Reflections on The New Jim Code:

The broader themes that continue from last week, also

present in The New Jim Code:
1. Visibility: What is at stake in visibility? Tied into this is
Henri Lefebvre’s notion of recuperation -- at which point
does trying to become visible just end up as an opportuni-
ty for capitalism and sovereign power to turn visibility as
an opportunity for marketing or control?
2. Neglect vs Institutional Racism
What is the line between active “neglect” and institution-
al racism? Is there a line? The excuse “I just didn’t know”
reverberates throughout Silicon Valley, and then buffered
with apologies alongside calls for diversity in the engineer-
ing room. Benjamin points out how diversity in the police
force still serves white patriarchy rather than ameliorating
police violence. Is neglect then active harm? This actually Crania Americana, 1839, Samuel Morton
reminds me of Arendt’s banality of evil essay...
3. Production:
- Race is produced through the acts of representation and
classification (knowledge systems). This is an important
point. While a strain of moderate liberalism sees images of
early craniometry/phrenology as “unscientific” or “prob-
lematic”, it doesn’t question the construction and produc-
tion of race to begin with. In a recent talk, Zara Rahman
from The Engine Room pointed out how ridiculous the
ethnic and racial categorizations kits like 23andMe put out
are. What does it mean to be truly “Mongolian”, for exam-
ple? The category itself is a complete farce. Race is a tech-
nology (Wendy Chun)
- Difference has to be manufactured, and in the manu-
facture of difference (identifying how people don’t “look”
alike, or “sound” alike), allows difference to become com-
modified towards the ends of capitalism.
- We need to be wary of the production of empathy,
especially since its a space of tech solutionism, since the
narrative project of empathy relies on logics of difference, Bruno Beger, a Nazi anthropologist in Tibet, 1938
differentiation rather than wholesale awareness or pres-
ence.
- The production of race/ethnicity is important to fully
draw out, since it gives context to how race is produced
globally, not just in the US. She gives the example of AI
phrenology in Zimbabwe with a Chinese company aiding
the government in the production of race. The focus of
dialogue, then, can’t just be about a blanket, global sense
of classifying power -- it needs to attack the grounds of
classification itself.
4. Solutions: Technological fixes or social change? I found
this part to be unanswered, but it’s an unanswered ques-
tion more broadly, in contemporary discourse. Towards A brief hashtag on Twitter designed to usurp the pre-existing meaning
the end, Benjamin suggests audits of technical systems as of “Blue Lives Matter”
one way forward, and deep social change. She also suggests
we can use technology to subvert narratives, like the white
collar crime map. There’s one argument to be made that
subversion doesn’t scale and that is precisely the point. But
if it doesn’t scale, what does it provide in terms of politi-
cal change? And will regulation be enough? Is there just
something inherently racist about AI and how it functions
on classification?
5. States of exception: How did we arrive at the sustained
condition of a “state of exception”, with the state’s monop-
oly on violence, and especially the state’s encroachment on
everyday life as a site of control over “bare life”? Has this
always been the case throughout US history?

The Punisher is a Marvel

hero with enormous popu-
larity among the right wing,
law enforcement, etc. Frank
Castle, The Punisher, is an
Italian-American man. Pop-
ular Punisher imagery and
memes now center around
the color blue.
 I recently walked into a skincare store, The Ordinary, asking
for sunscreen. I rarely get a sunburn, but like the song goes,
“Don’t forget to wear sunscreen”, which seems to be important
in a time of ozone holes, weird weather and harsh exfoliating
skincare products somehow available online.

The sales assistant was a person of color. She conspiratoral-

ly lowered her voice and said “Don’t buy our sunscreen. It’s
horrible if you’re not white, it’ll leave you ashy.” She scribbled
down on a piece of paper a brand she thought would work for
me, “Black Girl Sunscreen” and sent me off in search. I visited
the website, a sunscreen which brands itself as “sunscreen for
people of color”.

I ended up in an internet hole of research on suncare, UV

light, melanoma. Some of the debate include viewpoints such
as: People with melanin are less susceptible to melanoma. One
dermatologist, Richard Weller, a bespectacled Caucasian man
with a TEDx talk claims that during his volunteer time in Ethi-
opia, he’s rarely seen a case of skin cancer, that makes my skin
crawl with subtle racism. Other doctors point out that we don’t
know the full effects of the sun on the rest of the body, and it
could cause other diseases besides sunburn, such as inflamma-
tion and diabetes. Other doctors point to the complete lack of
health data and clinical research on people of color in the US
more broadly. Some people accuse the sunscreen industry of
trying to expand customer base onto people who “don’t need
it”, and that chemically based sunscreens can actually be harm-
ful and absorbed by the skin. The discourse on genetics, race
determining genetics and difference was bizarre. It also brought
up some of my further apprehensions about Western medicine
vs Chinese medicine which has a very different understanding
of the body.

In the end, I settled on a terrifyingly expensive bottle of all

natural sunscreen made by a company run by Frank Ocean’s
mother as compromise.
The early Shirley cards, with whiteness as default.