Racial formations as data formations

Abstract

This commentary uses Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that new technoscientific processes are instituting an ‘end to race’ as a provocation to discuss the epistemological transformation of race in algorithmic culture. We situate Gilroy’s provocation within the context of an abolitionist agenda against racial-thinking, underscoring the relationship between his post-race polemic and a post-visual discourse. We then discuss the challenges of studying race within regimes of computation, which rely on structures that are, for the most part, opaque; in particular, modes of classification that operate through proxies and abstractions and that figure racialized bodies not as single, coherent subjects, but as shifting clusters of data. We argue that in this new regime, race emerges as an epiphenomenon of processes of classifying and sorting – what we call ‘racial formations as data formations’. This discussion is significant because it raises new theoretical, methodological and political questions for scholars of media and critical algorithmic studies. It asks: how are we supposed to think, to identify and to confront race and racialisation when they vanish into algorithmic systems that are beyond our perception? What becomes of racial formations in post-visual regimes?

Situating questions of data, power, and racial formation

“…The opening commentary by Phan and Wark (2021) takes up Gilroy's provocative claim that “the time of ‘race’ may be coming to a close” (1998: 840) as a starting point for reconsidering how the mediated nature of datafied processes evince shifts in racialization. They ask: As regimes of computation are largely opaque modes of classification, what does race become?…”

Banking on alternative credit scores: Auditing the calculative infrastructure of U.S. consumer lending

“…Contrary to the idea that an algorithmic audit must break apart the ‘black-box’ of algorithmic decision-making, many audits elide the question of “what's in the black box?”; instead, focusing on algorithmic effects. As Phan and Wark (2021) note, the often invoked ‘black-box’ is not a discrete, coherent entity but rather a “technical ensemble… [that] produces end-products that we can engage with and critique, in the form of new abstractions that act in and on the world” (Phan and Wark, 2021: 21). These “new abstractions” are the target of this audit as I document the effects of risk classifications generated from user volunteered information such as education or employment history in one fintech firm 1 , Upstart's, alternative credit scoring model.…”

“…I also tested for differences in employment between an insurance sales agent (salaried) and a barber/hairstylist (non-salaried). The specifics for the second and third categories of information were chosen due to the socially saturated nature of these data and their potential to serve as proxies (Chun, 2021; Phan and Wark, 2021) for protected classes of information pertaining to race or gender under U.S. fair lending laws.…”

“…This approach suggests that educational attainment is not simply a socially saturated data point, but rather an algorithmic classification produced by machine learning techniques and the application of inductive reasoning to large datasets. Phan and Wark's (2021) theory of “racial formations as data formations” show how large-scale, data-processing systems produce digital structures with the capacity to “produce race by other means” via the racial imperative “to classify, to differentiate and, crucially, to determine context” (4). In contrast with proxies which seek to locate racial identification on the other side of the model, racial formations as data formations produce categorizations of risk that impose racializing logic without an auditable connection to what Simone Browne calls the “visual economy of race” ( Browne, 2010: 145 ) .…”

The Datafication of Race-Ethnicity

“…In this context, the once hopeful proposition made by Paul Gilroy, that "new ways of seeing, understanding and relating to ourselves point to the possibility that the time of 'race' may be coming to a close" (Gilroy 1998, 840), seems somewhat premature and naive in its belief that a change in technological mediation would somehow reveal race as a the fiction it was all along. It does, however, as highlighted by Thao Phan and Scott Wark (2021), point at the necessity for an investigation into how the ontology of race is coupled with the instruments that mediate it, which in a datafied society equates to investigating "racial formation as data formations":…”