Race is inscribed in every detail of our lives, determining where and how we live, speak, write, move, sense, and encounter one another. So it stands to reason that the technologies that mediate, as Ta-Nehisi Coates might say, “between the world and me,” are also generated by the constraints and expectations of race. In this conversation, Charlton McIlwain (Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and author of the forthcoming book with Oxford, Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter and Stephanie Dinkins (Artist and Associate Professor of Art at Stony Brook University) discuss what artificial intelligence, big data, hashtags, Internet memes, and digital assistants tell us about being Black in the 21st century—and what they might portend for our future.
New York City, NY; NYC