A racist soap dispenser? Critical Theory and the non-neutrality of society
By Marie Heath
Can soap dispensers be racist? Is it the technology that is racist? Is it our society that is racist?
Take a minute to watch this video of an automatic soap dispenser that refuses to see the hand of a Black man.
A central refrain of the Civics of Technology project is that educational technologies are not neutral, and neither are the societies into which they are introduced. A corollary to this assumption is that schools and society are messy and complex, and inserting a technology will not change that or lead to easily won futures. In fact, technology can exacerbate injustices and power imbalances. One way to help understand our CoT conceptualization of “not neutral” is through critical theory.
First - a very brief background on early critical theorists. Critical theory grew out of the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers working out of the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany from the years 1923-1933. The thinkers and political dissidents of the Frankfurt School engaged in their work immediately after the devastation of World War I, during the crucible of the Great Depression, and parallel to the rise of fascism in Germany. They expanded on Karl Marx’s 19th century theory of economics and exploitation to understand labor and anti-semitism in Germany in the 1920s. Members of the Frankfurt School argued, like Marx, that modern society continued to perpetuate exploitation. However, they contended that modern exploitation occurred through more than controlling means of production. Instead, critical theorists argued, dominant groups exploited non-dominant groups using harmful ideologies, rooted in modern or “western” traditions (e.g., patriarchy, environmental domination, capitalism), to maintain power. Due to the rise of Nazisim, the members of the Frankfurt School relocated to Geneva, and then the U.S., in the 1930s. Eventually, their approaches to understanding society would influence feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and other frames to understand the ways society turns on its own people, oppressing and harming the humans living within it.
Critical theorists contend that society turns on itself because of an unjust balance of power. Some groups in society have more power than others. The dominant groups weaponize western ideals, ideologies, and institutions to maintain their power and oppress those without power. We see the results of this oppression in large and small ways. The inconvenience of a soap dispenser that fails to recognize Black skin, but will work for even a white colored napkin, is a small but still harmful reflection of the ways white people turn on and attempt to dominate Black people in society. A larger example of Whiteness seeking to dominate Blackness can be witnessed in police brutality and the routine murder of unarmed Black people, like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, by police. In another example, Dr. Costanza-Chock, a non-binary person, writes of the ways that airport surveillance technology fails to recognize her non-binary femme body, leading to uncomfortable searches and insulting interactions with airport security teams. On a societal scale, heteronormative cisgendered people leveraged policy to turn on and oppress queer people. For instance, the state of Texas has codified oppression by criminalizing gender-affiriming care for young people, terrorizing parents and children.
So how is it that with a constant barrage of evidence of oppression, society continues to perpetuate harm on the most vulnerable humans? Critical theorists assert that a certain level of comfort and affluence lull a large portion of society into complacency and disbelief that injustices persist. The resulting ambivalence of privileged groups allow injustices to be perpetrated against those without wealth or other forms of power. The ideologies of capitalism and individual opportunity lead to the belief that if an individual genuinely works hard, they will “improve” their life and not experience the trauma of poverty, racism, heteronormative, ableism, or any of the other ways that people are systemically harmed. This narrative allows dominant groups to explain away injustice as a failure of the individual, not a failure of society.
What happens when we introduce technologies into a society that is rife with power imbalances and also naive (or complacent) about oppression? We get racist soap dispensers. But we also get companies like SafeGraph that sold the location data of people who visited abortion providers to the highest bidder, even if that means it could lead to a person’s arrest since the re-criminalization of abortion. We get Clearview AI. They scraped online pictures, without consent, to sell to police and advertisers without any concern or consideration for the disproportionate threats to immigrants, refugees, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We get technologies that exacerbate and aid in oppression.
When we write in the Civics of Technology project that society is not neutral, we mean society privileges some groups and oppresses others. And the privileged groups in society are privileged because they benefit from the oppression of vulnerable people. When considering technology in society, we should ask, whose interests are served by technology? Who is subjugated and who may remain in power? And finally, what must occur so that we may all live in more just futures? This last question is as important as all of the others, as critical theorists do not separate knowledge from the world, nor theory from praxis. Knowing should lead to action, illuminating injustice and working toward a more just future.
This is an area where I continue to have questions. What are actions that I can take, that we can take? What communities and organizations exist that we can join and support? In what ways can the Civics of Technology project serve as a source of action and praxis for educators and educational technology scholars? I’m asking! Please join me in conversation in the comments.