Joshua Ogure’s presentation of the Map Kibera Trust was very interesting. The community involvement in mapping Kibera was something I hadn’t even thought of before. This is where my privilege of being born in the U.S. is highlighted, It had never occurred to me that a village wouldn’t appear on a map. It’s truly amazing how the youth of the city made its inhabitants their own map, this is wonderful for community engagement and businesses within Kibera so anyone who views the map is aware of all places where they could spend their time and money.
While reading “Algorithms of Oppression” I was not shocked at the idea of such a large monopoly enforcing racist and sexist stereotypes in its algorithm. It’s common sense that every person has a bias, but a bias this blatant and immoral should be unacceptable and employers should be more aware of this when hiring and also in their ways of tackling these problems when their faculty make them aware. When Noble began to speak of the blatant racism during the Obama administration I was completely shocked, labeling the leader of the U.S. a slur, and using an offensive stereotype to relate to his wife is not a “glitch”.
That doesn’t seem like an accident to enforce stereotypes that have been used to dehumanize black people for more than 300 years. They didn’t take any preventative measures to avoid this and when their algorithms were exposed for their racism it was a quick-fix an apology, then onward to the next scandal. The problem of systemic racism is a heavy topic but with algorithms such as these, continuing to spread this hateful information makes us no closer to lessening the number of people who believe in these heinous views.