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Understanding racism

America has a long and painful history of anti-black racism. Our institutions, policies, practices, and norms were designed to protect white interests.

Racism is everywhere

• Academic inequality — black children are over represented in special education, more likely to be in crowded classrooms and have less experienced teachers, and suffer higher rates of disciplinary action such as expulsions and suspensions.
• Medical — black women have higher maternal mortality rates and people of color have experienced higher COVID death rates.
• Housing — systemic discriminatory practices have led to lower levels of black homeownership.
• Employment — inequitable hiring, salary, and promotion practices have reduced opportunities for people of color.
• Legal system — biased policing, sentencing, and incarceration have disproportionately impacted black people, with black people five times more likely to be arrested than white people.

Racism is a systemic issue by design, and we need to recognize and focus on the systems and structures that create racism instead of dismissing inequalities as the fault of individuals.

Race is used as a technology — a tool to create division and social status.

Current technologies perpetuate racism

We love using technology to help solve our problems, but when society designates people of color as “the problem,” the solutions we create can hurt more than help.

We don’t have a great track record…

We designed facial recognition technology that allows police to search through suspects based on skin color. We developed predictive policing algorithms that disproportionately criminalize people of color. We devised credit score algorithms that unfairly label black people as risks, reducing their opportunities for homeownership, obtaining loans, and even getting jobs. We’ve even curated social media that taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be racist in less than a day.

Charlton McIlwain, a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, reflects: “So the question we have to confront is whether we will continue to design and deploy tools that serve the interests of racism and white supremacy. If we don’t want our technology to be used to perpetuate racism, then we must make sure that we don’t conflate social problems like crime or violence or disease with black and brown people.”

Rethinking technology: Designing for anti-racism

How might we use technology to educate?

Technology has the power to make education accessible, engaging, and personalized.

• Catalyst, a non-profit empowering women in the workplace, created a Bias correction plugin for Slack to help users identify and combat their unconscious gender bias. It flags messages privately, suggesting unbiased alternatives to use instead. This plug-in can educate and empower users in context in a highly dynamic and personalized way.
• Netflix curated and featured a list of movies, documentaries, and series about the Black experience in the US. These powerful narratives elevate black voices and experiences, allowing others to learn about past and present challenges black people face.

How might we use technology to foster empathy?

Technology has the power to immerse, connect, and inspire us.

• There has been buzz around the potential of virtual reality to use immersion and storytelling to foster empathy and encourage perspective taking.1,000 Cut Journey allows people to embody a black male child, adolescent, and adult and experience things from his perspective. The central premise explores if these visceral experiences can enhance how people understand, empathize, and engage with racism.
• The Intercultural Virtual Exchange of Classroom Activities (IVECA) is a nonprofit organization helping classrooms around the world digitally connect with each other to foster multi-cultural learning among students. Using video technology, students from Ghana to Mississippi can see and speak to each other. One teacher reflects, “When students are doing meaningful work together, they understand that people from other countries aren’t that different from them. Students may look different, but they’re really dealing with the same issues; they have the same feelings. They’re more alike than different.”

How might we use technology to encourage positive behaviors?

Technology has the power to nudge, support, and enlighten us.

• Uber Eats launched an in-app feature to support Black-owned independent restaurants in selected cities in US and Canada at a $0 delivery fee.
• Google added a “Black-owned business” attribute in Maps, Search, and Shopping that allows businesses to identify themselves as black-owned to help people find and support these local businesses.
• Siri Shortcuts allows users to create customized shortcuts, and one user created “Hey Siri, I’m getting pulled over”. It became very popular and functions as “the civilian equivalent of a police body cam.” The shortcut spurs several different actions, such as turning on “do not disturb” mode, notifying a selected contact that the person has been stopped by the police and sharing their location, turning on the front camera, and recording what’s happening. Once the user stops the recording, the video is automatically sent to the specified contact and “do not disturb” is turned off.

What else can we do?

Educate ourselves

• Education is never done — it’s on ongoing process. We have to continue to stay curious and open-minded to learn from those around us. Check out this excellent anti-racist reading list for designers.
• We need to continue to uncover and understand systemic racism. We can’t put the onus on people of color to explain it to us.

Mentor and hire diverse design talent

• We need to elevate and include black voices, perspectives, and experiences in the design and development process. Diverse teams perform better.
• We need to create more opportunities. Mentoring others and creating internships and full-time positions will help expand the field to new voices.
• We need to create inclusive workplaces. Try creating supportive and supported employee resource groups as well as defining and sharing DEI KPIs to hold ourselves accountable.

Practice inclusive design

• Use co-design and co-creation exercises as well as recruiting diverse participants to include varied perspectives and viewpoints into the design process. Too often the people products aim to reach (people of color, women, and other misrepresented communities) are rarely part of the design or creative process — which is a big problem.
• Be thoughtful and purposeful in your design process, considering core questions: What’s the worst-case scenario, and on whom? How do the identities within your team influence and impact your design decisions?What perspectives or lived experiences might be missing from your team? Who might you be excluding? How will you engage the people you want to reach within your design process, equitably?

Design is fundamentally about reimagining. What kind of world do we want to live in? Who do we want to be? How can we get there? How can we use our tools, skill sets, and positions of privilege to move things forward?

Once we understand a problem, we can explore possible solutions. We can’t get caught in a loop and only spend time and brainpower describing the issue. We need to move forward and enact change — working collectively. We won’t have all of the answers, but we have to start somewhere. As Mariame Kaba said, “We’ll figure it out by working to get there”.

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The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published on our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.