Black Blockchain: The Future of Black Studies and Blockchain

Abstract

Black Blockchain: The Future of Black Studies and Blockchain Nishani Frazier (bio) Lt. Nyota Uhura, a fictional character performed by actress Nichelle Nichols, is a much beloved figure of the Star Trek universe. MSNBC commentator Jason Johnson features her Ebony Magazine cover in his virtual background. CBS’ All Rise fictional character, Judge Lola Carmichael, furiously rebuked another judge who removed Uhura’s picture from her office. Former President Barack Obama confessed to a youthful crush, and Star Trek fan, Whoopi Goldberg, joined the second iteration, Star Trek: Next Generation, because Nichols characterized for Goldberg a black woman on television who could play someone other than a maid. The attachment to Lt. Uhura epitomizes Black possibility in spite of a subjugated past. Scholars define this interface of imagined Black future and technology as Afro-futurism. While Afro-futurism exists mainly as a cultural field of study, futurism permeates Black daily life, in sometimes dark, problematic ways. Recent works like Coded Bias expose how new technologies, like AI and big data, increase surveillance, reinforce racist notions of Black criminality, and apply discriminatory treatment in Black patient care. Scholarly attention rightfully centers on the negative impact of futuristic machinery, but these technologies can either empower or suppress. Block-chain embodies this tech duality and concomitantly stores within it the key to self-determination, sovereign identity, and community empowerment while divergently acting as an instrument for oppression. How Black Studies adopts blockchain can determine black people’s political, social, cultural, and economic futures. But without the philosophical intervention of Black Studies, blockchain’s potential for people power becomes subjugated to individuals, entities, and institutions insensitive to the issues impacting the black community. [End Page 13] For these reasons, there can be no blockchain without Black Studies, and no Black Studies that can ignore blockchain. Black Futures and Technology Few understand blockchain or the technological processes by which it came to be created. Undeniably, blockchain is a frustrating mixed bag of “smart contracts,” “crypto currency,” “NFTs,” “interoperability,” and other terms that obscure more than reveal. However, technical expertise is not the sole determining factor for engagement with blockchain, nor is Black engagement with futuristic technology antithetical to the Black experience. Many scholars rightfully argue that Afro-futurism can act to insert the cultural, historical Black self into tomorrow. Or, it can assert the future as a site of survival, and in doing so make it a tool of liberation.1 Alternatively, the future can collide into Black people extending real world racist belief systems into digital outcomes that hamper and damage Black freedoms. Scholar Ruha Benjamin examines this issue by merging Critical Race Theory and technology in what she terms “race critical code studies.” Benjamin explains that “technological benevolence” conceives futuristic machinery as an unbiased solution to societal conflict, and yet these efforts to address bias ultimately “end up reinforcing the New Jim Code.”2 The solution is to “demand that tech designers and decision-makers become accountable stewards of technology.”3 Black digital humanists suggest a similar approach, insisting that the presence of blackness can change the landscape of technology.4 Yet these mediations are not enough. The future is a contestation of power, and the fight for power requires our active presence and vigorous implementation of self-determination.5 Within this chaos, Black Studies is best poised to enter the bedeviled crossroads by bridging blockchain’s meaning for Black people and Black people’s import for blockchain. As participatory players, scholars of the Black experience can direct technology for Black people’s emancipation. Blockchain in Black Studies: Sovereignty and People Power Entre into blockchain is much more than a gesture toward blackness in the future. Blockchain has the ability to incorporate community defined concepts of Black identity and peoplehood within computational structures. This is not just an abstract notion. Heir property is one significant area where the Black community can insist that self-determination merges with blockchain in a real-world application that helps preserve Black land. According to ProPublica, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lists heir property as the leading impetus for Black involuntary land loss. Black owners distrusted southern courts and circumvented estate probate by allotting ownership interest to each...