The Surveillance of Blackness: From the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to Contemporary Surveillance Technologies
▻http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35086-the-surveillance-of-blackness-from-the-slave-trade-to-the-police
as Simone Browne, a professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, demonstrates in her new book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, we can trace the emergence of surveillance technologies and practices back much further, to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
You have a large push into affective computing technologies, the kind of machine reading of emotions being used at airports, for example, in Israel, which monitor people for blood pressure, for sweat and for changes in their voice, and then assign a threat category or score to them.
These kinds of affective computing technologies amp up the role of affect, which, as we know, is something that is socially constructed.
This gets us to think about: Who gets marked as “angry” prior to any reaction? Again, this harkens back to the controlling images of the “angry Black woman” and the “threatening Black man.” Patricia Hill Collins’ “controlling images” is one of the foundational concepts that continues within sociology and Black feminist theory. It is about social control and the ways in which Black women’s various ways of being become surveilled and stereotyped as a form of social control.
