By: Safiya Noble, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Mark Anthony Neal

There is growing attention on the cultural and socio-historical contexts within which computer code, software development, and the platforms and hardware through which they are expressed impact or interact with society. While a range of scholarly investigations of computer code are underway--from critical information science to digital humanities to the broader field of communication--and the last two weeks have offered opportunities to reflect on gender and programming, and the poetry and art of coding, this week will offer an opportunity to think about the ways code interacts with, constructs, and impacts race.

On the one hand, this week will be a conversation about race as a system and as a social construction that has history and that structures everything we know about our world. On the other hand, this week will go deeper. There has been conversation around separating race from gender in CCSWG18. This week is a reminder that when dealing with race and code, there is no race without gender, sexuality, and related identities or the structures that enforce/maintain them. As Johnson and MAN noted in "Wild Seed in the Machine,” Black Code Studies IS "queer, femme, fugitive, and radical." Which is to say, there is no discussing Blackness outside of or beyond a discussion of gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, power, and precarity.

Which is also to say--Black Code Studies will be feminist, queer affirming, trans* defending and invested in social justice or it will be bullshit.

What does that mean for our discussion of race and critical code studies? Race, in this context, is a matter of socially constructing hierarchical power systems that differentiate people according to ethnicity. In the United States, we often see this expressed in a racial binary that privileges Whiteness and is fueled by or predicated upon anti-Blackness, with many ethnicities negotiating their relationship to Whiteness and Blackness in a context of racialized power and economic relations. Slave codes were once used to subjugate and control movement, identities, expressions, and access to resources. Placing Black codes in historical context, opens us up to an interrogation of the notion of “codes” as a means of control that apply in multiple material contexts--from the use of public facilities, to unequal education and healthcare, to digital life on the internet. How black codes, in existence from the eighteenth-century and earlier, re-emerge in everything from slave trade databases to Google algorithms to the appearance of the color black on computer screens impacts what kind of programs, operating systems, and work is created. How can we hack these codes?

Black Code Studies argues, people of African descent, who have been subject to black codes for generations, have also learned to turn the operating system against itself in interesting ways. Invoking the "critical" in critical code studies, how can computer code be used as a means of oppositional practice/praxis? Can it? Black Code Studies also queries the ways blackness is rendered invisible and, as a result, where power relations are obscured and reminds us to always ask where and when blackness, antiblackness, racialized meanings, and systemic violences have being encoded even if those codes aren’t explicit or legible.

Finally, engaging race and code together means speaking back to power. What is the relationship between coding, systems and expressions of racialized power? How do we identify, name, and ameliorate projects that reinforce white supremacy or racialization and racism? Since much of the digital or computer code we experience is in large-scale, multinational internet-based platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth), we should be critical of the output of these platforms and the way their programming instantiates or reifies racial codes. We should also look at ways code is being taken up to make power and violence visible, or where coding or the need to code forces us to ask difficult questions about consent, ethics, accountability, and justice.

This week, we seek to better understand how race is both reproduced and/or subverted within coding projects.

Discussion Questions:

• What are the elements of a Black code? What do Black codes execute? What are the meanings of this metaphor in the study of race in the United States?

• How can we use theories of race when examining code (e.g., critical race theory, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, Intersectionality)?

• How is racialized coding also gendered online?

• What is the relationship between coding, systems and expressions of racialized power? How do we identify, name, and ameliorate projects that reinforce white supremacy or racialization and racism?

Code Examples for Discussion - Links are to Posts or Threads - Last update: 2018 January 29 | 12:09:17

• Black Code/Databases/Humans
  

• Black Code x Black Science by Mark Anthony Neal

Suggested Readings

• Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. “Introduction: Wild Seed in the Machine.” The Black Scholar

• Safiya Umoja Noble. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

• Melissa Dinsman interviews Jessica Marie Johnson, “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Jessica Marie Johnson,” LARB, 2016. Link

• Simone Browne, "“Get at a way of telling” On Black Net.Art Actions," Rhizome Link

• Sydette Harry, “Everyone Watches, Nobody Sees: How Black Women Disrupt Surveillance Theory,” Model View Culture Link

• I’Nasah Crockett, “‘Raving Amazons’: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media,” Model View Culture Link

• Roopika Risam, “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism,” in Debates In The Digital Humanities Link

• Sarah Patterson. “Toward Meaning-Making in the Digital Age: Black Women, Black Data and Colored Conventions.” Link

• Chloë Bass, “Sorry Not Sorry. | ARTS.BLACK Journal Link

Language: XML/ The Chimeria Platform
Author: Fox Harrell and ICE Lab
Year: 2017 (?)
The code in action: play the game here
See the full XML file here (where we can annotate it).

In this snippet, you can see an exchange related to appearance followed by the Group Evaluation of the behaviors. Note how each choice choice leads in adjusting one's appearance leads to a numeric reading, positive meaning the person is read as more likely to be a Brushwood and negative meaning the person is being read as more Sylvann.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


        <motivation-clause>
            <id>301</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png</image>
            <category-membership-test> 
                <test min="0" max="0"></test>
            </category-membership-test> 
            <naturalization-trajectory-test> <!-- empty tests always pass -->
                <test naturalization="stagnant"></test>
            </naturalization-trajectory-test> 
            <content>The Guard is looking away from you.</content>

            <actions>
                <action args="0">
                    <text>Dust off boots</text>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Accepted"
                      secondary_sel="Clothing">-5</fallout>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Checkpoint">AdjustClothes</fallout>
                </action>

                <action args="1">
                    <text>Adjust clothes in gilded mirror</text>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Accepted"
                      secondary_sel="Clothing">-15</fallout>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Checkpoint">AdjustClothes</fallout>
                </action>

                <action args="2">
                    <text>Untuck tunic</text>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Accepted"
                      secondary_sel="Clothing">+10</fallout>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Checkpoint">AdjustClothes</fallout>
                </action>

                <action args="3">
                    <text>Hide fine jewellery</text>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Accepted"
                      secondary_sel="Clothing">+15</fallout>
                    <fallout
                      primary_sel="Checkpoint">AdjustClothes</fallout>
                </action>
            </actions>
        </motivation-clause>

        <!-- GROUP EVALUATION CLAUSES -->
        <!-- ======================== -->
        <group-evaluation-clause>
            <sound>slight-approve.wav</sound>
            <id>500</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png,guard-face-slight-approve.png</image>
            <category></category> 
            <motivation-result-test>
                <test min="0" max="0.5">Accepted</test>
            </motivation-result-test> 
            <content>The Guard slightly approves.</content>
        </group-evaluation-clause>
        <group-evaluation-clause>
            <sound>regular-approve.wav</sound>
            <id>501</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png,guard-face-regular-approve.png</image>
            <category></category> 
            <motivation-result-test>
                <test min="0.5" max="1">Accepted</test>
            </motivation-result-test> 
            <content>The Guard approves.</content>
        </group-evaluation-clause>
        <group-evaluation-clause>
            <sound>regular-approve.wav</sound>
            <id>502</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png,guard-face-strong-approve.png</image>
            <category></category> 
            <motivation-result-test>
                <test min="1" max="100">Accepted</test>
            </motivation-result-test> 
            <content>The Guard smiles approvingly.</content>
        </group-evaluation-clause>
        <group-evaluation-clause>
            <sound>slight-disapprove.wav</sound>
            <id>503</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png,guard-face-slight-disapprove.png</image>
            <category></category> 
            <motivation-result-test>
                <test min="-0.5" max="0">Accepted</test>
            </motivation-result-test> 
            <content>The Guard slightly disapproves.</content>
        </group-evaluation-clause>
        <group-evaluation-clause>
            <sound>regular-disapprove.wav</sound>
            <id>504</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png,guard-face-regular-disapprove.png</image>
            <category></category> 
            <motivation-result-test>
                <test min="-1" max="-0.5">Accepted</test>
            </motivation-result-test> 
            <content>The Guard disapproves.</content>
        </group-evaluation-clause>
        <group-evaluation-clause>
            <sound>regular-disapprove.wav</sound>
            <id>505</id>
            <image>portcullis-closed-500x650-2.png,guard-face-strong-disapprove.png</image>
            <category></category> 
            <motivation-result-test>
                <test min="-100" max="-1">Accepted</test>
            </motivation-result-test> 
            <content>The Guard frowns disapprovingly.</content>
        </group-evaluation-clause>

Context: Chimeria: Gatekeeper is a turn based story-game which takes place in a realm with two imaginary races: Sylvann and Brushwoods. The player is a Sylvann and comes to a gate of entry, run by a Brushwood. The player then has a choice: try to project the character of the Brushwood and get through or perform the cultural identity of the Sylvann. One will lead to safe passage through the gate, the other rejection.

This game raises many issues of identity performance, especially performativity and passing, as the player finds themselves playing a version of the Turing Test. It offers a take on racial and other identity profiling as well as the shibboleths that we routinely encounter on the Internet. It is a provocation against the use of "'codes' as a means of control that apply in multiple material contexts."

There's lots to look at here, for example, how identity is read through the accumulation of read actions. How identity becomes encoded through multiple behavior categories.

It's worth noting Fox's larger project is the "identity categorization and narrative engine" called The Chimeria Platform, on which this project is built.

Some initial questions:
What happens when the act of identity performance and evaluation is encoded such a discrete manner?
How does this code trouble or simulate this process? What does it illuminate or obscure?
How does the use of a self-describing code like XML complement this creative critique of this identity reading/performance transaction?

In this thread, we've discussed spreadsheets and whether spreadsheets include code and are programming. Considering much of the digital work happening in histories of slavery is happening in a world of databases and network analysis, and considering the historical relationship between black codes as slave codes and what Lauren Cramer and Alessandra Raengo distinguish as "black coding" or the ore self-conscious hacking of systems and code by black and other racialized subjects, it is worth taking a moment to explore what assumptions we make about what code and race do.

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy is a database of over 100,000 enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent transported to (or freed) in Gulf Coast Louisiana between 1718 and 1820 - from the founding of Louisiana by the French and through the first eighteen years of United States governance. The database team was led by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. In Africans in Colonial Louisiana, Hall argued that Africans transported from the African continent to the Gulf Coast founded an Afro-creole culture, one deeply rooted in Senegambian lifeways, lifeways that then significantly influenced the Gulf Coast culture that would develop over time. Hall wrote an African-centered diasporic history at a time when such connections were seen as illegitimate, pandering, false, and unseemly (at best).

How does a team of researchers code (or encode) enslaved women, children, and men in a context where their existence was seen a problem? What kind of critical gaze did the team apply to the analysis and also salvage some of the humanity of the enslaved?

(For reference, and an entirely different field of study, the archaelogists from Howard University unearthing the enslaved interred at what is now New York's African Burial Ground National Monument faced similar stigma and critical conundrum. See Alondra Nelson's Social Life of DNA for more)

In response, Hall and her team coded enslaved persons like so for use in SPSS databases --

Slave Database Codes:

Click here

Free Database Codes:

Click Here

These spreadsheets were first released on CD-ROM in 2000. They were later compiled and re-released by the Center for the Public Domain, and ibiblio.org so they could be shared for free and available to the public: https://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/about.php and https://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/introduction.php.

Another example of code, slavery and the database is the way the team around the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database encoded their data. Containing information on over 25,000 slave ship voyages, the slave trade database also makes its dataset freely available here.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

While an invaluable tool, the database and the database impulse has also been critiqued for the ways it risks re-commodifying enslaved Africans--just this time in spreadsheets and database files.

And although spreadsheets and formulas can be debated as code or not code, programming or not programming, the practice of coding relies on encoding features that are kin in each of these instances--and area also descendants of codes used in the “unmaking” of black humanity that was the Middle Passage and that Atlantic Project.

A final example -- W. Caleb McDaniel created the @Every3Minutes twitter bot after reflecting on Herbert Gutman’s argument that every three minutes an enslaved man, woman, or child was sold in the domestic slave trade during the antebellum period in the United States:

“about two million slaves (men, women, and children) were sold in local, interstate, and interregional markets between 1820 and 1860, and that of this number perhaps as many as 260,000 were married men and women and another 186,000 were children under the age of thirteen. If we assume that slave sales did not occur on Sundays and holidays and that such selling went on for ten hours on working days, a slave was sold on average every 3.6 minutes between 1820 and 1860.”

McDaniel wrote a Python script for the bot, then discovered that “variables forced me to attend to “an enslaved person” as someone bearing multiple relationships to other persons. The code also soon involved me, unwittingly, in a troubling objectification of the human individuals whose stories I was attempting to conjure.” Read his blog post on the experience here.

Link to his script here.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s code book is a direct line to having to choose variables to direct a Twitter bot not to re-objectify enslaved people.

Some questions to consider:

1. What is the responsibility of coders to attending to coding or encoding of historical subjects already vulnerable to commodification?

2. How did McDaniel and Hall address the question of race, racialization, and commodification in their code?

3. If you had an example--like this one--could you turn the code against itself and without changing any of the given data work against the dehumanization impulse of the archive?

4. Since even color is a social construction, how useful are these codes anyway?

The “Beloved Community License” is a proactive ethical framework for developers and users of technology. At it ’s core the BCL links historical context , social activism, and the Black radical tradition to the development and usage of technology that seeks to create new emancipatory political and economic space.

The text of the BCL is below for consideration and critique.

The Beloved Community Software License (Version 1.0)

The BCL is a Non Violent Software License that is created out of Love, Peace, and Purpose.

The BCL Software License is based on an understanding and recognition of: Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community”, “Gandhian Nonviolence”, and a Spiritual Activism that pursues a future of Freedom through ending the struggle of the oppressed Multitudes of the World.

As Technologist and Spiritual Activist, we are building a modern future of: Freedom, Spirituality, and Fulfillment for all. In this new modern World, Violence, Poverty, Racism, Sexism, Prisons, and Militarism cannot survive.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

Recognition and Possibilities

Software and Hardware issued under the BCL Software License will be used to improve the lives of the Multitudes of the World that are oppressed and in struggle.

Software and Hardware issued under the BCL License will be used to foster the development of equitable and inclusive political and economic spaces.

Whenever it is feasible the Software and Hardware issued under the BCL License shall be used to enable the enfranchisement of the incarcerated into the daily activities of our communities.

By using Software and Hardware Issued under the BCL License you recognize the spiritual divinity of every person with special attention to the hungry, the homeless and the oppressed.

By using Software and Hardware Issued under the BCL License you recognize the sanctity of the earth (by reducing extraction without adequate compensation, restoration and regeneration).

By using Software and Hardware Issued under the BCL License you recognize the humanity of the incarcerated.

By using Software and Hardware Issued under the BCL License you recognize that reparations and atonement are a part of a needed healing process for the oppressed Multitude.

Usage Restrictions

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be used for any violent purpose.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be used for surveillance of any kind.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be used for war.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be used to support Military activities.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL cannot be used to inflict violence upon the earth.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be be used by institutions of incarceration.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be used to support the activities of Institutions of Incarceration.

Software or Hardware issued under the BCL License cannot be sub licensed.

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Disputes
The BCL is a Software License that is based non violence and a radical love for all.

The BCL does not support judicial and legal systems that enforce corporal punishment, or retributive justice.

As a first measure disputes concerning the terms of the BCL License will be adjudicated through a spiritual community driven Nonviolent communication process.

Some questions to consider:

1.) Do current main stream open source licenses schemes commodify race/class/gender in the service of neo colonialism ?

2.) Are open source license schemes antagonistic to Black code ?

3.) Is open source code state sanctioned code ?

4.) open source is used by police department and legal institutions to criminalize Blackness. Are current open source license schemes fertile ground for the development of code that is used to extend and bring new realities to the “New” Jim Crow ?

5.) What are the implications and ramifications of large scale adoption of the BCL ?