My colleague Anna Lauren Hoffman organized a summer faculty reading group on technology and race, and we first read Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology. Then we read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. We conclude today with the last half of Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter.

When I signed up to be part of the summer reading group, I was looking for excerpts from texts that I could use in teaching my 2020-2021 courses: Enterprise Risk Management (Informatics); Information and Operational Risk (MSIM); Emerging Concepts in Cybersecurity (Informatics); and Ethics, Policy and Law in Information Management (MSIM). As I moved through Benjamin’s book, I began to see that my own education was spotty around significant historical events. Browne’s book drove that point home clearly, too. McIlwain’s book is really two books, both of them dealing with historical context that I am part of, again turning the magnifying glass onto events that I thought I knew reasonably well. The first half of his book highlights individuals as they developed careers and the respective impacts they had. The second half of the book looks at history, in particular the role of presidential commissions as well as the role of IBM Corporation in enabling certain kinds of “progress.” Commissions seemed to generate theory, which rapidly turned into policy, which even more rapidly became manifest as computerized tools to be used to measure and to manage.

If I were to add a fourth book, it would be Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality that examines “the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America.”

As we move into our final discussion, I see that my “learning objective” has changed. It is not so much that I will use excerpts from the texts in my teaching, though I may do that. It’s that my own thinking and understanding of history have been amplified around the question of race and technology. That is bound to manifest itself not only in the classroom, but also in my writing and my public speaking.

Thanks to Anna for her leadership and for the energy she has brought to our efforts.