- Hi everyone.
I'm happy to welcome
you to our final digital
humanities initiative slash digital praxis
course lecture of the semester.
My name is Matt Gold.
I'm associate professor of
English and digital humanities
at the graduate center at City Tech.
And with my colleague Steve Breyer
I'm teaching this course
called digital praxis seminar.
Our idea is to really try and
reach out to incoming students
and to introduce them to
landscape of digital work
in their first semester
here so that it's not
the first time they hear
about various digital
tools and methods isn't in
their fourth or fifth year
of education.
We've been really excited all
semester to have a great line
up of speakers on a range of
DH topics, and we're no less
excited about today, today's
lecture, which I think will be
a great conclusion to our semester.
So I'm happy to welcome Simone Browne
of the University of
Texas at Austin today,
and I wanna say a little
bit about why we wanted
to invite Simone to speak with us.
It's, it's not only I
think because of her work
but also I think because of
what we think digital humanities
needs now, which is a
greater attention to issues
of race, issues of
surveillance, and basically
the kinds of things Simone is working on.
After the NSA prison program
was kind of made public
recently there was a debate on Twitter
about whether digital
humanists should be engaged
in critical discussion around it,
with some people saying
that you know DH-ers
you know might not have
anything to necessarily to do
with the analysis of that type of program,
and other people saying
you know DH-ers who might
have a sophisticated
understanding of networks
really have a kind of a
responsibility to speak out
and to think critically about these,
these kind of developments, and you know,
simultaneously there's
been a increased attention
I would say in recent
years to how and whether
the digital humanities
community engages issues
of race, of political
action, and kind of are
the relationship of our work
to active issues that we are
facing, sort of social justice
issues, and I think here
again Simone's work really
kind of answers a need
and is really a great example
of the kind of work that
DH-ers can do that is
engaged, that helps us think
critically about the
technologies around us,
and that is a model of the kind of work
we'd like to see our students doing.
And so that's why we, we've
brought her here today
is to, to share her
research, but also to serve
as an example for how students
who are just beginning
to engage the digital
humanities can add a political
dimension to their work
and think critically
about networks and
issues like surveillance
and state sponsored surveillance.
So Simone is assistant
professor in the department
of African and African diaspora studies
at the University of Texas at Austin.
She teaches and researches
surveillance studies,
biometrics, airport
protocol, popular culture,
digital media, and black diaspora studies.
She is working now on a
book that is under contract
with Duke University Press called
Dark Matters, On the
Surveillance of Blackness.
We're very pleased and excited
to welcome Simone Browne today.
(audience applauding)
- Hi, good afternoon everyone.
Thank you Matt for that
great introduction,
and thank you to the
digital praxis seminar
for the invitation to
come here and speak to you
today about a bit of my work as well.
Thank you to Steven Breyer
as well, and Matt Gold,
for organizing this here.
So, I use the title Dark
Sousveillance here to cue
my extension of Steve Mann's
concept of sousveillance,
what he describes as the
inverse of surveillance
through the tactic of
appropriating tools of social
controllers and resituating
these tools in a disorienting
manner, and I use the term
Dark Sousveillance to situate,
as a way to situate the strategies
employed during the fight
or flight to freedom from slavery
as necessarily ones of under sight.
So Dark Sousveillance describes the ways
that tools of social control,
implantation surveillance,
and beyond were appropriated,
repurposed, co-opted,
and also challenged to facilitate escape,
and you can think here
of Ellen Craft escaping
from slavery in 1848 by
passing as a white man.
You can also think here of Henry Box Brown
who mailed himself to
freedom in 1849 in a box
that was three feet
long and two feet wide.
Harriet Jacobs, who escaped
to her mother's garrets,
basically an attic in
her grandmother's home
which she named as both her prison
but also her emancipatory
loophole of retreat.
So slave spirituals as
coded messages were used
to coordinate escape along
the Underground Railroad,
and so this arc of,
archive of surveillance
and slavery often goes missing
from surveillance studies,
and so this is where my work
makes an intervention I think
in this emerging field
of surveillance studies,
by naming the absented
presence of blackness.
Absented in the sense that
blackness is often absent
from what is theorized and who is cited,
while it's ever present for
example in the subjection
of black motorists to a
disproportionate number of stops,
stop and frisk, the use of
closed circuit television
as a kind of urban renewal
tool or urban renewal project
in areas that are subject
for urban renewal,
or where black city spaces,
where blackness gets displaced,
mass incarceration and
the various exclusions
and other matters where
blackness meets surveillance
and then reveals the on going racisms
of unfinished emancipation.
So you can think here of
buying belts at Barney's
or Renisha McBride and the
recent killing in Michigan
and what Dream Hampton
calls the criminalization
of black corpses.
You can also think of
baggy pants ordinances
where pants that are worn below the waist
get criminalized as fashion
infractions or fashion crimes.
So of course this is not the
entire story of surveillance
but it's often a part that
goes missing in surveillance studies.
So this is not to shade
surveillance studies.
I really think it's an
exciting and emerging
and very transdisciplinary
kind of, of research,
but my research broadly is
guided by the following question.
What can a realization of
the conditions of blackness,
the historical, the present,
and also the historical
present, help social
theorists to understand about
our contemporary
conditions of surveillance?
So I begin by situating
the archive of slavery
as a way to offer an historicizing of some
of the concepts and
concerns that now shape
this emerging field of
surveillance studies.
This is to say that the
historical formation of slavery
is not outside of the historical
formation of surveillance,
and I think the continuities
that this archive reveals
gives social theorists
new ways of understanding
surveillance in contemporary life.
So this is not to say
that this type of work
has not been done before
by say Angela Davis
or Joy James, also bell
hooks, Hortense Spillers,
but to say that, and other,
and other social theorists,
but to say that there's a
certain kind of citation politics
within the field of surveillance studies
that often doesn't engage
with their contributions
in meaningful ways, and
I hope my work can do
an intervention in that case.
So what I'm gonna talk
about today is a chapter
from my book Dark Matters, On
the Surveillance of Blackness
and so a word on
methodology for this part.
New configurations of
surveillance require a creative
approach and this is a mode
of research that must take
on a sense of what black
feminist theorist and sociologist
Patricia Hill Collins calls
a quote writing across time,
meaning an approach that's in
dialogue with, and also honors
early institutional
projects, political projects,
that sought to theorize and
challenge certain justices.
And so writing across time
is a critical methodology
of surveillance in relation
to blackness, and this method
of analyzing the conditions
of blackness brings historical
documents, interviews,
digital art, photography,
popular film and television,
and the various other forms
of cultural production into dialogue
with feminist theorizing and
critical race theorizing.
And so I'll begin, I'll present
this work in three parts.
The first section is branding blackness,
and I provide a discussion of branding
and its role in the making
of the racial subject as
commodity in the course of the
trans Atlantic slave trade.
I do this to, in order to situate
branding or slave branding
as a form of racializing surveillance.
So branding as a form of identification,
but also a form of corporal punishment
in plantation, plantation settings,
and also settings of
urban domestic slavery.
So you can think of we
often understand plantations
or slavery as something
of a Southern project,
but you can think of
urban domestic slavery
and spaces like New York City.
And so to more clearly draw the links
between a contemporary
biometric information technology
and trans Atlantic slavery,
I trace the archive
of trans Atlantic slavery,
mainly runaway notices,
written accounts, a carte de visite.
And so understanding Dark
Sousveillance as a framework
for trying to think about
surveillance can allow us
to question how certain
technologies or certain
surveillance technologies
instituted during slavery
to track blackness as property.
You can think here of slave
patrols, slave passes, branding,
runaway notices, how these
technologies anticipate
the contemporary surveillance
of the racial body.
The second section I
talk a little bit about,
I draw on Frantz Fanon's
theory of epidermalization
to question how what the
racial epidermal schema
that he makes plain, can we see this,
and find this is some
of some recent research
and development in biometric technology?
And biometric technologies,
I mean things like the iris
scanners and the fingerprint scans
and facial recognition technology.
And so to, to look at this question,
I examined the role by what
I, played by what I call
prototypical whiteness, in
the making of some bodies
and not others as problematic
in biometric technology
and its practices, and by
practices here I'm thinking
about research and development coming out
of the biometrics industry.
I'll just show you an image
of what prototypical whiteness
or at least lightness might look like.
This is HP, Hewlett Packard
in 2009 they released
a camera that would
kind of follow the face,
and so this, this
particular one had an over,
as you can see from this view too,
these two workers are in a store,
one a white woman
apparently and a black man,
and so the face the program was calibrated
to understand or to read
lightness or whiteness
and when the black man entered the screen,
it would not track his face.
And then of course
Hewlett Packard released,
'cause this video got quite a few hits,
Hewlett Packard released their own video
with their own black worker
who was able to with proper
lighting, they had to change the lighting,
to have the track movement.
But to think about how
prototypical whiteness
or lightness operates
with some of the you know
questions I want to ask.
And then the final section
branding blackness,
I wanna suggest here that
popular representations
or popular cultural
representations of biometric
technology and surveillance
are one of the ways
in which these technologies
get sold and rationalized
or branded to the public.
So the brand.
Sometimes the crest of the sovereign,
at other times alpha numeric characters,
denoted the relationship between the body
and its said owner.
I'm going to read a short
excerpt from a 17th century
account of branding in a slave barracoon
by a French slave trader.
A barracoon is like a barrack or a prison.
The slave merchant described
the process like this.
When the Europeans are to receive them,
they are brought out into a large plain
where the surgeon examines
every part of every one of them.
Good and sound are set on one side,
and the others by themselves.
Which slaves so rejected
are called macrons,
being above 35 years of age
or defective in their limbs,
eyes or teeth, or grown gray,
or have venereal disease,
or any other infection.
Each of the others which
have passed as good
is marked on the breast
with a red hot iron,
imprinting the mark of
the French, English,
or Dutch companies, that so each nation
may distinguish their own.
In this particular care
is taken that the women
as tenders be burnt, not burnt too hard.
So in this account, it tells
us that branding was not only
a mass corporate and crown
exercise of registration
of people by way of corporal markers,
but as an exercise that
sought to categorize people,
deemed who was most fit to labor unfreely,
that being the good and the sound,
and distinguishing those from others,
who were then literally imprinted
with the mark of the sovereign.
So think about the mark of the Dutch
or the British crown imprinted.
So slave branding was a racializing act,
meaning that making blackness
visible as commodity
and therefore sellable,
branding was a practice
that sought to dehumanize
and classify people
into groupings.
So just sought to, people
always resisted these,
these dehumanizing practices.
But the idea was to produce
new racial identities
that were then tied to a system
of exploitation in the west.
And, but as this quote
details, branding was also
a gendering act, as with
it, as with it, women were,
a certain discretionary
concern were taken with women.
In this large plain turned
factory bodies were made
disabled and those named
contagion or defective
in their limbs, eyes
or teeth were rejected.
So later in this account
the slave merchant warns
that feeder and artist
slaves are of all the others
the most apt to revolt aboard ships,
by a conspiracy carried
out amongst themselves.
So this slave barracoon
or the barracks it seems
was also a space for ascribing a certain
ontological link between race,
ethnicity, and resistance
and revolt.
So a useful concept for me
here to think about this
making of inter group
distinctions is what sociologist
Joe Fegan has termed
the white racial frame.
Distinctions made by this slave merchant
and other merchants of
slavery between the quote
black and the fine and
the quote lusty and strong
speak to the early role of this
dominant white racial frame
in categorizing difference,
where blackness is framed
as unruly, with some set to
be more unruly than others.
So Joe Fegan outlines the
dominant white racial frame
as consisting of what he
calls an anti black sub frame
that worked to rationalize
slavery and its attendant
violences by branding
blackness and bestial,
alien, rebellious, among
other markers of difference
in the white mind.
So the Dutch West India
Company branded enslaved people
on arrival to Curacao, sometimes
right on the auction block,
and so these scars that
would remain on their body
could be used at post
mortem as to identify people
at auction and in death.
So the Dutch West India
Company used Arabic numerals,
a numeral branding iron until 1703,
after which time the company
began to use alpha numeric
branding irons in A to Z sequence,
with the exception of the letters U and J,
so as not to be confused
with the letters V and I,
and the letter O was not used
because the branding iron
was worn down.
So I want you to think here
of what it means to have
a branding iron be so worn down from use.
Marked for death, branding
sought to inscribe
a premature death on black skin.
For existence, sorry,
for instance, the Society
for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Barbados
in the Caribbean branded the word society
on the chest of the people
it enslaved in 1732.
So this is the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel branding
people on their chest.
So one of the things I looked at is
the diary of Thomas Thistlewood.
He was an English planter and slave owner,
and he tells of plantation conditions
in 18th century Jamaica.
I was particularly
interested in the life of a,
of an enslaved woman named Akuba.
Many of you might of
heard about Thistlewood
in the news recently when Martin Bashir
made a comment about
Sarah Palin and slavery
and excremental torture
and now he's not on MSNBC,
but you can see that this
archive and parts of it,
all of it is available at Yale right now,
can tell us a lot about the violence
and the brutality of slavery.
He kept very detailed files.
Akuba was purchased by Thistlewood in 1761
and branded on her right
shoulder with his brand mark,
which is a TT in an inverted triangle.
During the over 13 years that
she was enslaved in Jamaica
Akuba escaped captivity numerous times,
and each time she was recaptured,
she was flogged, tortured.
One time she escaped wearing a collar,
and so one time she was
branded on her forehead
for punishment after, after an escape,
and five days after that
branding she ran away.
Thistlewood wrote in his diary,
Akuba wanting this morning.
So in defiance of the
brand Akuba escaped again
and again and made her own way.
Eventually she was sold from Thistlewood
for 40 pounds and transported
out of Jamaica to Georgia.
So Akuba running away despite
the TT that branded her skin
reveals the limits of these
acts of dehumanization.
She, Akuba, she disrupts
the practice of branding
as punishment, accounting a
preemptive strike at marking
the already hyper visible
body as identifiable outside
of the plantation, and
other spaces of enslavement.
So regardless of receiving
this marking as slave,
she ran away.
So I wanna look here
at this runaway notice.
I'm just gonna read parts of it here.
It's from 1756, and
it's, it posts a reward
for a negro man named Kato, alias Toby,
and it attests that he was
branded when a boy in Jamaica
in the West Indes, with
a B and I think a C
on his left shoulder plate, shoulder blade
the advertisement states.
In the advertisement Kato is described
as a sly and artful fellow who deceives
by credulous, by
pretending to tell fortune,
and pretends to be free.
And so in this way the B
and the C on Kato's shoulder
show, serve as signs that
can betray his identity
despite his cunning use of an alias
and other artful tactics.
So although branding during
slavery was a practice
of racializing surveillance
that sought to deny
the black body to be multiply experienced,
the idea that everybody
would be marked society
on their chest, running
away, black escape,
and numerous other
counter practices suggest
that this dehumanization was not achieved
on an effective level
and that those branded
were still ungovernable under
the brand or in spite of it,
like ex slave Wilson Chinn.
So you can find a Wilson
Chinn, a branded slave
from Louisiana or at
least the carte de visite
on eBay.com and other
online auction sites,
sometimes going for $750 up to 1,000,
being sold amongst other
kinds of slavery's ephemera.
Wilson Chinn's portrait
was taken around 1863
and in this particular
portrait a chain is tied
around his ankle and
various tools of torture
around his neck and lay at his feet.
A caption below the image
reads exhibiting images,
instruments of torture
used to punish slaves,
but not entirely visible, on
his forehead is marked VBM,
which is Valson Bonnesir Marmilliaun,
a Louisiana planter who
branded Wilson Chinn.
So you can think of the brand
here as a traumatic head
injury, that sought to fix
the black body as a slave,
or at least attempted to.
Chinn escaped Union lines in New Orleans.
So Wilson Chinn the carte
de visite brings plantation
punishment, black escape,
and also the continuing
selling of slavery and
its ephemera into focus.
So Wilson Chinn also marks the circulation
of the archive of slave branding,
and so these artifacts
such as this one here
live on as heirlooms for
sale on the Internet,
and this particular one
was called black Americana
antique slave branding
iron from the 19th century.
It was advertised for sale on eBay in 2008
and this was described
as in fantastic condition
with a unique design forged at the end
to identify a particular slave.
This instrument of torture
was listed at a buy it now
fixed price of $1,126.25 with the option
of a zero APR until
2009 if it was purchased
with an eBay MasterCard.
So the seller specified that, quote,
from what I've read and researched,
each slave is normally branded twice,
once in Africa when leaving their country,
and once in the Americas upon arrival,
and that the branding
iron can be purchased
and then gifted to a museum
for display for all to see
and to learn here, and so one
of the things we don't know
necessarily who the seller
is, who the purchaser
of these things, and what
they would be used for.
But just to think about
this continued circulation
of these, of these technologies.
So the contemporary
circulation of slavery era
branding tools and other
so called black Americana
for sale on online auction
spaces is questioned
by conceptual artist and digital artist
Mendi and Keith Obadike's
Blackness for Sale.
This piece of digital art is from 2001,
and it saw Keith Obadike
auction his blackness
on eBay as a way to disrupt
the trade in slave memorabilia
on the Internet and the
commodification of blackness
more generally.
So his auction was scheduled
to last for 10 days
but was deemed inappropriate by eBay,
and only after four days it
was removed from the website.
The auction garnered 12 bids overall,
the highest coming in at $152.50.
So there's no image of Keith Obadike
on the, this particular site.
It's his blackness that is
described as an heirloom.
Instead potential buyers
are provided with a list
of benefits and warnings
regarding Obadike's blackness,
like the seller does
not recommend that this
blackness be used while
making intellectual claims.
(laughing)
Or the seller does not
recommend that this blackness
be used while voting in the
United States or Florida.
So Mendi and Keith
Obadike's project is one
of black counter framing
where the institutionalizing,
institutionalized and
every day surveillance
and negation of black life is satirized,
as a way to highlight the
ways in which the kind
of structural embeddedness
of, and pervasive nature
of anti blackness.
And so this is a anti
racist counter framing,
providing what you can call
a counter systems analysis
of the ways that racism, white
hostility and discrimination
operate structurally and interpersonally.
So Blackness for Sale then
points to the productive
possibilities of black
expressive practices,
and perhaps satirically
to the apparent limits
of black anti racist counter framing,
or as Mendi and Keith Obadike put it,
this blackness may be used
for writing critical essays,
or scholarships about other blacks.
That was a joke.
So the second section I wanna,
I'll draw the links between
the historical and the present,
by thinking about this notion
of digital epidermalization.
So in simple terms, biometric
technology is the measuring
of the living body.
So with biometrics the
body or more increasingly
performances of the body or
parts and pieces of the body
are mathematically coded as data,
making for so called unique templates,
and then put to use for verification
or identification purposes.
So the answering the question,
are you who you say you are?
Are you the, the rightful
holder of this passport,
or driver's license, where your
unique biometric is encoded?
Or, the verification,
sorry, that's verification,
or the other one, identification.
Who are you in a face in the crowd?
The eye, you can use this say in a casino,
or in a sports, you know, the Olympics,
or some large sporting event.
And so popular biometric
technologies include
physiological features like
iris and retinal scans,
hand geometry, fingerprint
templates, facial recognition,
vascular patterns, and increasingly DNA.
And you also have like behavioral traits,
of voice analysis, pen
stroke and key stroke,
how you type, gait recognition.
So for example, I had
a friend when I was in,
he's from Toronto, but since
this is being live streamed,
I'll use, say Rob Ford was my friend.
He would, he would walk very,
he had a very unique walk like this,
and so this is in Toronto and
I was like primary school,
and so one day in I guess the mid 2000's
I was in Austin, Texas and I
saw someone doing that same
walk, and I was like
wait, is that Rob Ford?
And so, and it turned out to be him.
And so the idea that some
people or maybe Olivia Pope
have unique kind of gaits
or unique ways of walking
that could be then used as an identifier
to then match their
identity to their walk.
And so simply put biometrics is the idea
that the body will reveal
the truth about the subject
despite the subject's claim.
So the idea that I might
say my name is Rob Ford,
and then to the eye, but my body,
whether it's my DNA, my
fingerprint, my iris scan,
or some other piece of or part of my body
will reveal my true identities.
So with the concept of
digital epidermalization
I'm suggesting here
that biometrics research
and development continues
to rely on certain practices
of what I'm calling prototypical whiteness
as well as prototypical
maleness, prototypical able
bodiedness, prototypical
youthness as well,
that this speaks to the ways
in which biometric information
technologies are sometimes
inscribed in racializing schemas
that see certain bodies
privileged, or at least whiteness
might be privileged or
lightness in some of these
enroll measurements
and enrollment process.
So I'm gonna look here at
a few findings in recent
research and development
coming out of the biometric
industry to kind of make
sense of this for you
all in the audience,
because I think that these
research and development
publications tell us
a lot about industry
concerns and specifications,
and they also tell us a lot
about who these technologies
or what kind of bodies these
technologies are designed
to suit best.
And so one such study is
examined how facial recognition
technology could be employed
in a multi ethnic environment
to classify facial features
by race and also by gender.
Yes, that's Will Smith right there.
And so a technology like
this could be applied
for example in shopping malls,
casinos, amusement parks,
or something like the
photo tagging application
that might be used in Facebook, or so.
So the authors of this study
found that when they programmed
that their gender classification
system generically
for all ethnicities, the system was quote,
inclined to classify Africans as males,
and mongoloids as females.
And so, the racial nomenclature
of quote unquote mongoloid
is seemingly archaic I
know, but not uncommon
in some of the R and D
coming out of this industry.
And so with this gender
classification system,
what happened here is
that black women became
presumably they could be,
they were read as male
most of the time, and Asian
men were read as female
most of the time, with
this particular study.
And so in this way it mirrored
earlier pseudo scientific
racist and sexist discourse that sought
to define racial categories
and gender categories
in order to regulate these
artificial boundaries
that could never be fully maintained.
So you think here of the
black woman as surrogate man
or the feminized Asian man.
So interestingly in this particular study
their gender classifier
was made ethnicity specific
for the category African,
and they found that images
of the African females
would still be classified
as females 82% of the
time, and while that same
African classifier would
find images of Asian females
95% of the time and for what
they call caucasoid females
96% of the time.
This is a study that came out in the late,
sort of the early, around 2010.
So these, these kind of languages
of caucasoid mongoloid as well.
So meaning that with this
particular African female
classifier was when it's
calibrated to detect black women
the African classifier is better
suited as classifying Asian
women as well as Caucasian
women or white women.
And so using actor Will
Smith's face as a model
of generic black masculinity
the study's authors
are left to conclude
that quote, the accuracy
of gender classifier on
Africans is not as high
as on mongoloid or caucasoid.
And so another study, that's end quote.
Another study, I'm gonna talk a little bit
about failure to enroll.
The, this is, this came out
in 2009 in a Nikon camera,
and the idea that some
bodies fail to enroll
within these technologies,
and these things change
once, you know, once
these kind of failures
reveal themselves and sometimes through
Twitter and public ways like this.
So in another study we can
see how epidermalization,
and what I mean by that
is the imposition of race
on the skin, is present for
example in comparative testing
with controlled groups with
higher failure to enroll rates
than others, and so this study stated,
and I'm just gonna read.
This is a popular quote that's often used
in people that research
biometric technologies,
but it says here, elderly
users often have very faint
fingerprints and may
have poorer circulation
than younger users.
Construction workers and
artisans are more likely
to have highly worn
fingerprints to the point
where ridges are nearly nonexistent.
Users of Pacific Rim slash
Asian descent may have
faint fingerprint ridges,
especially female users, unquote.
And so what this quote
is telling us is that
the elderly, people that come
in contact with corrosive
or caustic chemicals such as mechanics,
or nail technicians or manicurists or,
often have unmeasurable fingerprints.
You can think of massage therapists too,
or people that have heavy
hand washing in their job
like nurses or people in
the health care profession.
So this question then,
this should lead us to ask
questions about can these
technologies be calibrated
to determine gender, race
or class differentiation?
In the same study that I just quoted,
the authors note that
facial scan technology
may produce higher failure to enroll rates
for very dark skinned users,
because of the quality of images provided
for the facial scan
system by video cameras
are often optimized for
lighter, light skinned users.
So what their research and
development is telling us
is that certain technologies
come to privilege whiteness
or at least lightness in
the ways in which they are
lit in the enrollment process,
or at least how some bodies are
lit in the enrollment process.
So you can see the logic
of prototypical whiteness
operating here and also
with this Canon camera,
I'm sorry, Nikon camera here.
And so with this the
possibilities of racializing
surveillance are revealed.
This is especially so when
facial recognition technology is
calibrated, or it's calibrated
only to find matches
with, from within specific
racial and gendered groupings
leading to higher failure to enroll rates
for some groupings.
So the application of surveillance
technologies in this way
leads to questions
concerning the idea that,
you know, can gender and race,
which are social constructs,
be specified by these
technologies, or programmed so?
And also how do
transgendered people fit in
within this algorithmic equation?
So they are unaccounted
for within the algorithm.
These research and development
reports and articles
make clear that there's
a certain assumption
that these technologies,
with these technologies,
that categories of
gender identity and race
and clear cut and then a
machine can be programmed
to assign gender categories or what bodies
and body parts should signify.
So such technologies can
then possibly be applied
to determine who has access
to movement and stability
and to other rights.
So given this there are
some important questions
I think that need to be asked.
How do we understand the body
once it's converted into data?
What are the underlying
assumptions with surveillance
technology such as passport
verification machines,
facial recognition software,
and fingerprint template technology?
Well, there's the notions
that these technologies are
infallible, that they're
objective, and that they are based
on mathematical precision without
error, or bias on the part
of the computer programmers
who calibrate the search
parameters of these machines,
or on the part of those
who read these templates
to make decisions.
But I wanna return to, so
for, this is another one,
the idea that some of these
technologies might not pick up
certain faces that they're,
within how they are lit there.
Return a little bit to Will Smith,
and to question what his
image is doing in a research
and development article coming out
of the biometrics industry.
So Smith is the star of
at least three Hollywood
blockbusters, action movies
in which surveillance
technologies play a role.
So you can think of Enemy
of the State from 1998,
I, Robot, and also Men in Black.
And so seeing how surveillance
technology is displayed,
discussed and depicted
through Smith's films
is very important for
understanding the various ways
that contemporary
surveillance technologies
from CCTV to drones to
facial recognition technology
get marketed to, to the public
through popular entertainment.
So this you could think about
as kind of like our popular
biometric consciousness or
our popular consciousness
around surveillance technologies.
So, Enemy of the State,
his film from 1998,
is a panoply of surveillance.
This is where this image is from.
The film's plot revolves
around Smith's character
getting caught up in an NSA, with the NSA,
in an assassination plot
and then legislation
that would increase
domestic spying capabilities
that is as one character puts it,
not the first step to
the surveillance society,
it is the surveillance society.
So the film came out
as I mentioned in 1998
and throughout the film Smith's character
and by extension us as
the viewing audience
are given a primer on pre
9/11 surveillance technologies
and their histories and
also their capabilities.
Surveillance is wielded in a
very kind of conspiratorial
manner against Will Smith's
character in this film.
There's facial recognition technology,
fingerprint scanning
technology, GPS, databases, CTV,
beacon transmitters, satellite imagery.
There's even like black
helicopters that circle around him.
So in Enemy of the State
surveillance technologies
operate by way of
product placement really,
in this kind of a brand
integration to use industry terms.
The film's viewers come to
understand surveillance,
and by the end of the
film the lead characters
turn the tables on the NSA,
and I guess he was like pre Snowden.
They become the ones
who watch the watchers,
and what this move
seemingly tells us is that
when placed in the right hands
surveillance technologies
lose their negative valance,
and it need not be feared
or cause for worry, and of course,
these right hands are gendered
in a particular way in this film.
So popular cultural
representations of surveillance
are some of the ways in which the public
comes to understand these technologies,
and how we come to see
biometric technologies
as necessary, as a
necessary security measure,
even for getting on our
laptops or our phones,
and how they get you know rationalized
and sold to the general public.
You could call this a, as I said,
a popular biometric consciousness,
and as a pitch man it
doesn't get much better
than Will Smith who was named one
of the highest paid
actors by Forbes in 2008.
And so he's often the star
of as I mentioned many
blockbuster films where the
audience is often subject
to his heroic exploits,
particularly when his films
become on syndicated
networks every weekend.
So there are lessons about
the surveillance technologies
and practices are regularly
broadcasted with Smith
in a starring role.
He's often seen saving America
and by extension the planet
from alien others, whether
it's Independence Day,
or I Am Legend, Hancock, Wild, Wild West.
Interestingly, when he was
promoting I, Robot in 2004
he was in Germany and he was
asked by the German press
about the effects of
9/11, and I'm gonna do my,
my German translation with
Google Translate here.
But he, his answer was, if
you grew up as a black man
in America, you have a very
different view of the world
than white Americans.
We blacks live with a
constant feeling of malaise
and if you're attacked by a racist cop now
and wounded or attacked by terrorists,
excuse me, it makes no difference.
In the 60's blacks were
constantly the target
of terrorist attacks, and
while it was civil terrorism,
but terrorism is terrorism.
We are accustomed to being attacked.
As for a permanent alert,
a defensive attitude
with which one lives anyway
has not changed since.
No, not for me personally,
as to my everyday life,
the tragedy of September
11th changed nothing.
I live anyway always 100% alert.
I was not even nervous,
anxious, or cautious after 9/11.
So what Will Smith is
articulating there is the racial
terror imposed on black life
in America by an overseeing
surveillance apparatus that was
in effect on September 10th,
2001 and long before that,
and he's giving us a bit
of black counter framing as well too.
So given this, the histories,
the failures to enroll rates,
the idea around prototypical whiteness,
racializing surveillance,
I'm calling for a critical
biometric consciousness
and this is following
Eugene Takara's call for a
critical genomic consciousness
and a critical biometric
consciousness entails
informed public debate
around these technologies
and their application.
It's a demand of
accountability by the state
and by private sectors who
you know might have our data,
trade it, sell it, rent it out,
and it's critical biometric technologies,
sees biometric technology
and the owner and access
to the ownership and access
to one's own body data
and information that
is derived or generated
from one's body you have.
So think about the idea
of your fingerprint being
turned into a code and that
being your intellectual property.
That must be understood as a right.
And as well, importantly,
this consciousness must
also understand the kind
of historical connections
between contemporary biometric
information technology
and its historical antecedents,
meaning here that a critical
biometric consciousness
must contend with the
ways in which branding
and particularly racial
slavery was instituted
as a means of population management,
in the making, marking,
and marketing of blackness
as visible and as commodity.
I think another thing that's
important to think about here
is the use of conflict
minerals in these technologies
to produce them, or the people
that, and Lisa Nakamura's
done work on this, the
people that produce these
technologies as well to
sort of have a consciousness
about the implications of
those things as well too.
And so as I mentioned a
critical biometric consciousness
must contend with the
ways in which branding
was a form of punishment
and racial profiling.
The idea of every body marked
society, or F for fugitive.
Perhaps that F stood for freedom,
and R rather than standing
for runaway could stand
for revolt, so a critical
repurposing of that.
So much of how biometrics
are languaged in R and D
derives from the racial
thinking and assumptions around
gender that were used to falsify
evolutionary trajectories,
that rationalized violence,
the violence of trans Atlantic
slavery, colonialism,
genocide, and imperialism.
And so the absence of a
discussion of how such racial
thinking shapes the research
and development of contemporary
biometric information technology
is in self constitutive
of the power relations existing
in that very technology.
So the idea that blackness get
invoked through Will Smith,
or something like that, as well.
So in conclusion, this talk
began by offering a longer
history of biometric information
technology and the ways
in which the history is in close alignment
with the commodification of blackness.
So current biometric
technologies of course
and slave branding are
not one in the same.
However, when we think about
our contemporary moment
when suspects citizens, trusted travelers,
refugees claimants, incarcerated people,
welfare recipients and others are having
their body's informationalized by way
of biometric surveillance,
sometimes voluntarily,
sometimes without consent or awareness,
or sometimes with coerced consent,
and then stored in large
scale automated databases,
some of these databases
owned by the state,
and some owned by private interest.
My suggestion here is
that we must question
the historically present
workings of branding
and racializing surveillance,
particular in regard
to biometric technology
for critical rethinking
of punishment, torture,
and moments of contact
where there are increasingly
technological borders.
And so this is especially
true or important
given the capabilities of non
cooperative biometric tagging
by way of drones or biometrics employed
in US counter insurgency
measures and other military
applications, for example,
targeted killings,
or for search and rescue missions.
So understanding how biometric
information technologies
are rationalized through
industry specifications
and popular entertainment provides a means
of falsifying the idea
that certain technologies
and their applications are always neutral
regarding race, gender, disabilities,
and other categories of determination
and their various intersections.
Examining biometric
practices and surveillance
in this way invites us to see how integral
and understanding of the
conditions of blackness is
to developing a general
theory of surveillance.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
Yes, question, yeah.
Okay, Dana, hi.
- I want to be a prosecutor for a second,
because, so face recognition technologies
are almost all made in China.
- Mmm-hmm.
- Which is in itself really fascinating,
and which actually the
languages of mongoloid
and caucasoid mean
something very different
because of the histories
or the translation
and cultural appropriation of race.
And so I'm curious in
light of your project,
how do you read across it
from a Chinese perspective,
because it's such a different history.
The race of slavery, of you know,
the ways in which surveillance operates
in relationship to the
state, and I think that
there's something about the
cross cultural construct
that's very much embedded in your project.
But I'm curious to how you
would respond and think about.
- Yeah, and I'm still
trying to think about it,
but think about it through Will Smith,
and this kind of international--
- That, that is a very
specific role in China.
- Yeah.
- He's loved, he's revered,
cross over of cultural character.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
'Cause it's the Fresh Prince,
or something like that.
Yeah, and so, so very different histories,
but there's, there's
something still trans national
about this, about the
commodification of blackness
and particularly in I
think, not particularly,
but in China as well too,
and so I do kind of have
to gesture more to the
difference between the terms,
and that they're still possibly
in use, but those terms are
still informing things like
for example, like this, right.
And so, so what, what does it mean when
these products are then
sold at a global level?
And so, so those are the
kind of larger questions
to ask on a micro and macro scale.
How do we answer all of these questions?
And maybe I'm just trying
to think through some of it,
but you know, thank you, yeah.
- Yeah, there's just a
number of prospects--
- Yeah.
- Because that's what I
see is those languages
and those cultural practices,
it's always parallel,
and in some ways they end
up bleeding into each other.
- Yes.
- And when you start looking
at those technologies
as a screen ridge does not hold value,
and so in many ways embedded differently
in the production side,
and they already make
that assumption for us.
- Exactly, but then you'd
still see with that one
particular research that black
women became masculinized
even when the technology
was specified to read
black women like race and gender.
They were still read as a man,
even, and that African
identifier would read white woman
as white women, but not
you know as black women.
And so some of these
things, these histories
and the racial classification
even in the 21st century
still exists and then when
you see that language there
it gets a bit kind of tricky,
yeah, yeah, thank you.
- Yes?
- How do you see yourself getting by the,
the underlying thing is critique of a,
of the claim to privacy that still exists?
The way that every cell phone holder
especially with the revelation of this new
sting ray cell phone mimicking
utility by police departments
to gather up all the local cell phones,
and advise you the owner
of your cell phone.
How do you see the
relationship between biometrics
and sort of the attempt
to assign and identify
the persistent sort of
ubiquitous unique identifiers
that have all been co-opted
in the sense of brand
identification presents itself,
taking on the data internally.
For each carrier beacon
that can be legally used
to identify us irrespective of the--
- Of the body, right?
- Yeah.
- I mean, when the phone can be something,
and particularly with 3D
printing to make, you know,
a fingerprint, and so would it
become more and more internalized?
Like we, we leave our fingerprints around
but we don't necessarily
leave our iris prints,
you know, around the place, right?
We might not have the
same kind of histories
of criminalization as well, too.
And so I don't know if
I think that privacy
or our right to privacy
particularly in public spaces
or our face or our body would be the,
the, I guess the strand to
go by making rights claims
for this, and maybe it's about a shared,
well not a shared ownership,
but at least having
some say in ownership in our body data,
and how those things are
you know sold or traded.
So for example one of
my students I asked them
if they would give away their
fingerprints to cross a border
and one of them told me like
she uses her fingerprints
to get in the pool by her house.
And so the idea well I wanna
get in the pool, you know,
and so people give up these things,
and I asked you know what, what happens?
Is your, is your housing
agency or housing people
taking care of your fingerprint?
Are they selling it?
Are they, is it in a secured space?
And many people it's just about for them,
it's just about the good,
she's gotta go to the pool
and it's not a big deal.
And so some of these concerns
maybe not everyone else
you know takes them up
in the way that I might,
but I think that we should
have still a discussion
about that because this
idea of function creep
that something might be
used for a driver's license
then is used to get into a pool.
There should be some kind of regulations,
and not necessarily by the state,
but maybe by some of the,
and I can give you an example of one here.
This here is Mark Boolan from
the Open Biometrics Institute
and this is the keeper of key machine,
and it's a kind of a performance piece,
but it's the idea that well
A, would you just walk up
to a machine in the middle of like a mall
and give your fingerprint,
and not question them?
Would you just you know would
you then give it to a driver's
license, especially ones that
are outsourced to the state?
And so what this does is you walk up there
and you get a scan, and it
doesn't actually hold the data.
So you actually get a
print out here of perhaps
these are spaces in which,
you, this is not like
the Photoshopped, Adobe
Photoshop fingerprint
that you might get, but
this is the one where
these particular nods here
could be spaces that may,
you know, you can think
about Brandon Mayfield,
whose fingerprints were
wrongly said to be involved
in the Madrid subway bombing.
The idea that, falsely so.
You'll then get something
called a good scan
that you can then print out and keep,
if you are ever to come up in a situation
like say Brandon Mayfield,
or being falsely accused
of your fingerprints
being left some place,
which might be important now
that people can, you know,
create 3D scans and have
these kind of fingerprints
or gummy scans as well too.
And so those are one of
the ways in which I guess
creative practices like this
from the Open Biometrics
Institute can get us to think
about privacy or also the
storage of data and who owns
what data about you, I think.
So that's maybe one question.
Hi.
- I was wondering what you
would say about the technology
very specifically designed
to classify people by race.
I sort of think that
things like the census
if you look at it, a
history of the US census,
you see all these very
different categorizations
that they used over time and
sometimes changing things
in kind of unexpected ways,
and then more recently
genetic testing services
like 23 and Me, they try
to tell you what your,
your racial ethnic background
is based on genetics.
So I was just wondering if
you, if you had anything
to say about how they fit
in to surveillance culture.
- Yeah, I think you raise a
good point about the census
because it was always,
and I think when I talked
at the beginning about
slave branding and the idea
that the Dutch would brand the
British and other countries
to kind of separate their
human cargo from the other,
that these were always
practices of the racial state,
whether it was the
census or slave branding.
And so you can see some
of these technologies now
moving into not necessarily
the state but back
to the corporate with 23 and Me.
I think there was recent decision
that they could no longer
do genetic predictive,
or, as Dana, you know me?
- It keeps changing.
- It keeps changing, so,
so like I guess those
are kind of, let's us
know that although it's,
race as a social construct
has very material effects,
particularly with the state,
and its need to manage
and control populations,
and there's actually with,
I guess with 23 and Me
quite a profit in it, yeah.
- I have a sort of like non
believable question about
the relationship between
branding and commodification
and this sort of like
thinking about whole economy
more broadly, because
where you started out is
you started by talking
about incarcerated bodies.
I'm thinking when I think
about incarcerated bodies
I think about surplus population.
And so I'm curious as I
guess I'm curious about
how you see not just branding
and sort of like paraphernalia
and commodification of
like black Americana
as well as securitization
sort of fitting it
into the bunch of surplus populations
and more main, and sort
of the flip side of that,
maintaining functional
like racial capitalism.
So, so in thinking about
securitization I think about
state management of
populations, and particularly
people of color and part of
that being the production
of surplus population or
managing surplus population.
And so I'm just, I guess I'm just curious
if you could talk a
little bit about how this,
where everything that you're talking about
fits into sort of like an analysis of like
the prison capital system, of
capital solution states or--
- So you mean what I
didn't talk about here?
(laughing)
I'd like to look at this particular piece
by Hank Willis Thomas, and it's a,
from his branded collection,
and this one is actually at
the, taken at the funeral
of his cousin, gun shooting death.
So when you talk about social
death or surplus populations
or populations that are made surplus,
I think this is one example.
And so this is also through
this particular project
and looking at the kind of
commodification of blackness
but the history here, one
of the things you'll see
is the picking, the idea that
picking the perfect casket.
He does, looks at the
history from picking cotton
to premature death of black males,
and the idea from a
nine millimeter pistol,
the bullet, gold chain, new
socks, three piece suit,
picking the perfect casket
for your son, priceless.
And so you see the, the
family's grief there speaks
to not only the kind of,
it's interesting there
with MasterCard being the long histories
of the banking industry that had,
that was dealing in human
bodies now profiting
off bodies whether it's through, you know,
paying for the funeral on a credit card,
or the idea of the
indebtedness to black life
of these companies still
while they're still
you know making money off of them.
And so I think yes, I
think this, like the work
that I presented here around
biometric technologies
and the long histories of
marking certain bodies for death
or certain bodies to labor unfreely,
you can still see this
kind of reverberations now
in the contemporary prison,
where you know I guess
spaces that were you
know prison towns become
repopulated with these prisons that can,
that warehouse black and brown bodies.
And so I think these kind of,
my work is to make an intervention to say
that these histories are of, are missing
in drawing the links between
the prison industrial complex
and then the earlier kind
of histories of that too.
Dana?
- I have another question for you which is
I love the fact that you're
talking about biometrics
as unique identifiers and
the sort of complexities
of that with regards to race.
One of the things I would
provoke you to also think about
is the way in which biometrics
can sort of connect us
to other people through networks,
and what I mean by that is that you know
the ruling this summer
that Maryland v. King,
that collecting DNA samples
is akin to connecting
photo prints at the point of arrest,
actually is really interesting in light,
in the light of the fact that
your DNA actually connects you
to all sorts of other people.
- Yes.
- And so what happens is that
the state then inevitably
collects large databases on black bodies,
'cause it's not just the
individuals but the connections
and relationships they
have to everybody else.
- Yeah.
- And so then therefore what
does race get instantiated
into these other networks,
not because of the individual
body, but at the individual
body of relationship
to other bodies.
- Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm.
- Just like, be fun to think about the--
- To think about networks
and consent as well too,
because my DNA can tell
a lot about my brother,
and so you know if I'm
like for example there was
a case once in Toronto
where they went around
asking for people, you
know, just give us a swipe,
and then you'll be counted
out of this particular crime
as they were looking for
someone, and the idea of consent.
Well, I can consent to
someone, but I'm not consenting
to everyone at my house,
and what does it mean
when you collect, when this
is then collected or stored
or traded as well too?
And so those networks of
communities but also communities
being I guess these kind of
caracal practices as well
to just through a simple
swipe or a simple nail
or something as well that
has to speak to you know
our critical consciousness
around these technologies too.
Yeah, I think I'll add that, yeah.
Hi.
- I was wondering if
those had given attention
to the relationship between
surveys and visibility
because people who are
subjects ask of this
for the people of color in
general just like 'cause a lot
of these technologies,
or any other technologies
for instance are used by
you know kind of modernized
sometimes in where it's like
to make themselves invisible
so then I'm wondering what your
thoughts are and the tension
between that and then these technologies
also being tools of surveillance.
- Yeah, and so I don't
necessarily see surveillance
as something being negative
or having a negative valance
to it, and that there's really
productive possibilities,
and so in some cases like film the police,
and you can see whether it
is the stop and frisk app
by the New York Civil
Liberties Union that would,
in some way, can crowd
source a filming of say
a stop and frisk happening,
and that could be used
to I guess crowd source
a witnessing as well too.
Or even the idea of people
taking selfies of themselves.
There was recently the hashtag started by,
co started by a student
at University of Texas
called feminist selfie, and
it was kind of to challenge
this idea that if people
are subject to say
anti black violence or their
beauty and their selves
are not necessarily viewed as pleasurable
in the public sphere that
the idea that you like,
someone would actually find
pleasure in posting themselves
or looking at themselves as a way
of supporting their existence.
So I think that the idea of
visibility and surveillance
I don't necessarily see
one as being negative
and one even though, it's
sometimes about equalizing that
in some way, and I think
spaces like, like a Instagram,
or like a stop and frisk
app, or filming the police
are some ways in which this
kind of a certain parity
and a kind of Dark
Sousveillance could happen
in those spaces, all right.
Hi.
- In the couple of published
pieces that we read
for the class as opposed to
everybody who's here for DHI
you make a kind of
fascinating connection between
slavery and the institutions
of surveillance under slavery
and pass, the pass system ran
all of that, and passports
and the role that you know
sort of the book of negroes
plays, and I just wondered if you
could say a little bit more.
You didn't touch on that in
your talk, but I found that
kind of very suggestive connection,
because of course the
instruments of control
in the 18th century and
certainly before there was
photography require a whole
different sort of technology
and you've, you suggesting in some ways
that that the regulation
of slavery and slaves
and slave people is sort of
what drives this forward,
and I just wonder if
you'd say a little bit.
- Yeah, yeah, thank you for reading that.
One of the things when I
was doing that research
and since I'm in New York City now
was looking at the what
I call lantern laws
and these laws from the early 1700's
that regulated that black, mixed race,
and indigenous slaves if
they were walking after dark
in New York City without being accompanied
by a white person they
had to have a lit lamp
or could be subject to
seizure or taken to the police
station and to kind of
seeing that as the kind of,
the historical precedent or
I guess the legal formation
of say stop and frisk happening
right now in New York City.
To see that there are long histories then
if we just kind of make those connections,
and so with the passport
I was, the book of negroes
is a list of 3,000 black people
who had self emancipating,
had fought with the
British, and then eventually
had passage to Canada, some to Germany,
and also some to the, to England,
and their names were recorded
in a book of negroes,
but it would also list any type
of scars that they received
from the kind of labor that they did,
or even their trade as well too.
And so I called this one
of the first documents
that linked biometrics
to a right to travel,
and so the people could
be blind in one eye.
They would say mixed race, or mulatto,
a young woman, and so if
we just kind of rethink
our histories of the
passport and situate them
or at least acknowledge
the histories of regulating
blackness we can have you
know maybe a different
understanding of some
historical and also contemporary
surveillance practices, and I
think that those lantern laws
are one space in which
that plays, plays true.
- I had a question about a
kind of within DHS called
critical code studies
and I was looking at how
various concepts `get kind
of encoded in various forms
of code and I was just
wondering if you're aware
of how racial difference
actually gets encoded
in the biometric software at all,
or if anyone's sort of
been looking into that.
- Oh, I don't know.
Unless it was something like
exactly what I was showing you.
You mean like something
like, sorry, this here?
- No more like at the
actual level of the code,
like how different you know races are,
how it shows up in the actual
code behind the software.
- Yeah, no I don't, I'm not too sure.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
But something like Wendy
Chung's work I think
would be one place that I would go to look
for something like that,
and also some new work
by Mark Anthony Neil and
Jessica Marie Johnson on black
codes, the history of black
codes or regulating of blackness
to kind of contemporary black
codes of ways of speaking,
ways of knowing, and kind of
making those connections there,
and I think those are kind
of I guess three people that
I would look to to answer those questions,
but I don't know code
studies, so thank you.
- Can you, I just wonder,
can you go back to the image
of Wilson Chinn?
This is an image I know
pretty well and the story.
- Uh huh, thank you, yeah.
- My sense is that that
was done in the south
in Louisiana the picture was taken.
Is that your understanding of it?
- Yes.
- He wasn't brought up
to New York even though
it's a New York agency that is--
- That takes, that took the picture?
- Yeah, so this is, this is the year after
the Civil War stars and New
Orleans is emancipated--
- Yeah.
- Is liberated by the Union navy--
- Yeah, I think, I'm sorry, go ahead.
- I'm just gonna say
and he's used as kind of
he's put on stage if you will.
- Yes.
- To show people in the north
the barbarities of slavery,
so he's sort of acting that.
- Yes.
- Since that was my understanding of that.
- Yes, because there's another
one where there was kinds
of those tools of corrections
and instruments of torture
are on his feet and he's standing
very defiantly on top of them.
He's also posed with the
emancipated slave children
that were taken to New
York City as a way of,
there's some interesting
of, they were supposed to be
white looking slave
children to kind of pull
on the heartstrings of liberals,
'cause to fund this school
for free colored children
in Louisiana, in New Orleans,
and they'd be taken around the country,
or use these carte de
visites which they would sell
for like 25 cents to
raise money as well too.
And Wilson Chinn in some of the pictures
he would be there's one
about the love of learning,
where he's sitting with the three children
and there's one Charlie,
one boy, who's at the same
kind of frame or line of sight,
and so you see in some of those pictures
some people have read
that as the kind of making
of the color line, within
African American civil society,
with Wilson Chinn and these children.
And so yeah, so this is
staged, very much so,
as well too.
- Okay well if there
are no other questions
please join me in thanking Simone.
- Thank you.
(applauding)
