Sunset Racism

“In the realm of information technology (IT), to sunset a server, service, software feature, etc. is to plan to intentionally remove or discontinue it. In most cases, the term also connotes that this discontinuation is announced to users in advance, generally with an expected timeline.” - Wikipedia, 11/6/2021

Leap of Faith

The Sunset Racism blog is a space to explore how we can end racism during our lifetime, before we pass it onto our children’s children.

This blog seeks to “unstick”, recruit, and de-weaponize groups of white people who are committed to antiracism and mobilize them in the service of ending racism. It’s also intended to be a safe space for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color to view the efforts of a white person who is committed to understanding and telling the truth about my own internalized white supremacy, for what that’s worth.

Sunset Racism focuses on white antiracism work -- obviously because I’m a white person, but also because, insofar as racism is a technology, its user base is predominantly white and the network of conversations it resides in is largely hosted by and promulgated by white people.

Black thinkers, activists and leaders have been thinking about and working on how to decolonize their own minds from racism/white supremacy for centuries in America. Antiracism for white people by white people often seems to be an empty, disconnected echo-chamber.  Those who have been involved in the movement are far too few.  This blog is intended as an Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to work towards modeling a disruptive “technology” to unlock the heretofore invisible potential of antiracist white people.

This blog is written with a leap of faith assumption that racism (and indeed all oppression) can and should be intentionally removed and discontinued. Most people do not object (out loud) to the idea that racism should be dismantled. Black and white antiracists alike sometimes struggle with is the idea that racism can be ended; that it is even possible. Indeed, our cultural heritage and the system of racism/white supremacy silently shouts at us that that sunsetting racism is impossible. This blog is intended to contradict that voice and the fallacies the systems of white supremacy thrusts at us as reality.

This blog takes it as axiomatic that racism should be sunsetted, and if you make the case, as I do, that racism is a technology, then it follows that it can be and must be sunsetted.

Technology is a word that means a lot of different things in our culture, but here I’m using the primary definition of technology in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “the practical application of knowledge, especially in a particular area”. 

So, I’m not referring to technology in the sense of computers, or code, or silicon chips, or machines.  I mean technology in the sense of systems of ideas created by people to advance a “practical application”.  For example, systems of agriculture were created over generations to create surpluses of food. Consider the technology of racism was evolved for a similar purpose: to structurally create surplus wealth and leisure for white people.

Since the technologies of racism are hosted in the conversations (and cultural inheritance) of white communities, white communities are going to have to get serious about exploring our own profoundly destructive role in the practice of perpetuating, hosting and promulgating the system of racism, and sunsetting those practices, teachings, habits and standards.

This blog is for white people who are ready to be serious about that, and for anybody who wants to see white people get serious about it.

Race as Technology

In 2009, Beth Coleman published a landmark essay entitled “Race as Technology” in which she wrote:

“I ask the reader to consider race as technology. This proposition moves race away from the biological and genetic systems that have historically dominated its definition toward questions of technological agency.”

She declares (“for the moment”) that the idea of “race as technology” is itself:

“a disruptive technology that changes the terms of engagement with an all-too-familiar system of representation and power.”

How does “Race as Technology”, as a disruptive technology, change the terms of engagement with the systems of representation and power that constitute racism?

In one way, “Race as Technology” shifts our attention from the static to the dynamic. This creates possibilities for change and new calls to action. As Wendy Chun observed in her “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race”:

“…race as technology shifts the focus from the what of race to the how of race, from knowing race to doing race by emphasizing the similarities between race and technology” (emphasis added).

When enterprises decide to sunset their legacy systems, they have to find a way to do things to the code, data, rules and systems that were previously invisible to everybody. The hypothesis here is that to sunset racism, we need to find ways to do things to the “code” of racism which runs in our cultural cloud.

Also, critically, by moving from the biological to the technological, Coleman (and her contemporaries) de-nature race and racism. Instead of experiencing race as something that we are born with, race as technology declares our race to be something that has been written on our bodies by culture, language, and other human beings.

As Coleman wrote in 2009:

“For race to be considered a technology, it must first be denatured— that is, estranged from its history as a biological “fact” (a fact that has no scientific value perhaps, but constitutes, nonetheless, a received fact).”

Technology, Coleman observes, extends us, but it does not define us. Race as technology gives us a familiar, easy-to-understand way to comprehend how race attaches itself to us. We humans are wired by genetic-cultural co-evolution to extend our conception of ourselves to include the technology we use. Technology implicitly extends the capabilities of human beings in ways that can that blur the boundaries of the self. The hammer in our hand becomes an extension of our arm. When we are in a near fender bender, our minds react like our automobiles are our bodies, even though we know they are not. We hurt when our sports teams lose. We rage when our symbols are disrespected.

While race and racism and other technology might sometimes feel as though they are hard wired into us, in fact, they are not. Framing race as technology allows us to separate and distinguish our racist context, ideas and self-talk from our physical bodies and for white people to notice that we too are limited, controlled, and constrained by racism and white supremacy culture.

How do race and racism as technology limit, control, and constrain white people? Dr. Ruha Benjamin, in her 2019 book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code  asks readers to:

“…consider racism … as a set of technologies that generate patterns of social relations… these (patterns) become Black-boxed as natural, inevitable, automatic.

As white folks, we need to consider the patterns of social relations generated by racism that shape our behavior. How many times have you watched a white person (including me, or yourself) say something or do things on automatic that are perfectly aligned with the standard of white supremacy?

I’ll use a personal example from my life today. I have a friend, a professional colleague, and Black woman who sometimes uses me as a sounding board to think about racist behavior she encounters (everyday) in her software company workplace.

Every time, (and I mean every time), she describes some white person doing something shady, my first and overwhelming reaction is to want to point out that IT’S POSSIBLE THAT PERSON ISN’T MOTIVATED BY RACISM. (Yes, the voice in my head is shouting at me. Sorry for the all caps.)

Now, let’s be crystal clear. She knows that already, and she knows I know it. There is NO reason at all for me rationally to say such a thing. I know better. She’s didn’t come for my insight into individual white folks I’ve never met. She is interested in my experience navigating the C-suite at tech companies.

So, why do I want to say it EVERY TIME even though I know better? I believe it’s the same reason white folks compulsively engage in repeated automatic speech acts online (commonly referred to as sealioning).  Why when threatened by conversations about racism, we seemingly, without any training or orchestration or planning all, say the same things over and over again ( Racism bingo, anyone?).

Consider, white folks, that the technology of racism, which we’ve effectively installed in one another, is like the safety features built into autonomous automobiles. We’re in control until the technology senses a threat (to itself) at which point the technology asserts its right to speak, act, or lash out through you.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say the technology of racism controls and weaponizes white people. It keeps us in our lane, makes sure uncomfortable conversations end quickly and makes sure enough of us are a sufficiently constant threat to BIPOC to keep them in “their lane”.

Backwards and Upside Down

Sometime in the in the early 2000’s (after my early efforts at grassroots antiracism had come to a sudden end), I came to the conclusion that everything I believed about race and racism was backwards and upside down.

I had this idea that racism was basically a moral or a spiritual failing. I thought if I did enough personal work I could “fix” my own racism, and then I’d be able to help other people deal with what was, fundamentally, a personal problem that individuals like me would have to address, to move the world forward. Since I never was able to fix my own racism, I never was able to move to the step where I talked to other people about it. I was stuck in place by a matrix of ideas that I didn’t believe in, but nonetheless stopped me from acting.

I knew intellectually that there was structural racism, but I behaved like personal racism caused structural racism, instead of the other way around, or as part of some broader ecosystem.

That’s an example of what I mean by backwards and upside down.

The work I had done by then had led to some personal breakthroughs for me. By this time, I was enjoying wonderful friendships and professional relationships with Black people that were unavailable to me before.  But something still wasn’t right.

Problematically, I noticed that I was continuously slipping back into my own default perspective of comfortable “colorblind” whiteness.  Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to hold onto an antiracist perspective without the active support of a community of Black and Brown people around me holding my hand. 

And worse yet, now that I was engaged in real, long-term relationships with Black people, I could see first-hand that antiracism work with white people like me was harder on my Black friends then it was on me and my white friends. As I worked for change in the DC government (a majority Black institution working for Black executives), I was shocked and appalled to realize to that even there, everything I did still seemed destined to harm Black folks.

Was my home-brewed antiracism doing more harm than good? It often seemed like it.

At work, we promoted a (worthy and under-recognized) Black colleague, and it drew the attention of a racist HR person who immediately started efforts to undermine his success.

A senior Black management consultant was fired to send a message to my group to stay out of another executive’s territory.

My very existence was used by 3rd parties as a lever and bludgeon against a more experienced and more accomplished Black colleague when he was promoted before me. Despite having 10+ years more experience than me, people smeared him, regularly behind his back and to his face, with insinuations of having been promoted based on the color of his skin, despite being the only Black executive on the senior team.

These incidents were largely met by shrugs by my Black friends in the DC government. It was par for the course from their point of view. They were not only not surprised by it, but also at least one friend found my shock and amazement to be amusing. The only surprise they expressed was that I (as a white person) wanted to learn about it.

I was pretty shaken though. I began to wonder if the exuberant, exciting antiracism work I had undertaken with Black friends in the late 90’s hadn’t harmed my friends who started the group with me. I thought I was doing good, but just how much harm was I causing in my wake?

Fundamentally, what I was doing wasn’t working and what other white antiracists were doing looked misguided to me. I felt stuck, and didn’t know what to do next. I began to cast around to find frameworks that I could adapt to my own position in the world: as a privileged, middle class, white, straight, cis-gendered man and as a technologist, political theorist and committed antiracist.

In 2003 or thereabouts, this line of questioning led me and a group of mainly white and a few BIPOC antiracists to a classroom at Howard University to learn from a visiting lecturer named Dr. Neely Fuller, Jr.

We were a little late, and I was feeling self-conscious as one of the few white people in the room. I was a little surprised when we sat down and one by one every student nearby turned to us and very seriously asked something to the effect of: “Good evening. Are you a white person? Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

Counter Racist Code

Dr. Fuller was teaching from his book The United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept: A Compensatory Counter- Racist Code.  One of the things he was teaching was something to the effect of: if Black people want to understand what racism is and how it works, we really ought to ask white people, since they are in the room when a lot of it happens and Black people are not. 

Dr. Fuller wasn’t suggesting that white people would articulate useful, or logical explanations of racism. He was suggesting that Black people should, for their own survival, understand and observe white people scientifically so they could learn about the parts of the system of racism/white supremacy that happened when it was occluded from their view.

The mostly Black students in that classroom had ongoing classwork (I learned) to engage with people who self-identify as white and ask questions, rigorously, about how racism and white supremacy works. As a white person attending the lecture, I had stepped into an environment where I was now invited to be the subject of an intense inquiry into the nature of Racism/White Supremacy.

I came away from that evening with a couple of insights that still stick with me decades later:

The first was that, when pressed rigorously by people who were curious about what I had to say on the topic, I didn’t have anything useful to share about how racism/white supremacy functioned. I may (or may not) have been a useful anthropological subject, but I didn’t understand racism/white supremacy myself and had next to no insight into how it functioned. White people might have designed racism, but I appeared to have nothing smart to say about it, and my other white colleagues didn’t appear to either.

They asked me how I knew I was a white person. I told them I thought it was because other white people said I was. I babbled that people of my heritage (Irish) weren’t always considered white people historically. They had a lot of follow up questions to that. Did I know how my ancestors had become white? How did that work? Could I explain how a white person became a white person?

I felt embarrassed that all my answers sounded so stupid. How was it possible that I had never thought about these things before?

I resolved to pay more attention and to have more to contribute if ever asked these questions again.

The second insight I gained from that visit was that I was deeply confused, not only about race and racism, but especially about the system of white supremacy. Because in this room, white supremacy didn’t operate the way it did everywhere else, making it clearly visible to me for perhaps the first time in my life. 

What I mean by that is I realized that outside that room the codes of white supremacy were always at play in social relations everywhere in my life in the background.   They were so ubiquitous that became invisible to me, and to all White people in everyday circumstances.   Only by experiencing social relationships that were conducted by a different set of codes and standards was I able to notice that my behavior was shaped differently the other 99.9% of the time.

I found the evening, and my ongoing conversations with the students afterwards, to be deeply uncomfortable. I was not shown deference, and that made me notice uncomfortably that I had an expectation of deference. Nobody went out of their way to make me comfortable (or uncomfortable for that matter). People were polite, but not warm. I was the subject of an experiment. I had a role to play, but I was not the hero, or the scientist, or the anthropologist. I was the subject, with my consent, of an experiment to understand White Supremacy better. Important work was being done, not by me, but on me. We were participating but we were not centered in the way we expected to be. This was a new experience for me as a white person.

Nobody was worried about whether we would get defensive, or bombastic, or offended or fragile. One of my white colleagues started to cry, and I’m pretty sure her interviewer wrote down the time and the question that had triggered the tears and then asked her another question.

Two of my friends were only asked one question. The first was a Black man who was a graduate of Howard. When asked if he was a white person he said no, and they stopped the interview. The other person was blonde and blue-eyed and I would have said (confidently) a white person. But when asked, she responded that her great-great grandmother was Cherokee and she didn’t consider herself to be white. The students all thanked her, but immediately turned their attention away from her. The questionnaire was for white-identifying people, defined by the standard of saying yes to the question, not white-appearing self-identified Native Americans.

In that room, where people operated according to the Counter Racist Code, I didn’t get to decide whether my friend was white or not (because I would have sworn she was). The Counter Racist Code prevailed, and its standard was not what other white people said. In that room, the conversation was shaped by whether people said they were white or not. That is how the Code operates.

I experienced the system of racism/white supremacy being countered, in a real way by a system (or at least a prototype of a system) of justice which is, of course, the explicit purpose of Dr. Fuller’s work.

As he stated so eloquently that night: “If you do not understand white supremacy – what it is and how it works – everything else that you understand will only confuse you.”

That led to my third takeaway from that evening, Dr. Fuller was doing something groundbreaking and very compelling. He was creating a counter-racist code…. a compensatory counter racist system. He was creating standards and protocols to help Black folks survive in a world shaped by racism/white supremacy, and he and his colleagues were training the students in how to train one another to understand and survive the system of racism/white supremacy.

The lecture with Dr. Fuller was my first encounter with someone who was creating what I would now characterize as an antiracist technology. By the end of my interaction with Dr. Fuller’s students (who I worked with, as a subject, for a few months), I was left confused, hurt and more sure than ever that that everything I thought I understood about race and racism was backwards and upside down.

I didn’t know how, but I knew I needed to find ways to stop the system of white supremacy from hiding itself from me in my own blind spots. I became deeply curious about the system of racism/white supremacy and the constraints it imposed on me as a white person. I wondered if it was possible to create some kind of antiracist code which would help white people be less confused about the system of racism/white supremacy.

Shortly thereafter, I took all the notes I had written from the 90’s about ending racism, and threw them in the trash can. From that day forward, I focused my work on the hypothesis that structural racism is encoded on us and, counter to everything I was taught and believed, not a personal problem but a cultural and (later) technological problem. Racism as a structural, pervasive, contextual problem set that could be influenced by focusing specifically on our operating codes: racism as a technology to sunset.

Invitations

In Race After Technology, Dr. Benjamin extends an invitation focused on the heart of the matter. An invitation:

“…to refuse the illusion of inevitability in which technologies of race come wrapped to “hotwire” more habitable forms of social organization.”

This is first and foremost an invitation to imagine more habitable worlds. Consider that after we invented ourselves as white people, we lied to ourselves that the system of racism/white supremacy creates the most habitable world possible. Since we operate like racism is natural, inevitable, and (when framed as our country’s “original sin”) perpetual, the fact that our privilege comes at the expense of Black people is just the way the world is. The fast-talking voices in our head tell us that even if none of those things are true,  there is nothing that we can do about it anyway.

The combination of these pervasive illusions, and the visceral fear of our own feelings are highly effective at keeping white people in the roles assigned to us in the patterns of racism: complicit, compliant, confused, and weaponized.

I believe Race as Technology is a powerful tool to denature racism, and has the potential to become a platform to create counter-racist code that allows us to refuse, reject and escape the control of the seeming inevitability of systemic racism. As Coleman proposes:

“technology’s embedded function of self-extension may be exploited to liberate race from an inherited position of abjection toward a greater expression of agency…. — the ability to move freely as a being...”

It is my sincere belief that “to refuse the illusion of inevitability” is the first step towards liberation for everybody.

Dr. Benjamin calls much of what we’ve talked about here: “Race critical code studies”.

“Race critical code studies, as I develop it here, is defined not just by what we study but also by how we analyze, questioning our own assumptions about what is deemed high theory versus pop culture, academic versus activist, evidence versus anecdote. The point is not just to look beneath the surface in order to find connections between these categories, but to pay closer attention to the surfaces themselves.” Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

The “surfaces” Sunset Racism is connecting and focusing on include Race as Technology, lean startups, legacy technology transformation, the technology architecture of racism and the role cultural genetic co-evolution has in its transmission. I intend to bring the things I know from being an entrepreneur and successful civic hacker combined with what I’ve learned (mainly from black folks) in my two decades of small and large group transformational antiracism work.

I hope what I write here is valuable, but insofar as anything here makes a difference, it will be because of you, the reader, not me, the blogger.

White folks, if you are anything like I was at the beginning of my white antiracism journey (or now), a post like this might bring up a lot of powerful feelings: positive, negative and everywhere in between. Alternately, you might be numb or wanting to tune out, shut down or distract yourself.

Honestly, if you’ve read this far, and you’re still engaged, you’re doing great.

The most important thing now, please, is not to go dump, report or process these reactions with Black people or other People of Color! Do not use Sunset Racism (or indeed anything you read) as an excuse to push ourselves to the center of attention in their communities or conversations. If you feel the urge to do this, slow down, take a few deep breaths and see if you can notice all the ways technology of racism is trying to use you.

“The goal of thinking of race as technology is greater mobility for the subject and for society, more freeness.” (Race as Technology, Coleman, 2009)

The first step to gaining some freedom from being stuck in the patterns we’ve inhabited is admitting to ourselves that the machine has got us.

If you need to process and talk about what you’ve read here, consider cultivating a network of at least one white antiracist ally  (or you can always engage with me in the comments.)

If you’re a Black person, Indigenous person, or a person of color of any identity, and you’ve read this far, thank you for your attention. Feedback is always welcome but never expected.

If you think this would be useful to others, you are welcome to share the content developed here freely or remix in accordance with the Creative-Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Sharealike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

P.S. An earlier version of some of this content was published in 2020 under the title “Racism as a technology (premise)” which I archived after realizing how much it was influenced by the works of the BIPOC authors I have cited in this version. The original version can be accessed here for archival purposes. My deepest gratitude to the folks that brought this to my attention and coached me in getting it to where it is today.