Framing Free Software as Racial Justice

-- By VinayPatel - 06 Dec 2019

Racial Justice Framing

I have found, and behavior collectors can probably verify, that I become more invested in issues when they are framed as problems of social inequality, especially racial injustice. Framing the problem of digital surveillance as a racial one may motivate others to act for the same reasons that it appeals to me. Having grown up post-9/11, when suspicion and surveillance of brown-skinned people as terrorists was at its peak, I have an easy time associating surveillance and racism because the harm is more concrete and personal. Additionally, I am strongly motivated by values of fairness, equality, reciprocity, and consistency. I still manage to find some comfort in a problem that affects everyone because at least we can fight or fall together. I also find racial justice issues interesting because there is such a deep historical context for all of them which has never been fully reckoned with and is often erased, so there is a lot to learn. Inversely, ignoring the racial history and dynamics of the surveillance problem may make it more difficult to protect those who are at greater risk. This essay considers the racial dimension of surveillance in the American context to highlight the disproportionate threat to racial minorities.

Populations at Greater Risk

Surveillance is a mechanism for people in power to control potential threats to their interests, and in the US, this has historically included racial control, from plantation overseers and slave patrols to police and prisons. In the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI dedicated itself to the disruption and containment of the Civil Rights Movement using invasive and illegal surveillance tactics under COINTELPRO. Contemporary Black political activists still risk being targeted by the FBI for surveillance as “Black Identity Extremists” or “Racially Motivated Violent Extremists.” White people in power designed a system to protect White people’s interests, and people of color who do not wish to be exploited to serve those interests present a threat to social order which must be monitored and contained to control the threat.

In addition to government surveillance, there continues to be a disproportionately large risk of harm to people of color from the surveillance by the internet society. It may be more common for people of color to express views online against state institutions which commit violence against us and then be marked as a dissident and potential threat. It may be easier for advertisers to leverage the economic vulnerabilities of various communities of color to influence behavior. And, Russian interference in the 2016 Election provides an explicit example of an intelligence agency targeting racial minorities using social media with race as a fault line to change political behavior. While these risks are present for all those connected to the internet society, there is an especially high risk for people of color.

Whose Surveillance Matters?

White people as a class have relatively less reason to be concerned about digital surveillance, and this has implications for how we discuss the problem and move people to address it. There may be a racial dynamic to the general apathy and inaction which allow the spying to continue. As one manifestation of White privilege, White people may feel more secure in this regard because they trust powerful institutions to protect them or at least not go after them first. There could also be a more sinister sense among certain White people that the surveillance is good because it constrains people of color. Because the threat is less personal, there is a lesser sense of urgency to combat it.

When the problem of digital surveillance is framed in universalized, race-neutral terms (i.e. that it is everyone’s problem), Whiteness remains the default perspective we use to understand the problem. The White perspective has historically been used as the standard for what is normal, rational, and good. White normativity dominates our social education, from our history to our values and to our measures of success, so that we are taught to think from a White perspective as though it were natural and neutral. The public narrative of surveillance adopts a White perspective. Thus, we also start to see less of a problem with surveillance because we learn to trust those institutions which are protecting White interests as if they were protecting our own. We also feel relief that we are not the ones who will be targeted because we are not the ones doing anything wrong; those people deserve what is coming to them. Unless we take the time to interrogate the position from which we analyze the problem by considering race, we run the risk of breeding complacency among those who are especially endangered by complacency.

A second problem with universalizing the threat is that it has the potential to dilute or diminish the gravity of the threat to people of color. If we do not have the rhetorical tools to differentiate the threat of surveillance to different groups, we are left with a one-size-fits-all approach which may not be appropriate. If our only response to a Black activist concerned that they are being harassed under suspicion of being a Black Identity Extremist is that all surveillance matters, we lose the ability to cognize the specific threats that they face and cannot prescribe effective solutions. A universalizing approach creates a false equivalency between different surveillance threat models which people face on the basis of race. This makes it harder to help people understand the grave threats that specific people face from surveillance and diminishes the sense of urgency to protect freedom and privacy.

By providing a racial analysis, we can better understand and differentiate the risks that people personally face from surveillance, consider another contributing factor to our collective inaction, and develop a stronger historical context for surveillance. This may not be as helpful in addressing surveillance in other countries, but racism is deeply ingrained in American society, and its connection to surveillance practices must be confronted to fully reckon with the problem.