Artificial Intelligence Between Oppression and Resistance: Black Feminist Perspectives on Emerging Technologies

Abstract

This chapter explores Black Feminist perspectives on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the political, economic, and cultural oppression of Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC) through AI-based tools. The second part lays out alternatives to the status quo and portrays Black feminist activism that leverages AI as a site of resistance. Black feminism is a critical social theory that deals with the oppression and empowerment of BIWOC in the United States and beyond (Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire. An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. The New Press, New York, 1996; Collins, Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York, London, Routledge, 2020; Nash 2019). It has produced seminal contributions to the study of society and the social dynamics of oppression, discrimination, resistance, and social change. In recent years, Black feminist critiques of AI challenged the design and development of emerging technologies. Black feminists have argued that long-held biases are consciously or unconsciously built into AI-based tools and reinforce racial and gender inequalities in societies (Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press, Cambridge, Medford, MA, 2019; Noble 2018; Browne Dark Matters. On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). At the same time, Black feminists proposed new frameworks for the study and development of AI-based technologies (Noble 2016; Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press, Cambridge, Medford, MA, 2019; Constanza-Chock, Design Justice. Community-led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020). They have campaigned for a moratorium on new AI-based tools and used AI to create art for protest (Buolamwini 9/27/2018). This dialectic of oppression and resistance is a characteristic element of Black feminism. Precisely because BIWOC have been and are structurally disadvantaged in American society, they have developed a perspective and practice that aims at dismantling all systems of oppression. Black feminist perspectives on AI thus offer important tools for critique and future visions of social and economic justice with and without AI.