Most of what appears at this website has a rather positive spin to it.  However, that sentiment wouldn’t be quite accurate when thinking about race and digital cultures.  Nothing involving technologies (especially when related to the internet) is immune from racism or anti-Blackness and is always connected to centuries of oppression that Black communities have faced.  We unpack some of those layers here. It was important, however, to not inundate this website this way. It was critical that we not frame everything related to Black peoples as a doom n’ gloom world of death and decay.  Instead, we also intentionally look to the places of joy and creation and communication… against all odds.

The term-- RACIAL COMPUTATIONS--- was a 2023 placeholder.  TCU undergraduate students thought the following gets at their perspectives better:
  • "Race in the Digital World" (we cannot assume everyone knows what computations mean)
  • Algorithmic Racial Profiling (to better address the deeper implicit biases that can be ingrained in the code by the person who writes it, rather than talking about a more broad subject and result)
  • “A Crime Against Wokeness” or “Imprisoned Wokeness” (this theme is predominantly about crime and technology against Black communities)  
  • “Calculating Racial Biases in Technology” (this lets you know that technology is deliberately used towards anti-blackness)
  • "The Digital Era's Systemic Racism" (references our current moment)
  • “Seeing the Unseeable in Technology” (people need to realize how racism is always technologized)
  • “Dissecting Racist Technology” (we are dissecting the many layers of how technology is racist in our society)
What We Are Reading:
  • "_____ While Black: Millennial Race Play and the Post-Hip-Hop Generation" by Aisha Durham
  • "All Lives (Don’t) Matter: The Internet Meets Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism" by Charles “Chip” P. Linscott
  • "Anti-Racist Technoscience: A Generative Tradition" by Ron Eglash
  • "The Black Digital Syllabus Movement: The Fusion of Academia, Activism and Arts" by Sherri Williams
  • "The De-realization of Black Bodies in an Era of Mass Digital Surveillance: A Techno-criminological Critique" by Bruce Arrigo and Olivia P Shaw
  • ​"The Dying Black Body in Repeat Mode: The Black ‘Horrific’ on a Loop" by Yasmin Ibrahim
  • ​​"Freeing Black Codes: liquid blackness Plays the Jazz Ensemble" by Lauren McLeod Cramer & Alessandra Raengo
  • "From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest, from 'I Am a Man' to 'Black Lives Matter'" by Sarah Whitcomb Laiola
  • "Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women's Mobility" by Armond R. Towns
  • "Governing Hate: Facebook and Digital Racism" by Eugenia Siapera1 and Paloma Viejo-Otero
  • "Information Inspirations: The Web Browser as Racial Technology"  (chapter from Distributed Blackness) by Andre Brock
  • "It’s Not How You Say It, It’s What You Say: Ambient Digital Racism and Racial Narratives on Twitter" by Felipe I. Agudelo and Natalie Olbrych
  • "Making a Way out of No Way: Black Cyberculture and the Black Technocultural Matrix" (chapter from Distributed Blackness) by Andre Brock
  • "Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities' by Kim Gallon
  • "Making Visible through Liberatory Design" by Lorna Roth
  • "Mapping Slavery's Attraction: A Case for an Autoethnographic Digital Humanities" by Frederick Charles Staidum Jr.
  • "Mobilizing Blackness: Analyzing 21st Century Black Student Collective Agency in the University" by David Turner 
  • ​​​“'New Genres of Being Human': World Making through Viral Blackness" by Ashleigh Greene Wade
  • Race after Technology by Ruha Benjamin (excerpts)
  • "Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy" by Winifred Poster
  • "Racism, Hate Speech, and Social Media: A Systematic Review and Critique" by Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Johan Farkas
  • "Reclaiming Racial Dignity: An Ethnographic Study of How African Youth in Australia Use Social Media to Visibilise anti-Black Racism" by Kathomi Gatwiri and Claire Moran
  • Revisiting Digital Defense and Black Feminism on Social Media" by Sherri Williams
  • "#SayHerName: A Case Stud andy of Intersectional Social Media Activism" by Melissa Brown, Rashawn Ray, Ed Summers and Neil Fraistat
  • Scams, Heists, and Racial Disidentification: Joanne the Scammer at the Intersection of Queer of Color Critique and Digital Blackness" by Kidiocus King-Carroll 
  • "Social Injustice in Surveillance Capitalism" by Jonathan Cinnamon
  • "Spectacularized and Branded Digital (Re)presentations of Black People and Blackness" by Francesca Sobande
  • "The Unremarked Optimum: Whiteness, Optimization, and Control in the Database Revolution" by Nikki Stevens, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, and Sarah Florin
  • ​"Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought" by Romi Ron Morrison
  • "Where Blackness Dies: The Aesthetics of a Massacre and the Violence of Remembering" by Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez
"Indifference to social reality on the part of tech designers & adopters can be even more harmful than malicious intent."
​~Ruha Benjamin

"Algorithms of oppression"
with safiya Noble

digital blackness

A College Rhetoric Course at TCU
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