The plural throws up an even odder set of results. The first photo for ‘Straight couples’ is a heterosexual black couple, the second is a lesbian couple with a child, the fourth a black gay couple and the fifth a lesbian couple. And that is just the first line. By the third line of ‘Straight couples’ the results are solely gay. ‘Couples learn from gay relationships’ is the tag to a photo of a mixed-race (black and white) gay male couple. Then we have ‘Straight couples can learn from gay couples’. Then a gay male couple with an adopted baby. And then just a photograph of a cute gay male couple from the gay luxury lifestyle magazine Winq. Why, just three lines down of images requested for ‘Straight couples’, is everyone gay?
It gets predictably stranger. For ‘Straight white couple’ the second photo is a close-up of a knuckle with ‘HATE’ written on it. The third is of a black couple. Asking for this in the plural (‘Straight white couples’) throws up a range of images so bizarre that it is clear that something is up. As the second image we get a mixed-race couple. Fourth is a gay male couple (one black, one white) holding two black children. By lines two and three the photos are mainly of gay couples with tags including ‘Interracial couples’, ‘Cute gay couples’ and ‘Why gay couples tend to be happier than straight couples’.
But try these searches in other languages and apply them to Google search engines in the countries where these languages predominate and you get a different set of results. So for instance, Googling for ‘White men’ in Turkish on Google Turkey just turns up lots of images of little white people or men whose surname happens to be ‘White’. Google Image searching in French seems to turn up the same phenomenon as that in English. But in general the further away you go from European languages, the more you get what it is that you asked to see. It is in the European languages that these strange results come up. And it is in English that the results are most pointedly, clearly, in-your-face just not what you asked for. In fact the oddity of the results for some of these searches in English is so extreme that it is clear that this isn’t just a machine trying to throw in a certain amount of diversity. This is not simply MLF.
Whereas a search for ‘White couple’ will throw up a mixed-race and mixed-race gay couple in the first five images and then a white couple who have given birth to black babies by using black embryos, a search for ‘Asian couple’ returns what the searcher actually asked for. ‘Asian couple’ simply gives a range of photographs of Asian couples. It is not until the fourth row of images that an Asian woman is photographed with a black man. There is one other similar image, but otherwise almost entirely just Asian couples. At no point is there an effort to make it gay. There are no gay couples at all.
This is very mysterious. If MLF alone was being applied to the searches then a search for straight white couples might turn up some gay couples. But it would not end up prioritizing images of couples who are neither straight nor white. There seems to be a deliberate effort – on specific occasions – to push images of couples who are none of the things that have been asked for.
What appears to be happening is that something is being layered over a certain amount of MLF: it is MLF plus some human agency. And this human agency seems to have decided to ‘stick it’ to people towards whom the programmers or their company feel angry. This would explain why the searches for black couples or gay couples give you what you want whereas searches for white couples or straight couples are dominated by their opposites. It explains why people interested in searching for photos of Asian couples do not need to be aggravated or re-educated whereas the sort of people searching for ‘White couples’ do. Likewise, straight people of Asian descent do not need to be shown a diversity of mixed-race couples or be told that such couples are not merely normal, but more normal than anything else, or to have photos of gays thrown at them. If a person just wants to search for an Asian couple they will be shown lots of happy straight Asian couples – young and old. At no point will Google try to rewire their view of what a couple is or what the average relationship might look like.
Whereas somewhere in the coding there has been a very deliberate attempt to upset, throw, disorientate or enrage people who are searching for certain terms. It appears that Google wants to offer the service it prides itself as providing for some people, but not for anyone who might be searching for heteronormative or Causasian couples; these people would obviously already be a problem and must be refused and frustrated in their attempts to access the type of material they are after. They must be given a giant, tech-sized ‘F- you’. All in the interests of fairness, obviously. It is the same thing that The New York Times is doing with its endless stories about gay businessmen and gay ballet dancers. But it is being done in the Valley at such a sustained pitch and speed as to make it far less deniable.
Search for ‘Black family’ and you will see smiling black families all the way down, without even a mixed-race family in sight. Type in ‘White family’ on the other hand and three out of the five images in the first line alone are either of a black or mixed-race family. Soon it is black family after black family.
It seems that in order to strip computers of the sort of bias that human beings suffer from, they have been set off to create a new type of non-bias. Yet this turns up a skewed version of history plus a new layer of bias that has been deliberately injected into the system by people intent on attacking other people who they regard as having particular biases. In the interests of weeding out human biases, humans have laced an entire system with biases.
The problem with this is not just that people will not get what they want to get from the search engines. People are used to the media landscape which we have had. If you read The New York Times or The Guardian you know the particular biases that the paper may or may not have, and you can choose to be a reader or not. Likewise if you are reading The Daily Telegraph, The Economist or the New York Post you know the direction that the paper, its editors, contributors and perhaps owners may hold. Even if these attitudes and outlooks are not ones that you share, the familiar reader can select out what is useful to him or her as they are reading because they know the direction from which the publication is coming.
But up until now the search engines have been assumed to be a ‘neutral’ space. They might be expected to throw up oddities, but not whole new editorial lines – let alone editorial lines which are outstandingly biased in particular directions. It is as though a paper of record turned out to be fairly reliable in its foreign reporting, extraordinarily biased in its domestic coverage and made it clear in the sports pages that anyone who like sports should be punished and corrected for their error.
Of course it is possible that as people become wiser about social media they will end up using search engines that are tailored to their specific needs in the same way that people tend to absorb news outlets that broadly fit their needs and existing world view. Or it is possible that the tech companies will be successful to some degree, and that the version of things that they push will become widely or fully accepted. Would it hurt very much if a generation or two from now most schoolchildren thought that their country had always looked as it does now? And that black people and white people were pretty evenly distributed in seventeenth-century Europe? Would there be much harm in straight people being more comfortable with gay people – including images of gay people showing affection? Would it hurt if young straight people thought that about 50 per cent or more of people are gay? You can see the ease with which these bias corrections can be slipped into. If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal?
The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past. Some users of the world’s most popular sear
ch engine will have noticed some of this. Some may have noticed all of it. But for most people on a day-to-day level, whether using Google, Twitter or any of the other big tech products, there may simply be a sense that something strange is happening: that they are being given things they didn’t ask for, in line with a project they didn’t sign up for, in pursuit of a goal they may not want.
3
Race
When Martin Luther King Jr addressed the crowds from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on 28 August 1963, he appealed not only to foundations of justice in the founding traditions and principles of America; he also made the most eloquent defence anyone has ever made about the right way in which to treat other human beings. He spoke not only after centuries in which black Americans had been first slaves and then second-class citizens, but in an era during which racist laws were still on the statute books in American states. Racial segregation laws including anti-miscegenation laws were still in place, able to punish couples from different racial backgrounds who had fallen in love.
It was Dr King’s great central moral insight that in the future about which he dreamed his children should ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’. Although many people have attempted to live up to that hope and many have succeeded, in recent years an insidious current has developed that has chosen to reject Dr King’s dream, and insist that content of character is nothing compared to the colour of someone’s skin. It has decided that skin colour is everything.
In recent years the world has become aware of one of the remaining sewers in which this dangerous game is played. Since the American presidential election of 2016 there has been intense media attention focused on the remnants of white supremacism and white nationalism which have lingered in the US as they have in parts of Europe. But the general attitude towards these people is agreed upon. There is little widespread support for the games they are playing with history’s darkest materials. Almost all media and political response to them is unequivocally condemning of racism exhibited by people pursuing white ethno-nationalism.
Yet the greatest backsliding on Dr King’s dream has not come from there. It has come from people who almost certainly believe themselves to be pursuing the same path as that which Dr King outlined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. In pursuit of anti-racism these people turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else. At the very moment when the issue of race might at long last have been put to rest, they have decided once again to make it the most important issue of all.
Academia
Like other special-interest studies, the decades since the 1960s saw the growth of ‘Black studies’ in American universities. As with other identity group studies, the aim of such courses started out in part as a way of de-stigmatizing the group in question and educating people about a crucial aspect of their history. Like ‘queer studies’ and ‘women’s studies’, ‘Black studies’ was intended to emphasize a specific version of history, politics, culture and literature. So black literature courses would cover black writers who might not be covered in other literature courses. Black political figures might be highlighted in a black history course and missed in a wider overview of an era or place. That such study areas grew after black authors and politicians had entered all the other syllabuses was one oddity. This meant that just as racial differences were diminishing they suddenly became siloed in special-interest sections of their own: ‘black literature’, like ‘gay literature’ and ‘women’s literature’, now got a section of its own in bookshops and libraries.
As with feminism, after black studies had reached something like the point of victory, so a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas entered the discipline just as racial equality was looking better than ever. Just as a popular strand of feminism turned from celebrating women to vilifying men, so a portion of black studies started attacking people who were not black. A discipline intended to de-stigmatize began to re-stigmatize. The racial equivalent of fourth-wave feminism came in the development of the growth of ‘whiteness studies’ – a discipline that is now taught at all of the Ivy League universities in the US, and at universities from England to Australia. This offshoot of critical race theory now sees the University of Wisconsin in Madison providing a course called ‘The Problem of Whiteness’, while at Melbourne University in Australia academics have pushed for ‘whiteness studies’ to be made a compulsory part of training in completely unconnected fields. Anyone who has been force-fed their intersectionality will recognize the argument in an instant.
Oxford University’s Research Encyclopedia describes whiteness studies as:
A growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce white supremacy and privilege. Critical Whiteness Studies presumes a certain condition of racism that is connected to white supremacy.
It certainly does ‘presume’ this, but the author of this entry – Syracuse University professor Barbara Applebaum – like others in her field also now makes a living from that presumption. In her 2011 book Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility and Social Justice Pedagogy (2011) Applebaum explains how even white people who are avowedly anti-racist may still be racist. It is just that they are often racist in ways that they have not yet realized. Among much else Applebaum calls for white students to learn how to listen to other people, admit their ‘complicity’ in racism and from there learn how to ‘build alliances’. For this does not appear to be a mere area of academic study. In Applebaum’s view – as she puts it in the Oxford Encyclopedia – it is an unabashed campaign, one with all the familiar hallmarks not of education but of re-education. It is like an ‘implicit bias test’ being run by someone who has already found you guilty.
Applebaum talks of ‘advancing the importance of vigilance among white people’, of teaching them ‘the meaning of white privilege’, of teaching them ‘how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism’. And of course all of this does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a situation in which racism is ‘rampant’ and has ‘violent effects . . . as numerous acts of racial violence in the media have shown’, she adds slightly anti-climactically. Still the Oxford Encyclopedia is clear what the aim of this course of study should be. Whereas black studies celebrates black writers and black history, and gay studies brings out gay figures from history and pushes them to the fore, ‘whiteness studies’ is far from a celebratory study – if it is a study at all. The aim of ‘whiteness studies’, as Applebaum proudly states, is that it is ‘committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness’. This is to be done ‘as a corrective’. So whereas every other field of race studies is performed in a spirit of celebration the aim of this one must be to ‘problematize’ hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.
Citing W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 observation that the ‘colour line’ is the defining characteristic of American society, she writes that ‘Unless white people learn to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism, and until white people develop an awareness that critically questions the frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world, Du Bois’s insight will continue to ring true.’
Of course it might be said that what will continue to ring even more true is that defining an entire group of people, their attitudes, pitfalls and moral associations, based solely on their racial characteristics is itself a fairly good demonstration of racism. For ‘whiteness’ to be ‘problematized’ white people must be shown to be a problem. And not only on some academic, abstract, level but in the practical day-to-day business of judging other people. As so often this progression of an idea from academia into the rest of society has found its most prominent demonstrations in the world of celebrity, which like every area of life has gone past race-unbothered straight into race-obsessed.
‘Problematize’ Armie Ham
mer
Consider the case of the actor Armie Hammer. His prominence grew in 2017 with the gay romance movie Call Me By Your Name. Unfortunately for his reputation, Hammer himself is not gay. But he is male and white, so when the movie he had starred in started winning critical acclaim and getting nominated for awards he had no defences. Buzzfeed chose to run a 6,000-word piece entitled ‘Ten long years of trying to make Armie Hammer happen’. Race and racial politics could now be weaponized to poison absolutely everything. As Buzzfeed’s ‘senior culture writer’ put it in her sub-heading, ‘How many second chances does a handsome white male star get?’ According to Anne Helen Petersen, the movie star had ‘the height, the side-part, and the old-fashioned good looks that would lead directors to compare him to the likes of Gary Cooper. He also comported himself the way people who have grown up with money often do: with confidence and charisma, or if you’re being less generous, like a little bit of an asshole.’ The writer went on to mock the various movie projects that Hammer had been cast in but which had either collapsed or not been well received. After he had been cast as a young Bruce Wayne in an adaptation of DC Comics’ Justice League: Mortal, the project fell through: ‘suddenly [his] path to instant stardom was over’. In a tone of undisguisable relish Petersen listed the ‘failed Westerns’, ‘blockbuster flop’, ‘prestige pictures’ which fell ‘flat’, one of the ‘greatest summer bombs of all time’ and an Oscar favourite that became a mere ‘blip on the awards season radar’. Despite this she complained that Hammer’s publicity team had ‘never given up trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen’.
The point of this interminable essay – written by a white woman – seemed to be to attack Hammer not just for being a loser but for being white – specifically for the ‘privilege’ that Petersen seemed to see at every stage of Hammer’s career. Her explanation for Hammer still being on the acting scene despite having dissatisfied Buzzfeed’s writer was that ‘Hollywood would never give up on a guy that handsome, that tall, that white, with a jaw that square.’ And again, ‘No one gets second chances in Hollywood the way straight white men do.’ And again, ‘Ultimately, the problem isn’t that Armie Hammer was given this many chances to happen. It’s the system that ensured those chances – along with those given to so many other white men – also withholds chances, leeway, and faith from those who need and would benefit from them most.’1
The Madness of Crowds Page 15
