Racism in our Operating System (Part 3)

(Trigger warning: descriptions of racial violence, dehumanization, and terrible things up to and including genocide written in an urgent, matter of fact, and direct tone by a white person.)

In parts one and two, I introduced the premise of Racism as a Technology, and began to break down how the system functions: running in the backgrounds of our minds, causing us to sort ourselves and how that cascades “bottom up” to result in death and distress for BIPOC while accumulating wealth and leisure for white people.

If you didn't read it, you might want to start there.  The two articles are probably a 10-15 minute read.  In the future, I’m going to try and write these pieces to be more stand-alone, but for now, it’s designed to be read in order.

In part three, I want to distinguish where the technology is hosted, how it gets communicated, and how the system of racism functions as malware of the mind.

This inquiry is not meant to be metaphorical.

At the end of his extraordinary book, "How to be an Antiracist" Ibram X. Kendi, uses cancer as a metaphor for racism.  Dr. Kendi suggests that racism is like a malignancy: a tumor that needs to be treated or cut away from our culture so we can be well again.  It’s clear from his words that he is not suggesting that Racism is a biological cancer, caused by out-of-control cellular reproduction.  For Dr. Kendi, cancer is a very personal and illustrative metaphor for how racism can be understood to relate to racist and antiracist policies, but Dr. Kendi is not actually proposing that racism be treated with chemotherapy.  He’s proposing that racist ideas and racist policies are countered with antiracist ideas and antiracist policies.  

So, to be clear, at Sunsetting Racism, when I posit that systemic racism is a technology, I’m not speaking metaphorically.  I am asking my reader to consider that the system of racism, (insofar as it actually IS anything), is a technology that needs to sunsetted as we would say in the technology business. 

This blog is an attempt to document racism as a technology so that collectively, antiracist people can be more effective when we work to sunset the system, (and as we work to create antiracist ideas, policies and yes, technologies that counter the new business models being worked on as we speak by racist technologists.)

As a technologist myself, it seems critical to me that antiracists understand WHAT the system of racism is and HOW it works, in reality, not just in metaphor or in mythology.  

This is my bias and my methodology as a technologist.  When I use (or even just observe) any system of systems, I can’t help but to try and model how it works, where it runs, what data goes where, how it is processed.  What did the designers mean the system to do and who are the actors it was designed for?

Insofar as racism is a technology, you and I didn’t design it, but I’ve come to the conclusion, somebody did.  Since I reverse engineer and replace nasty legacy technologies for a living, my lived experience has me reach for those tools to dismantle racism too.  But before we can start, we need to have an emerging hypothesis for where and how the system was “installed”.

If we’re willing to look, we discover quickly that whether we login or not, we white folks are pre-registered users of the system of racism/whiteness.  I am a consumer.  My world is shaped by it.  My BIPOC friends are threatened by it.  My mind is warped by it.  I’ve spent most of my life effectively ignoring it, but knowing on some level it is there if I need it, (like LifeLock, or my car insurance, or my Hotmail account from the late nineties).  Also, as I’ve noted before, if we stop thinking about it for a minute, (as a white person) it disappears from our view until we will ourselves to bring our focus back to it, which we almost never are required to do.

Worse yet, I’m not only a user of it, but I appear to be one of millions of physical hosts for the distributed technology of racism.  I’m not special in this regard.  In fact, like a blockchain implementation, every node in the network (which is to say every person in our culture) appears to carry around a complete running instantiation of the technology of racism/whiteness in our minds.  This system of ideas shapes our perception of the entire world.  It (and we) infect or reinforce or update the racist programming of other people, as we communicate with them verbally, symbolically, and/or violently.  It also, sometimes (but not always) appears to take over and control or at least constrain our behavior with the potential at any moment to be weaponized by the system to run different attacks: hurting BIPOC, distorting our thinking, impinging on our freedom, or dampening our humanity.

I’m not saying we’re not responsible for it when it happens. To be clear, the system is us, and we are the system.

I’m not saying you’re a machine.  You’re not.  You’re a human being, but your mind has been hacked, systematically and for generations to keep you and everybody else you’ve ever met hosting and maintaining and passing on the the technology of racism from generation to generation.

The network of racism absorbs and inhibits our humanity and our freedom.  It lives in our human operating system, and lurks there, just above our wetware, ready to be activated like a distributed botnet to rob us of who we are, and make us who white supremacy needs us to be.  When we’re run by the technology of racism our behavior is mechanical, predictable, and automatic, and based, not in reality but on the protocols of the tricknology.

How did our personal, community, institutional and cultural operating systems get infected with these destructive memetic protocols?  How do technologies, specifically racism, get installed, perpetuate and update themselves in our minds and our communities?  Where are the phenomena of racism and whiteness hosted in our culture, and in our minds?

  The technology of Racism and the standard of whiteness are installed in our minds through language (and symbols), and persist in the realm of consensus between human beings who are in communication with each other. 

In this context I mean language in the broadest sense.  Human beings have evolved biologically with an amazing capacity for signification, learning and meaning-making. Language includes the spoken and written word, obviously, but technologies are also communicated and spread through the language of practice, imitation, experimentation, habit, humor memes, symbology, art, stories, and superstition.  

Racism in particular can be observed to be transmitted through things NOT communicated explicitly: through things left unsaid; by images not shown; by body language; by meaningful looks; by taboos; by jokes where racist ideas are referenced but not named; by symbols that represent unspecified threats; by coded "dogwhistles" where  racist ideas are expressed in subtext without being spoken.  We understand these non-communications as communications because we have a the system of racism/whiteness running in our minds constantly, in the background and sometimes in the foreground all the time.

We also learn that the consensus of racism and whiteness is backed up with violence, brutality, privations, prisons, and the threat of all of the above.  Violence works on the body of the violated, but it is also, in this context, a powerful form of language changing the brain chemistry and operating instructions for not only the brutalized, but also the brutalizers, their commanders, the bystanders and the rest of the willfully (or unwittingly) ignorant folks with our heads in the ground like ostriches.

Effectively, human beings are born into an environment that already so rich with these signifiers as to form a ubiquitous context.  As children’s own language capabilities develop, we learn our native language, we learn our family's culture, we simultaneously learn our culture's norms and of manners.  We learn what form of religion we practice (or not), we learn where we and our family live in relation to and according to the system of racism and the standard of whiteness: are we Back, are we White, are we Asian, are we something else?  We learn whether our bodies are at risk, and when, and by who, and every single person in our culture develops automatic routines to survive it.

We learn what “race” the technology of racism says we are, and we observe how our family (or other communities) behave in relationship to it.  We discover how our communities want us to behave in relationship to it.  We absorb, (or reject) whatever version of racism (and/or antiracism) our family or communities practice (or not).  But even with the most enlightened family possible, it almost doesn’t matter, because as soon as we connect with the world, we are exposed to the context and the contagion of racism through hundreds of thousands of consensus driven communications including stories and representation in pictures, media, films, art, statues, and social media: and the violence they capture, communicate, distort or display.

The capacity for language is inherited and inborn.  The communications that condition us into racism and whiteness, (and its tautological feedback loop with the world) are not. They are human designed, created, codified, communicated optimized, and refined continuously through language: at first person to person, and then community to community, and eventually through cultural consensus and the standard of whiteness/anti-blackness.

The technology of racism is hosted in us, people, and the network of conversations of human beings in our culture.  It’s killing people, imprisoning them, injuring them, weaponizing everyone, and making a mockery of our highest, most cherished values.  

In the end, this technology will destroy our planet as surely as nuclear holocaust or global warming if we continue the way we’re going.

So, we’re going to need to find a new way to operate, and fast, and we have to do it together. 

Thanks, everybody for all the incredible feedback.

The most common request I’ve been hearing is “what should we do about it?” and so the next post is going to take a crack at that: my strategy is to repeat and amplify what BIPOC have already suggested we should be doing about it, but frame it in terms of the theory of racism I’ve been outlining here.

If you’d like to help, please drop in the comments what you are doing about it, what you think works, and what you think doesn’t work? I’ll be sharing from my experience as well, as best I can.