Member-only story
The Enduring Anti-Black Racism of Google Search
How neoliberalism, Google, and the U.S. porn industry coded searching for ‘black girls’ with racism
When Algorithms of Oppression was published in 2018, it was a landmark work that interrogated the racism encoded into popular technology products like Google’s search engine. Given that many Americans are currently using Google search to try to understand racism after the national uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd, it’s a good time to remember the architecture they are using to do so is itself deeply compromised — and how that came to pass. This excerpt, from Safiya Umoja Noble’s enduring work, explains why anti-Black racism appears, and endures, in tech products we are told to view as neutral.
On June 28, 2016, Black feminist and mainstream social media erupted over the announcement that Black Girls Code, an organization dedicated to teaching and mentoring African American girls interested in computer programming, would be moving into Google’s New York offices. The partnership was part of Google’s effort to spend $150 million on diversity programs that could create a pipeline of talent into Silicon Valley and the tech industries. But just two years before, searching the phrase “black girls” surfaced “Black Booty on the Beach” and “Sugary Black Pussy” to the…
