A Hundred Racist Designs
To build an antiracist future, we have to take a hard look at today’s creations.
This moment feels different.
It seems overnight, the world is overcome with injecting anti-racism into every endeavor. Some colleagues, for the first time, are coping with the weight of the oppressive system. Others, fortunately, have collected countless resources posed to help design a more equitable future.
Unfortunately, racism proves to be larger, more abstract, and more elusive than the objects traditional designers are used to constructing. To some extent, it’s not their fault: racism’s been designed into our society for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, designers still fail to recognize the countless ways — tangible, yet invisible — that racism has been injected into our technologies.
It’s time to do more.
A couple of months ago, I logged onto ‘Design Twitter’ to see how the community was coping at large with the political climate. I happened upon a tweet thread, started by @LabSpecEth, which asks the design world this question above.
