Whiteness in Digital Technology

This chapter argues that digital technology as an idea and as a practice is entangled with Whiteness as an ideology. Our aim is to introduce the main ways in which digital technology is both a product and a reproducer of the racial hierarchy developed in the past four centuries that privileges people racialized as White. We briefly explore the original entanglement of Whiteness and technology, including the ways in which technological advances functioned both as a means and justification for European colonialism. We then explore the role of specifically digital technology in maintaining the ideology and operations of Whiteness using Patricia Hill Collins’s four domains of power as a “foundation for analyzing intersecting power relations.” The first domain is the structural, in which we focus in particular on the concentration of power in a handful of American “Big Tech” companies and more broadly on how the digital economy perpetuates the structures of global racial capitalism. The second domain of power is the cultural, where we examine how the cultural context in which digital technologies operate both reflects and perpetuates White racial framing. The third domain is the disciplinary, in which we examine examples of what is often called algorithmic bias. The fourth is the interpersonal, in which we highlight how the entwinement of digital technology with Whiteness shapes the lived experiences of people of color with digital technology.