Racism/White Supremacy? This is a taboo topic that white people largely avoid, by habit and acculturation. I can speak from my personal experience, that the first time I tried to talk about my role in the system of racism, it seemed terribly dangerous to me. My heart rate spiked. I started to sweat and shake. My body reacted the same way it did when I did something reckless, like rock climbing without safety equipment, or driving on the wrong side of the highway.
Why is the architecture of racism important to understand? Well, I often hear people talk about dismantling racism, but if I’m honest, I didn’t understand what that meant in reality … until I began to try to model for myself what actually needs dismantling.
In this post, my goal is to begin to distinguish the “as-is architecture” of Racism as Technology and to try to grope towards understanding, the (no longer written down, but still in operation) standard of whiteness/white supremacy. In my experience, before you can sunset (or replace) a technology you need to understand what it does, where it’s housed and who’s going to freak out when it disappears.
As a reminder, I did not invent the idea of Race or Racism as Technology. The concept has evolved over two decades, led by women of color. I’m exploring ideas they originated mainly to see if white folks can use the concept to denature racism, and see if that makes a difference in our capability to participate in dismantle it, as a technology.
Climbing inside the idea of a technology
When I was 3 or 4 years old, there was a child at the preschool I attended who was a highly precocious bully. When I told my parents what the child was doing to me, my dad explained what a bully was and told me that I was going to need to stand up to him. That all seemed well and good, except that this kid had assembled a small gang of other children all willing to do violence on his behalf. The idea of ending up face down in the gravel being kicked by them all again seemed like something to avoid.
Something about the word “Bully” stuck with me though, and later on I was watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon (that I only now realize was called “Bully for Bugs”). The Cartoon featured a giant, ferocious terrifying bull. I took out a piece of paper and sketched designs for a robot version of the bull, which had a little staircase built into the back of it so that I could climb inside of it.
I decided to build a robot version of the bull in the cartoon. I would build the robot, climb inside it and then I could stand up to my bully at school. He would either run away (like Bugs in the photo above) or, if not, I supposed I would have to kill him with my giant Bully killing machine.
That weekend, I went from house to house in my neighborhood in suburban Maryland and asked all my neighbors for robot parts. I assembled a treasure trove of old appliance parts, and spent at least an afternoon or two trying to figure out how to turn them into a murderous bully killing machine.
Obviously, no robot got built. But the interesting thing was that the bully steered clear of me after that. I have no evidence, but I believe that he could sense that my new, preternatural confidence meant that I had access to some powerful invisible technology. He wisely decided to steer clear.
Sorting people though consensus categorization for mistreatment:
One of the main functions of the technology of racism is to allow people to identify other people who are protected and valued as fully human by the culture we live in, by the standard of “whiteness.” If you grow up, or are acculturated in the United States, regardless of your race, you will automatically visually, accurately and instantaneously sort people into buckets… including who has the protection of whiteness, as compared to you.
Conversely, the technology of racism also allows a person to identify visually, (and again for all practical purposes, instantaneously), NON-white people who are NOT (or not fully) protected and valued by the culture we live in (again according to the standard of whiteness.) To put it more bluntly, the technology sorts BIPOC folks into a category of people who can be mistreated by white (or whiter) people with some degree of impunity: killed, enslaved, deported, imprisoned, brutalized, silenced, domesticated, raped, overcharged, overworked, or simply marginalized.
Now, I don’t believe all (or even most) white folks look at Black and Brown people and THINK “Wow, I could really profit by mistreating this person.” There is ample evidence, that some do, and they’re using the rest of us to hide by blending in among the crowd. Let’s set those “real racists” aside, for the moment. Tragically, the rest of us don’t need to think racist thoughts to be be ruled by the technology of racism. The technology of racism is installed in us through our culture.
Technologies are systems of knowledge. The technology of racism, ensures that even if we don’t talk about it, (or even allow ourselves to think about it in our private minds) we still KNOW who is bucketed how, without words. Thus, when we operate automatically, the technology of racism shapes (as context) all interactions between all people everywhere in our culture. As opportunities arise, as white people, we take advantage of this structural advantage by either enjoying the protection of whiteness in our day to day life (interviewing for a job, talking to a policemen, getting a mortgage), or by mistreating Black and Brown folks (paying them less, charging them higher interest, threatening them with the police).
Through the lenses of capitalism, individualism and status, NOT taking advantage of these privileges occurs to us to be stupid, naive and self destructive. People with more privilege than us, (and there’s always somebody), are doing it to us, right? It’s a competitive world. There are winners and losers and the human mechanism of prestige psychology has been hacked to make us think that the winners are good, admirable, deserving people. (Some of them may be of course, because even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the really terrible billionaires also need someone to hide amongst).
But what this means is that if you are not ACTIVELY pushing against this system, you automatically perpetrate racism. If you are white, the technology weaponizes our day-to-day automatic way of being to support of the standard of whiteness and the technology (or system) of racism.
To paraphrase Dr. Ibram X Kendi in his book “How to Be an Antiracist”, it’s not enough to be Not Racist we have to be Antiracist.
Oh, and then let’s not forget, this technology is designed to be really easy to hide from yourself to the point where most of us have it in our blindspots 99.99% of the time.
The standard of whiteness (like all technological standards) disappears from view (at least for white people) and operates pre-verbally, faster than thought. The design of racism doesn’t want whiteness to be seen any more than the designers of Fortnite want you to see the C++ code it’s written in. The outcome is that people operating inside the system (almost all people, almost all of the time) collude to keep whiteness occluded all of the time. When it comes into view (or is brought into view), white folks throw up smokescreens usually made up of anti-blackness, which is to say racist ideas about black people. (By fetishizing, foregrounding, and defending anti-black racism, whiteness can also hide and minimize the racist mistreatment of people who present as other races other than black: e.g. LatinX and Asian people, people of Middle Eastern descent, and Jewish folks).
What I’m suggesting is that every time you interact with another human being, running in the background of your mind is the technology of racism — categorizing and sorting them (and you) into buckets by race and informing you about where they stand in the racist (and sexist, and classist and homophobic) consensus hierarchy: including who gets to mistreat who, and how.
These largely invisible, contextual decisions shape all of our reactions to other humans over and over and over again. They shape our one-on-one conversations. They shape our families. They shape our communities. They shape our institutions, our laws, our polity, our justice system and ultimately the difference in outcomes in our lifespans.
These bottom up interactions, compound each other, and self organize in ways that are tragically predictable. Billions of encounters with law enforcement, run through the technology of racism, result in the outsized murder and incarceration of Black young people. Billions of interactions with teachers, run through the technology of racism, result in the subtle, or not so subtle mistreatment of Black and Brown students and the suppression of economic opportunities unlocked by education for white folks. Billions of interactions with white neighbors on automatic, run through the technology of racism, increase the likelihood of murder or incarceration when white folks summon racist cops to address our undistinguished racist feelings that Black and Brown kids in the neighborhood are up to no good.
It’s not an accident. It is a system. A system designed to use white people against Black and Brown people to benefit the interests of property.
This system is not broken. The technology is functioning as designed.
From this point of view, framing racism as a technology (as opposed to a sin, or a personal failing, or something to be ashamed of), the goal of productive white antiracism work becomes much more clear.
The system does not function without our cooperation and consensus, white people. We need to find ways to keep it from slipping back into our blind spots on an ongoing basis.
What do we need to do for each other to keep from forgetting? How do we stay woke? Here’s what I believe works after doing this for 20 years, however irregularly:
Practice interrupting the technology as it runs in your own mind. I’ll remind you. You remind me.
Recruit other white antiracists in your life and help each other to see the machine and to clear each other’s blindspots. (I have a methodology for this I’ve developed, that I will publish soon in this space).
Create a micro-culture around yourself as a community to help keep the reality of racism in your field of view before your mind pushes it away (or to bring it back into view after your mind pushes it away).
Stop dismissing, punishing, mocking, and avoiding people who bring up the system of racism or the standard of whiteness.
If you’re agreeing to try all, or any, of this, let me know in the comments. And as always, if you have questions, ideas or lessons learned you’d like to share, you’re welcome to chime in, as long as you’re not perpetuating racism here!