Race & Computing: the Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine
R. Arvid Nelsen smu.academia.edu
Race & Computing: the Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine
Abstract Many young African American males have a passion for video games, but they don't often translate that passion into learning about computing. Part of the problem is that they do not identify with computing as a social norm within their peer group. This disidentification with computing can negatively impact academic performance and limit opportunities for upward mobility.

The purpose of this life history qualitative study was to explore the Counter-Life Herstories of African American women faculty in U.S. Computing Education. Counter-Life Herstories are derived from Counterstories, life histories, and herstories as powerful social justice tools to uncover hidden truths about marginalized groups’ experiences. Through the collection of timelines, counter-life story interviews, and reflective journal writings, I coconstructed and interpreted the Counter-Life Herstories of five participants using an integrative conceptual framework that included critical race theory and Black feminist thought as interpretive frameworks, and Afrocentric feminist epistemology to govern my knowledge validation process. As an emerging African American woman scholar, with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, I have a “unique angle of vision” to situate African American women’s distinctive educational experiences in the social-political context of U.S. Computing Education....

Thus far in reporting the findings of our project “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” our analysis of what has happened to African American employment over the past half century has documented the importance of manufacturing employment to the upward socioeconomic mobility of Blacks in the 1960s and 1970s and the devastating impact of rationalization—the permanent elimination of blue-collar employment—on their socioeconomic mobility in the 1980s and beyond. The upward mobility of Blacks in the earlier decades was based on the Old Economy business model (OEBM) with its characteristic “career-with-one-company” (CWOC) employment relations. At its launching in 1965, the policy approach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assumed the existence of CWOC, providing corporate employees, Blacks included, with a potential path for upward socioeconomic mobility over the course of their working lives by gaining a...

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the narratives of 93 Black women in computing in the USA to identify salient themes that are at the intersection of race and gender in the field of computer science.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a multi-method approach with a survey to describe the sample and a series of focus groups for in-depth analysis of themes. The qualitative methodology uses a grounded theory and consensual qualitative research approach with a research team that includes computer scientists and social scientists to collect and analyze data. Given the highly technical field of computer science and the intersectional experiences of the participants, this approach was optimal to capture and code data through the lens of Black women in computing.FindingsThe authors found four main themes that represented specific needs for Black women in the computing community. The first is the importance of linking Black women in computing (i.e. their recruitment, r...

To remain economically and globally competitive, the United States needs to increase its advanced domestic science and technology workforce (National Academies, 2010). As U.S. colleges are already majority female and are increasingly enrolling more minority students, women of color represent a growing potential source of domestic talent to meet the needs of the country. Thus, it is in the interest of all of us to ensure that women of color are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

As algorithmic models increasingly assist, judge, and manage human life, a growing amount of scrutiny, criticism, and backlash has ensued, calling into question the violence of such powerful applications and demanding a renewed focus on bias, ethics, and governance. At the same time elite academic institutions and massive tech firms have been adaptively adept at the capture and depoliticizing of its critics [Whittaker 2021]. Calls for a fundamental reckoning with the logics and violences of computation have been largely disciplined into niche new industries of expertise which Phan, Goldenfein, Mann, and Kuch refer to as "economies of virtue." In response, this essay explores Black Computational Thought as a critical intervention into the residues of Post-Enlightenment thought mapped onto and subtending contemporary computational logics. By placing computation within such genealogical bounds, we are free to ask the question, what other proximal places might we look to to recover computational practices that challenge colonial logics of coercion? What other genres lay in wait? Black Computational Thought holds open these proximal possibilities and directs our attention to the quotidian, social, opaque, woven, and fugitive practices of computation born from Black diasporic movement.