Afrofuturist and Chicanofuturist Visions

But there are many alternatives beyond the default settings. In countering the overwhelming Whiteness of the future in most popular representations of Hollywood films and science fiction texts, we can point to Afrofuturist and Chicanofuturist visions that not only center on people of color, but grapple with racism and related axes of domination.89 This work has a lot to teach us about reimagining the default settings – codes and environments – that we have inherited from prior regimes of racial control, and how we can appropriate and reimagine science and technology for liberatory ends.90

Likewise, critical race studies has long urged scholars to take narrative seriously as a liberating tool, as when legal scholar Derrick Bell urges a radical assessment of reality through creative methods and racial reversals, insisting that “[t]o see things as they really are, you must imagine them for what they might be.”91

Figure 5.2 White-Collar Crime Risk Zones Source: App created by Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne, and Francis Tseng for The New Inquiry Magazine, Vol. 59, “Abolish,” March 2017

Take, for instance, a parody project that begins by subverting the anti- Black logics embedded in new high-tech approaches to crime prevention Instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast street crime, the White-Collar Early Warning System flips the script by creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur.

The system not only brings into view the hidden but no less deadly crimes of capitalism and the wealthy’s hoarding of resources, but includes an app that alerts users when they enter high-risk areas to encourage “citizen policing and awareness.” Taking it one step further, the development team is working on a facial recognition program meant to flag individuals who are likely perpetrators, and the training set used to design the algorithm includes the profile photos of 7,000 corporate executives downloaded from the popular professional networking site LinkedIn. Not surprisingly, the “averaged” face of a criminal is White and male. In this sense, the narrative of what we consider to be a crime and of whom we consider to be a criminal is being challenged. But it remains to be seen whether such initiatives can help generate a different social order when it comes to criminalization. And creative exercises like this one are comical only if we ignore that all their features are drawn directly from actually existing proposals and practices “in the real world,” including the use of facial images to predict criminality – all, techniques that tend to target racialized groups.