Thatâs an interesting piece, but the author is kind of paranoid and weird in his insistence that a census is racist.
Just because racists are interested in statistical data on racial demographics, that does not make collection of such data racist. It certainly doesnât make technology developed to perform arbitrary calculations racist.
The article is cool in that it presents the early history of IBM, but âthe tech industry was founded by Nazis!â Is pretty absurdly over the top.
Oh, one thing, just because this bugs meâŚ
The census had been a racial instrument from its inception, beginning with the original constitutional clause that instructed census officials to count black slaves separately from whites and to assign them a value of only three-fifths of a person.
The act of counting slaves as 3/5 of a person was not racist. The racists were there slave owners. They wanted to count slaves as full people.
But the thing is⌠The actual racist thing⌠Is that those people werenât considered people. They were property. They didnât get to vote or have any say in government.
Counting slaves as less than free people in the census wasnât done in order to oppress them. It was done to limit the amplification of democratic influence that the slave OWNERS would have had if you counted the slaves as full people.
The racist part was owning people as property, not limiting the impact of that property on the census.
This is only a test away line in this article, but Iâve heard many people make the suggestion that counting slaves as less than fill people in the census was somehow racist, and it wasnât. It was a limit on the racists.
Regardless, again, this article is interesting and worth reading, despite the overarching idea of information technology being rooted in racism is over the top.
