In the last few years, we have witnessed an unrelenting race in the development of new technologies that govern our socio-political, economic, and cultural worlds. Racial justice actors and scholars have extensively demonstrated the racial bias of the algorithms at the heart of these technologies (and of the data scientists who develop them) and how these new technologies are not only entrenching, but actually intensifying racial violence in the "real world.".
Along with other civil society actors waging battles in national, regional, and international spaces to counter this trend, we, at Afalab, believe that we cannot let algorithms reproduce and extend racial violence.
In a context where the denial and invisibilization of historical and contemporary racial injustices by state institutions as well as private actors remain the norm, big data can help us highlight the systemic character of racial injustices. Indeed, with European states refusing to collect race-related data and reducing racism to isolated experiences of personal prejudices, we consider it imperative to explore the opportunities that big data offer for making visible the extent and nature of racial injustices in Europe.
We are acutely aware that big data won’t be the unique solution and that it has to be complemented with other forms of data and rigorous analysis. Nonetheless, we consider the urgency of racial inequalities in Europe, along with the systematic refusal of states to collect data on race, as sufficient reasons to explore the affordances of big data for addressing a critical void in the fight for racial justice in Europe.
Therefore, African Futures Lab is developing a "Global Racial Inequality Dashboard" that
- Monitors racial injustices within and across countries in Europe and Africa
- Documents demands for racial justice in those regions
- Highlights institutional actions are taken to address these issues
- Fills gaps in state-collected data (especially in Europe) related to racial disparities and violence
- It will leverage data from a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional sources, including existing datasets, reports from civil society organizations, legal documents, and social media to present a fuller picture of the effects of racism in an accessible and actionable manner.