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Black College Students Lead Movement to Eliminate Bias in Tech

NNPA NEWSWIRE — “Civics of technology derives from a lot of related concepts, but it’s about how we can use technology to further civic engagement, the democratic process, and social justice — especially anything that will galvanize a group of individuals to create social good,” Cierra Robson, associate director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, explained.
The post Black College Students Lead Movement to Eliminate Bias in Tech first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

Published

3 years ago

December 21, 2022

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By Nadira Johnson | Word in Black | The Afro

From self-driving cars that can’t detect folks with darker skin to keep from running them over, to digital assistants like Siri that have trouble understanding non-White accents, technology is biased, and it is hurting Black folks.

“A lot of people will look toward technology as the end all, be all solution to a lot of social issues, but often social issues are not solved by technology, and technology often exacerbates these social issues,” said Cierra Robson, associate director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab which brings students, educators, and activists together to develop creative approaches to data conception, production, and circulation.

Founded in 2018 and led by Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, the lab focuses on finding ways to “rethink and retool the relationship between stories and statistics, power and technology, data and justice.”

“Civics of technology derives from a lot of related concepts, but it’s about how we can use technology to further civic engagement, the democratic process, and social justice — especially anything that will galvanize a group of individuals to create social good,” Robson explained.

In her role at the lab, Robson works closely with Princeton students on a variety of projects that look at how technology bias is contributing to bias in all areas of our lives, from healthcare, to labor, and education.

Robson first became passionate about finding solutions to biased technology after learning about how the issue leads to violent over-policing.

“When I was an undergrad at Princeton, I had access to this entire wealth of resources that was kind of stuck in the university,” Robson said. “One of the biggest things that I wanted to do when the labs started in the summer of 2020 was figure out a way to get those resources from Princeton into the community, to people who needed them.”

And people do need this information, desperately, because biased technology is killing Black and Brown folks and contributes to higher rates of incarceration and injustice.

“Predictive policing technologies — there’s a whole bunch of them — but one of the ones I focus on a lot is that it predicts where crime is likely to happen in a given city, and that prompts police to go be deployed in those areas so that they can catch whatever crime might happen there,” Robson said. “What they base that data on is an algorithm that uses data on historic police interaction, but no one really stops to think that those historic police interactions are colored by all sorts of discriminatory processes.”

Robson points out that a recent study conducted by Aaron Chalfin, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that in Southern cities with large Black populations the homicide rate did not change when more police presence was added. But, more officers made arrests for low-level offenses like alcohol-related infractions, “which are not typically seen as contributing to public safety.”

“The fact is that Black communities are historically over-policed even before the advent of these technologies and algorithms,” Robson explained. “When you feed the data that focuses on arrests only in Black communities into an algorithm that predicts where crime is likely to happen, what you are going to get out of it is that crime only happens in Black and Brown neighborhoods when that’s not true.

“As a result,” Robson said. “Police are deployed overwhelmingly to Black and Brown neighborhoods, and it creates this cycle where more data is being created because there are more police there. This obviously has negative impacts on people’s lives. From the waves of violent policing that we’ve seen for quite some time, it’s evident why you would not want police in your community all the time. There has also been chronic over-policing and under-protection. Just because police are in a neighborhood, does not equate to greater safety in that neighborhood.”

Through her work with the lab and the Civics of Technology conference, Robson hopes to inspire more students to ask critical questions about how data is sourced and how technology is used in Black and Brown communities so that they can use their newfound knowledge to create better practices in whatever fields of work and study they choose to venture in to.

“A lot of them will end up in politics, in the tech industry, as lawyers, doctors, and all sorts of things,” Robson said. “One of the best things that comes out of teaching students of all kinds about this work is that it ripples out in every single environment in our daily lives, whether that be the law, whether that be healthcare, whether that be worker justice and labor.”

Participants in the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab might go on to earn a doctorate degree or work in the tech industry, but that isn’t required. Robson says if they end up working in another industry entirely, she wants students to be “able to take some of the tools that we teach them about — about fair design practices and questioning what it really means to have something be objective or questioning what it really means for something to be data-driven — into whatever area they’re going into in the future. Hopefully, if we can create enough students to do that, we are creating a new generation with a new awareness so that people are thinking twice about the technologies that they deploy and the data that they use in every area.”

To that end, in early August, the student members of the lab participated in Civics of Technology, a free, two-day virtual conference designed to bring the knowledge they’ve acquired while participating in the lab to the greater public.

Technology and education justice

During the virtual conference, Collin Riggins, a junior at Princeton and a research associate at the lab, and Payton Croskey, a senior at Princeton and creative content director for the lab, led “Reimagining Education Justice: Practices and Tools for Tech Freedom Schools,” a workshop which focused on education justice — from early childhood to college and beyond the traditional classroom. Their goal was to determine how technology can be used to promote better education practices for diverse students if it is used properly.

“The theme for this summer’s convention is Freedom Schools,” Croskey said, “Freedom Schools is where all of the research groups and products stem from. We are rooting ourselves in history before we try to build something new for the future.”

Freedom Schools were created in 1964 as entirely new schools specifically designed for the education and advancement of Black students. Supporters of these schools believed in paying attention to and meeting the unique needs of each individual child. Bringing that concept into the present day, Croskey and Riggins say that if we want to eliminate bias in education, we must similarly listen to and respond to the needs of the communities we wish to serve with technology.

We need to shift to “Thinking how we can build technology and community with those that the technology is seeking to serve,” Croskey said. “If we are building technology for young Black students in New York City, and we are saying that this is going to help them learn, then they also need to be part of that conversation and need to be included in that design.

“Technology is not going to be one size fits all,” Croskey said. “Especially in the education field, technology is going to need to be curated for a specific group and specific environments. Not pushing this one model that everyone needs to follow.”

“Although our goals are revolutionary, our work spawns from a long tradition of Black radical education,” Collins added. “We’re looking at the Freedom Schools, which decided in the summer of 1964 to create entirely different schools for Black students so they could learn frameworks for how to resist and how to function in daily life.”

“Across any institution, and even maybe across the world in general, there is a fixed approach to how you engage with technology,” Collins said. “One of the things the Lab does beautifully is allow people from different backgrounds and disciplines to come together in conversation. This has been very radical to me, especially at an institution like Princeton, which is very tech-driven and quantitatively driven. It’s nice to be able to engage with these concepts through art, or through storytelling, or through speculative fiction, and that not only be accepted but embraced. That inclusivity is rare.”

The two students have also used their time in the lab to focus on the use of surveillance in schools, which has significantly increased given the rising rates of school shootings. Although surveillance may prove useful in keeping some students safe from shooters, Croskey worries this will prove dangerous for Black students and students from other marginalized backgrounds.

“There is a lot of surveillance being used these days with the rise of school shootings. There is a lot of data being collected and a lot of tracking done on students who do not have the power to consent,” Croskey said. In addition, there are “Parents who are not being given the power to truly consent because they are not being given full explanations about how this data is being used or where it will be sent to.”

Their hope is that technology can be reimagined in a way that is “curated for a specific group and specific environments. Not pushing this one model that everyone needs to follow,” Croskey explains.

Connecting technological and environmental justice

It’s been a boiling hot summer with historic droughts ravaging the globe, but many people don’t often think about the connections between technology and environmental justice.

“When you look into it, there are a lot of ways that the technologies that we are using can be harmful to the environment,” said Kenia D. Hale, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology. During the Civics of Technology conference, Hale, who is also a graduate of Yale University, led “Reimagining Environmental Justice: Practices and Tools for Tech Freedom Schools,” a session that explored the intersection of the two topics.

Hale says that although the energy needed for a single internet search or email is small, there are approximately 4.1 billion people, or 53.6 percent of the global population, who now use the internet, and the associated greenhouse gasses emitted with each online activity can add up. It turns out that the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet, and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7 percent of global greenhouse emissions. This is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally.

“I wanted to figure out ways to challenge the idea that technology is automatically better for the environment and spreading more awareness about the ways it can be quite harmful. People think there is no physical impact, but there is actually a lot of physical impact,” said Hale. “You can’t do anything without a laptop, so this isn’t to shame people into not buying one, but more so to spread awareness. Get engaged with the environmental organizations and activist groups that are in your city. It’s better to be more proactive in getting organized with our communities on how to collectively combat these things.”

Hale says that some questions that folks should be asking themselves when determining the environmental impact of a technological tool are who is mining the materials that go into your car, computer, or smartphone, and does the company that makes this product overly contribute to global pollution?

Learning more about the effects of technology on our lives

To learn more about how to spot technology bias and how to advocate for better data sourcing practices in your community, the lab’s research and resources page lists plenty of useful information.

In addition, the lab’s founder and director, Ruha Benjamin, has written extensively about the connections between technology and inequality. Her 2019 book “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code” explores how new technologies are framed as “benign and pure,” even though they perpetuate social inequities. The book, which was a 2020 winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award (for anti-racist scholarship) from the American Sociological Association Section on Race & Ethnic Minorities also shares ideas on how we can combat these inequities.

In addition, “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, by Kwame Ture and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, which defines Black Power, presents insights into the roots of racism in the United States and suggests a means of reforming the traditional political process for the future through technology and other tools.

The post Black college students lead movement to eliminate bias in tech appeared first on AFRO American Newspapers.

The post Black College Students Lead Movement to Eliminate Bias in Tech first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

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COMMENTARY: The National Protest Must Be Accompanied with Our Votes

Just as Trump is gathering election data like having the FBI take all the election data in Georgia from the 2020 election, so must we organize in preparation for the coming primary season to have the right people on ballots in each Republican district, so that we can regain control of the House of Representatives and by doing so, restore the separation of powers and balance that our democracy is being deprived of.

Published

14 hours ago

February 10, 2026

Oakland Post

Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher San Diego Voice & Viewpoint Newspaper. File photo..

By Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher San Diego Voice & Viewpoint Newspaper

As thousands of Americans march every week in cities across this great nation, it must be remembered that the protest without the vote is of no concern to Donald Trump and his administration.

In every city, there is a personal connection to the U.S. Congress. In too many cases, the member of Congress representing the people of that city and the congressional district in which it sits, is a Republican. It is the Republicans who are giving silent support to the destructive actions of those persons like the U.S. Attorney General, the Director of Homeland Security, and the National Intelligence Director, who are carrying out the revenge campaign of the President rather than upholding the oath of office each of them took “to Defend The Constitution of the United States.”

In California, the primary comes in June 2026. The congressional races must be a priority just as much as the local election of people has been so important in keeping ICE from acquiring facilities to build more prisons around the country.

“We the People” are winning this battle, even though it might not look like it. Each of us must get involved now, right where we are.

In this Black History month, it is important to remember that all we have accomplished in this nation has been “in spite of” and not “because of.” Frederick Douglas said, “Power concedes nothing without a struggle.”

Today, the struggle is to maintain our very institutions and history. Our strength in this struggle rests in our “collectiveness.” Our newspapers and journalists are at the greatest risk. We must not personally add to the attack by ignoring those who have been our very foundation, our Black press.

Are you spending your dollars this Black History Month with those who salute and honor contributions by supporting those who tell our stories? Remember that silence is the same as consent and support for the opposition. Where do you stand and where will your dollars go?

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Why Black Parents Should Consider Montessori

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — I have found that there are some educational approaches that consistently provide a safer, more enriching, and more affirmative environment for Black children. The Montessori method, developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori and introduced to the U.S. in the early 20th century, is one such approach.

Published

2 days ago

February 9, 2026

Oakland Post

By Laura Turner-Essel, PhD

As a mother of four children, I’ve done A LOT of school shopping. I don’t mean the autumn ritual of purchasing school supplies. I mean shopping for schools – pouring over promotional materials, combing through websites, asking friends and community members for referrals to their favorite schools, attending open houses and orientations, comparing curriculums and educational philosophies, meeting teachers and principals, and students who all claim that their school is the best.

But keep in mind – I’m not just a mom of four children. I’m a mom of four Black children, and I’m also a psychologist who is very interested in protecting my little ones from the traumatic experience that school can too often become.

For Black children in the United States, school can sometimes feel more like a prison than an educational institution. Research shows that Black students experience school as more hostile and demoralizing than other students do, that they are disciplined more frequently and more harshly for typical childhood offenses (such as running in the halls or chewing gum in class), that they are often labeled as deviant or viewed as deficient more quickly than other children, that teachers have lower academic expectations of Black students (which, in turn, lowers those students’ expectations of themselves), and that Black parents feel less respected and less engaged by their children’s teachers and school administrators. Perhaps these are some of the underlying reasons that Black students tend to underperform in most schools across the country.

The truth is that schools are more than academic institutions. They are places where children go to gain a sense of who they are, how they relate to others, and where they fit into the world. The best schools are places that answer these questions positively – ‘you are a valuable human being, you are a person who will grow up to contribute great things to your community, and you belong here, with us, exploring the world and learning how to use your gifts.’ Unfortunately, Black children looking for answers to these universal questions of childhood will often hit a brick wall once they walk into the classroom. If the curriculum does not reflect their cultural experiences, the teachers don’t appear to value them, and they spend most of their time being shamed into compliance rather than guided towards their highest potential, well…what can we really expect? How are they supposed to master basic academic skills if their spirits have been crushed?

Here’s the good news. In my years of school shopping, and in the research of Black education specialists such as Jawanza Kunjufu and Amos Wilson, I have found that there are some educational approaches that consistently provide a safer, more enriching, and more affirmative environment for Black children. The Montessori method, developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori and introduced to the U.S. in the early 20th century, is one such approach.

The key feature of Montessori schooling is that children decide (for the most part) what they want to do each day. Led by their own interests and skill levels, children in a Montessori classroom move around freely and work independently or with others on tasks of their own

choosing. The classroom is intentionally stocked with materials tailored to the developmental needs of children, including the need to learn through different senses (sight, touch/texture, movement, etc.). The teacher in a Montessori classroom is less like a boss and more like a caring guide who works with each child individually, demonstrating various activities and then giving them space to try it on their own. The idea is that over time, students learn to master even the toughest tasks and concepts, and they feel an intense sense of pride and accomplishment because they did it by themselves, without pressure or pushing.

I think that this aspect of the Montessori method is good for all kids. Do you remember the feeling of having your creativity or motivation crushed by being told exactly what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why? The truth is that when presented with a new challenge and then given space, children actually accomplish a lot! They are born with a natural desire to learn. It is that spirit of curiosity, sense of wonder, and excitement to explore that Montessori helps to keep alive in a child. But that’s not the only reason that I think Black parents need to consider Montessori.

Fostering a love of learning is great. But more importantly, I think that Montessori students excel at learning to love. It begins with Montessori’s acknowledgement that all children are precious because childhood is a precious time. In many school systems, Black children are treated like miniature adults (at best) or miniature criminals (at worst), and are subjected to stressful situations that no kids are equipped to handle – expectations to be still and silent for long periods, competitive and high-stakes testing, and punitive classroom discipline. It’s easy to get the sense that rather than being prepared for college or careers, our children are being prepared to fail. Couple this with the aforementioned bias against Black children that seems to run rampant within the U.S. school system, and you end up with children who feel burned out and bitter about school by the time they hit 3rd grade.

In my experience, Montessori does a better job of protecting the space that is childhood – and all the joy of discovery and learning that should come along with that. Without the requirement that students “sit down and shut up,” behavioral issues in Montessori classrooms tend to be non-existent (or at least, the Montessori method doesn’t harp on them; children are gently redirected rather than shamed in front of the class). Montessori students don’t learn for the sake of tests; they demonstrate what they’ve learned by sharing with their teacher or classmates how they solve real-world problems using the skills they’ve gained through reading, math, or science activities. And by allowing children a choice of what to focus on throughout the day, Montessori teachers demonstrate that they honor and trust children’s natural intelligence. The individualized, careful attention they provide indicates to children that they are each seen, heard, and valued for who they are, and who they might become. Now that’s love (and good education).

As a parent, I’ve come to realize that many schools offer high-quality academics. Montessori is no different. Students in Montessori schools gain exposure to advanced concepts and the materials to work with these concepts hands-on. Across the nation, Montessori schools emphasize early literacy development, an especially important indicator of life success for young Black boys and men. Montessori students are provided with the opportunity to be

successful every day, and the chance to develop a sense of competence and self-worth based on completing tasks at their own pace.

But I have also learned that the important questions to ask when school shopping are often not about academics at all. I now ask, ‘Will my children be treated kindly? Will they be listened to? Protected from bias and bullying? Will they feel safe? Will this precious time in their lives be honored as a space for growth, development, awe, and excitement? Will they get to see people like them included in the curriculum? Will they be seen as valuable even if they don’t always ‘measure up’ to other kids on a task? Will they get extra support if they need it? Will the school include me in major decisions? Will the school leaders help to make sure that my children reach their fullest potential? Will the teacher care about my children almost as much as I do?’

Consistently, it’s been the Montessori schools that have answered with a loud, resounding ‘Yes!’ That is why my children ended up in Montessori schools, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. If you’re a parent like me, shopping for schools with the same questions in mind, I’d urge you to consider Montessori education as a viable option for your precious little ones. Today more than ever, getting it right for our children is priceless.

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LIVE from the NMA Convention Raheem DeVaughn Says The Time Is Now: Let’s End HIV in Our Communities #2

Set against the backdrop of the NMA conference, Executive Officers from the National Medical Association, Grammy Award Winning Artist and Advocate Raheem DeVaughn, and Gilead Sciences experts, are holding today an important conversation on HIV prevention and health equity. Black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV despite advances in prevention options. Today’s event […]

Published

1 week ago

February 3, 2026

Oakland Post

Black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV despite advances in prevention options. Today’s event is designed to uplift voices, explore barriers to access, and increase awareness and key updates about PrEP, a proven prevention method that remains underutilized among Black women. This timely gathering will feature voices from across health, media, and advocacy as we break stigma and center equity in HIV prevention.

Additional stats and information to know:

● Black women continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV, with Black women representing more than 50% of new HIV diagnoses among women in the U.S. in 2022, despite comprising just 13% of women in the U.S.

● Women made up only 8% of PrEP users despite representing 19% of all new HIV diagnoses in 2022.

● Gilead Sciences is increasing awareness and addressing stigma by encouraging regular HIV testing and having judgment-free conversations with your healthcare provider about prevention options, including oral PrEP and long-acting injectable PrEP options.

● PrEP is an HIV prevention medication that has been available since 2012.

● Only 1 in 3 people in the U.S. who could benefit from PrEP were prescribed a form of PrEP in 2022.