Margaret Hu, associate professor of law at Washington and Lee University, will present the public presentation “Algorithmic Jim Crow” at 2 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 28, in the Cone University Center, Room 113.
According to Hu, under the “separate but equal” discrimination of a historic Jim Crow regime, state laws first required mandatory separation and discrimination on the front end, and then supposedly established equality on the back end. In contrast, an “Algorithmic Jim Crow” regime allows for “equal but separate” discrimination. In this system, newly developed big data vetting tools fuse biometric data with biographic data and internet/social media profiling to algorithmically assess risk. Because everyone will be assessed this way, the screening appears to be equal. However, those individuals and groups negatively and disparately impacted by mandatory vetting and screening protocols will largely be the same as groups traditionally discriminated against on the basis of classifications like race, color, ethnicity, national origin, gender and religion.
The Center for Professional & Applied Ethics, with support from the Chancellor’s Diversity Challenge Fund, is sponsoring this event.