In our haste to digitize, computerize, and distill our world into comma-separated values and JSON files, necessities of diversity, diversity in data collection, and diversity in programmers gets lost in the mix and is deemed unimportant. So, when a Black man and his friends are tagged as “gorillas” by Google Photos’ facial recognition software, when a TikTok story book semblance filter turns white people into royalty and POC into animals or monsters, when the implicit and explicit biases of the people behind the lines of code appear in the user interface of these public programs, we are left to ask, is social media racist?! Just as children can be taught to be racist through socialization, artificial intelligence and machine learning models learn to be racist as they reflect the biases of their “parent” programmers. It is critical that we ask ourselves to examine and interrogate the data beyond the typical performance tests. Who is building these models, and what kinds of data collection shortcomings could give such skewed results as the mis-categorization of humans as primates? How can we retrace and reconnect the end product outputs and programs to the prejudice that leads to discriminatory tendencies? In other words, how do we work to fix this data-driven world? Our hosts Lena and Dinah are joined by special guest Dr. Michael C. Dawson, a Professor of Political Science here at the University of Chicago. In this episode, we are getting down into the true essence of coding hate and the ways in which technology and social media input data from the real world and reproduce these biases online. But technology does not have to rule our world. One way or another, we are reclaiming our data and taking a stance against online prejudice.


This Episode’s Hosts: Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager) and Lena Diasti (Executive Producer)

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Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Daisy Okoye (Content Creator).

Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Fernanda Ponce (Content Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team).

KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR’s 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black

Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown