From Credit Scores to Job Applications: California's Reparations Task Force Looks to Algorithms

The tech industry is intricately linked to California’s identity and economy, bringing in an estimated $520 billion per year according to the Computing Technology Industry Association, a nonprofit trade association specializing in IT.

Roughly 2 million Californians have jobs because of the state’s tech economy.

The lack of Black representation in technology jobs has long been a point of contention for racial equity advocates, and claims of racial bias and discrimination within the industry remain persistent. In recent years, technology experts have raised alarms about racism being baked into the algorithms that determine credit worthiness, health treatments, job application status and more.

Discrimination in technology was featured at the January meetings of California’s Reparations Task Force, a nine-member body assigned the daunting job of conducting public meetings to study and develop reparation proposals for Black Californians. The task force, established by AB 3121, held meetings on Jan. 27 and 28 focused on public health and eligibility, in addition to technology.

As part of their scope of work, the task force is examining discriminatory practices in the public and private sectors, such as redlining and predatory lending, from 1868 to the present.

The expert technology panel included Yeshimabeit Milner, co-founder of Data for Black Lives, a organization that seeks to use data science to improve the lives of Black people; Vinhcent Le and Debra Gore-Mann from The Greenlining Institute, an Oakland-based public policy and advocacy group focused on the economic empowerment of people of color; and Safiya U. Noble, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and professor of gender studies and African American studies at UCLA.

There are many ways the technology industry perpetuates the wealth gap, the experts told the task force. But, as Le and Gore-Mann said, harnessing technology may also be used as a reinvestment tool.

Before testifying about racism and discrimination in the tech industry, Noble, the author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” shared an anecdote about her family.

“I’m a descendant of enslaved Black Americans,” she said. “My paternal grandmother was born into sharecropping, and she and my grandfather bought many of our relatives out of this de facto system of slavery in Mississippi.”

Noble spoke about how algorithms used in criminal justice, resource allocation and surveillance can often lead to disparate outcomes for Black people.

“Each of these types of carceral technology are unfairly pointed at vulnerable Black people,” she said. “California is central to the origin story of the tech industry, and so it must be understood as a powerful element in California history.”

“Technology often allows systems to operate at a much faster speed and at a much higher scale, while also making the ability to intervene and question more difficult.”

Milner explained some of the nuances of algorithms to the task force and the audience watching from their computer screens. A simple definition for algorithms, Milner said, is that they are “a set of step-by-step instructions to solve a problem.”

“A recipe is an algorithm, a list of instructions … the result is based on what we define from the beginning of the recipe as a success,” she added. “Data has been weaponized against Black communities, because the bullets, police dogs and fire hoses of the past have become the predictive policing, data-driven voter suppression and facial recognition of the present.”