Surveilling Blackness With Dr. Simone Browne

Welcome to 1919Radio’s Black Geographies podcast series! This 4-part Black Geographies podcast series brings together four authors in the emerging field of Black geographies to explore the conditions of Blackness across multiple spatial dimensions. The goal of this series is to bring radical ideas of race, space, and the politics of place out of academia and into our community and streets through an engaging and open access medium.

In the third episode of the Black Geographies podcast series, Mohamed sits with scholar, researcher, and author Dr. Simone Brown. Dr. Brown is the Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Research Director of critical surveillance inquiry with Good Systems, a research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the author of the 2015 book ‘Dark Matters. Listen as these two discuss life under surveillance, Black ways of knowing and surviving, and the governable worlds we live in. Dr. Brown invites us to think about how biometric technologies, regimes of surveillance, illegibility, and the politics of recognition shape and govern Black life in a post 9/11 era. Toward the end of the episode, Dr. Brown gestures to the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba & grassroots organizers on how to live and dream abolition as practices of liberation.

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organization and mobilization Song: The Pharcyde - Runnin'

Transcript

1919Radio Intro audio clip 0:00

I never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently experiencing.

I am mentally spiritually physically, emotionally, intellectually, and academically developed and acutely aware of the condition of African people throughout the entire world.

We don't want fortune, we don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN 0:48

Welcome to another episode of 1919 radio, and the third episode in our black geographies podcast series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Simone Brown, Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Research Director of critical surveillance inquiry with Good Systems, our research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as author of the 2015 book ‘Dark Matters,’ on the surveillance of blackness. In this conversation, we discussed the historical origins of surveillance and biometrics and its relationship to Black Studies, for non-ideas of prototypical whiteness and blackness in the post 911 surveillance state, and its implication for black people. I hope you enjoy the show.

MN: 1:36

My first question is, what do you mean by sous-veillance and how does it relate to surveillance?

SB: 1:44

And this is a great question. And for definitions, you know, often when I'm teaching, we get to the definition of surveillance probably by the end of the class, as opposed to at the beginning because I see it as basically the operating system of the you know, how we're governed of the world that we're living in, is around us surveillance. And so, I wanted to put this work into conversation with surveillance studies, and to think about my own citational practices there. And so, sousveillance comes from a researcher, Steve Mann, at the University of Toronto. He had this eight-point compass or mapping of the way various forms of veillance operated. And what struck me was this concept of sousveillance, but he saw it as, you know, the counterpoint or contrapuntal to surveillance, like the idea of under-sight.

But when he was describing it, he mentioned, you know, this one time, when basically everybody had a camera, around the 17-1800s. And I was thinking about the absenting of slavery and basically its afterlife when we think about surveillance And so I wanted to, you know, really think of it as, as the ways, the black ways of knowing and surviving, and around questions, not questions, but life under surveillance. But I also wanted to say that black ways of understanding can't be so easily mapped onto these Cartesian logics. Like one camera, plus two cameras, no camera, you know, these kinds of things are not, it's basically, you know, the Rastafari idea of ‘over-standing’. Like, how do you understand survival in systems of incarceration, of systems of enslavement, of systems of racial capitalism?

And so that's how I wanted to think about it. That we can't be, you know, there’s a quote, that we have been branded by Cartesian logic or something like that. And to think about how to disabuse us of that understanding of surveillance is to really think about how, in my book, looking at the archive of slavery, but contemporarily about how people contend and challenge and really demand different from the system that we have now, of exploitation.

M: 4:30

What were lantern laws, and what are their legacy and modern surveillance systems and studies today?

S: 4:36

So, lantern laws were these… New York is where I was looking in the 1700s, early 1700s. There are records of a law that regulated the movement of they said Negro or Indian slaves in the nighttime. So basically, this was a law that was put into practice, put into place that if any, black or Indigenous person was walking after dark in New York City and they weren't in the company of some white person, then they were mandated to carry with them a lit lantern. You can think of the lantern as a kind of prosthetic, a supervisory device, but something that, you know, was mandated that it had to be carried. And if someone was found, not accompanied by a white person, and without a lantern, they can then be subjected to being, you know, arrested, taken to the gull or to the jail. And so, that is what the lantern law is.

And this continued in spaces like Boston, continuing into the 1800s. And, you know, we can think about the kind of modern ways in which, you know, light functions as a supervisory device. Or, similarly, you can think about, like, how stop and frisk operate. And so, the idea that without, you know, kind of governing black mobility, governing walking while black, existing while black, breathing while Black has long histories, and I think lantern laws, you know, points to that. And, you know, a simple kind of…not simple, because these are all complex.

But, you know, especially now, when people are learning online or working from home, you have systems like Proctorio, which are this kind of algorithmic monitoring software to make sure people aren't cheating and cheating looks like looking away from the camera, right? So, there's a camera that monitors you while you're taking your LSAT, or your exam, or whatever it is. And there have been so many cases that arose within the past year of, you know, black folks that they were, you know, they had to shine the light in their face so that their face could be registered by this kind of automation, facial recognition. And that's, and that not showing up basically criminalizes you. Like they say you're cheating when it's like, who are they developing these technologies to serve best? What kinds of bodies become like a prototype for these things? And what bodies get produced as innocent? And what bodies get produced as guilty? Because of, you know, the lighting infrastructure.

M: 7:25

Your book dedicated a chapter to analyzing and interpreting the Big Book of Negroes. Can you tell us what it was? What significance does it hold in American history at large? And how did it play a role in the development of modern biometric systems?

SB: 7:39

So, the Book of Negroes, this is a late 18th century documents with the end of the war of independence, when the United States became the United States, there was a time in which a call was put up by the British that, you know, input, enslaved folks could self-liberate themselves, by with the caveat fighting for the British. And in doing so, they would then gain passage to places like, you know, what would become Canada, England, and what would become Germany. And so, the Book of Negroes is a document of about 3000 names of people who had registered and had travelled on ships, to these various ports. So not only did they, you know, not only like soldiers, but people that did various types of support, work, spies, cooks, these types of things. And so, this is a historical document. I think that this is digitized now, but you know, at the time, there's one in England, Washington, Nova Scotia, Canada, these spaces.

And what happens in it, they would have people's names, they would have the name of the claimant, the person who might make a claim that I own this black person who was free, and then they would also have various, you know, descriptors. Descriptors around race, around gender, around the damage that was done to people's bodies around labor, they could say something like, you know, a hand or a scar, or these various types of ways of, you know, how the body was recorded there. And so, you asked, like, what significance does that play in contemporary biometrics, and you can think about the ‘Book of Negroes’ as basically the first state regulated and state mandated document for border crossing across the Canada and US border that particularly linked biometrics to, to the rites of passage, and you could think of biometrics simply as bio the body or having to do with the body and metrics a type of measurement and biometric would be here, the, as I mentioned, like descriptions of somebody's body.

And so, we talked about having national ID cards, fingerprints, facial recognition, all of these, perhaps even DNA in these passports, to think about those claims, those demands that you need a body to prove your identity. So not who you say you are, but that your body will reveal the truth about you, despite what you say, that has like a long history in, in the surveillance of blackness, when you think about the Canada-US border.

MN: 10:43

How does Fanon’s work broadly influence your analysis?

S: 10:43

When I was starting to write this book, I wanted to tell a different story of surveillance and one that was not, you know, so much indebted to the work of Michel Foucault. And I wanted to think about, you know, Fanon’s biography. I read, you know, so many of them. And, you know, one thing that struck me was that he died on, you know, in the, in the United States. He had come to the US for treatment just outside of Maryland. And it was the CIA that was able to pass him there. I wrote to the CIA, and the FBI. I did a Freedom of Information Act, and I had, you know, the name of his CIA handler, Oli Islynn, and I got basically, you know, nothing from the documents, that was a thin file. Because, you know, they gave me that basically, we can't confirm or deny, and if we were to confirm, we still must deny—what they call, like the Glomar response. And so, I was left with, you know, the idea that Fanon was still an important, you know, source and methods when it comes to surveillance, like the FBI or the CIA. But I found that you know, Fanon would be and then epidermalization would be an important way of thinking about the ways that race gets, or blackness gets inscripted. Stereotypes of blackness— he says that I'm like, battered down by tom toms, by slavery, by shore good eating, and the way that this kind of distorted white gaze, the look of Negro distorts blackness and black people and makes blackness a distortion.

I wanted to think about how that applies to contemporary biometric technologies that distort, like the Proctorio surveillance system. And so, that is the kinds of, you know, the questions that I want to think about— the way that you know, if we have a prototypical whiteness, like the kind of body… and prototypical maleness, prototypical able-bodiedness—like what kinds of bodies are these technologies designed for? So the idea that in some earlier biometric technologies, you know, people who are elderly, so thinking of fingerprint technology, people who work with, you know, heavy hand washing, like in the medical profession or that work with chemicals, like, you know, mechanics, artists, nail techs, people that come use their hands for labor, massage therapist, their fingerprints, you know, might be illegible.

So like, what does that say around, you know, questions of labor and who can, you know, enter into these categories to be enrolled in biometric technologies. When you look at some of the earlier research and development of biometrics, they, they use, like some really messed up, you know, languages that we have naming practices like Negroid, Mongoloid, I mean, this is like contemporary research from the 21st century, using these types of terms. And so, if these are the terms and the forms, and the kinds of ideologies that are shaping biometric technology, facial recognition technology, then it's like, it's not a surprise, when we see that there's, you know, so many problems into how they get put into use to criminalize and dehumanize you know, various populations that have historically been the category that has been dehumanized criminalized.

MN: 14:51

Your book was released in 2015, and the surveillance state has continued to expand unabated. How has surveillance technology and opposition evolved since then? How does the uprising of last summer factor into the future directions of surveillance technology and studies?

SB: 15:07

Yeah. When I was, this is a great question, because the book came out in 2015, I was writing it in, you know, I think I started in about 2008 or so. Right when it was coming out, you were seeing the movement for Black Lives had been, you know, recently formed, we have, you know, the uprisings and the black insurgencies and demands for abolition, that was took place in the summer of 2020, along with, you know, the pandemic. And so, the technology, you know, has evolved, but it's also like the ‘changing same’. I remember seeing videos like a chopper being flown, you know, quite low at the time of the protests last summer, as a form of threat of violence, of intimidation, and, you know, and as a form of crowd dispersal. And so, you know, that is not a new technology that has been used in various fields of warfare, in the US and outside of it. So, you know, some things that have changed is that we have, you know, so many more people that are on the ground, recording, so many more demands that are happening, but also, you know, so for example, I, there was a time around, maybe around 2016 in the US, and also, you know, in Canada as well too, where the response was, you know, give a cop a camera, and the idea of like, let's have like, you know, body worn cameras, for police, which really gives, which really is a kind of police reform, that really puts more money into those that produce those products, like the company that was formerly a taser and into policing budgets.

But I'll tell you something that I saw recently has been happening— so people, okay, we're going film the police, we're going have records, we're going have this kind of viral Black Death, that is, you know, basically like lynching photography, that has been circulated. It was about last month I saw a video of this person recording the cop. The cop was playing music, like, the Beatles, or country music, they've been doing this a lot around the country. And what it shows is, like, the kind of calculated knowledge of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They know that people are going to record them, and it's going to go on YouTube, on Instagram, on whatever, but they know that the content moderators are really the algorithms that say you can't put copyright music on YouTube, on Instagram will then flag those videos and it would be removed. So like, record me all you want, you know, but you’re not going to make this go viral, you're not going to be able to put it online. And so it's kind of like whack a mole, with the way that people you know, one up and challenge these surveillance practices when it comes to policing, in particular. I guess, when you talk about, you know, the future directions, I really like the work that is being done by abolitionists, by the movement for Black Lives, that continues to do that work, that has to be the demand, right? For abolition, and that must be the future, knowing that, you know, it's not like, oh, we need to get more technology, we got to just stay one step ahead of the cops or the state, or I.C.E or whoever it is about. Let’s make demands for something outside of this system. Imagine something different. And that's why I think the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, of Marian Kaaba and so many others really continue to teach me about, you know, how to live and to dream abolition.

M: 19:35

My question is, what kind of impact has the post 911 War on Terror had on the material conditions of black people and blackness at large? And how about specifically black women in this context?

SB: 19:47

It was right in 2001 in the summer in Atlanta, a whistleblower who was working with what would be become the TSA, it wasn't called the TSA until after this omnibus bill that the US put through called the Patriot Act, but she was a whistleblower to show how black people were being, you know, criminalized at the airport, even though they weren’t the ones that were trafficking in contraband and other types of things, in from her experience. And so how has that changed? It's the ‘changing same’. One example, and, you know, even though I am Canadian, I think a lot of my references are from the U.S., because I've been living in the US for quite some time. But it was about, I think it was 2016, that some documents were leaked to the press. These were FBI and Department of Homeland Security training documents, but they came up with this new category. Well, not so new, because, you know, black people have been criminalized, you know, at least we have details from Cointelpro and earlier, but this new category called the black identity extremists, and I'm sure you've, you know, you've heard about it, and it really demonstrates the state's continued ability to index black resistance as criminal. It’s part and parcel of a whole slew of other types of practices that have happened, that particularly focused on Muslims, black Muslims, like the idea of, the kind of build-a-terrorist that the FBI did. They called it create and capture where they would basically have the making of an informant and so you have, you know, people that would be informants, but also agents that would be in mosques, basically trying to inveigle people to criminalize themselves. And so that was called create and capture. And so that is, the kind of parcels of the methods and sources that have been used prior to 911 and even continually. We know that the kinds of films that have been coming out, the documents that have been coming out about, you know, Fred Hampton, but also the FBI foyer releases of the various ways that movements have been, and continue to be, infiltrated with disinformation as well, too. And you're seeing that, of course, more and more now, especially when we have things like social media, and various types of like bots and other types of ways that there's disruption, disinformation, and ways that black freedom struggles continue to be a problem for a white supremacist state.

MN: 23:19

My next question is, what is prototypical whiteness? And how does it play a role in the development and accuracy of surveillance technology? What do you mean when you say it is, to quote, ‘reliance on dark matter for its own meaning’?

SB: 23:32

That’s a great question. I was using that to think about biometric technology. I guess a short primer on biometrics, basically, can be used for three purposes. Identification— who are you in the face in the crowd? It can be used for verification—are you who you say you are? Are you the person whose unique biometric is held in this ID card, or this passport? Or automation—is anybody there? Automation is like, you know, when you go to a public washroom and use a touchless faucet, and you run your hand, you know, over the capacitive sensor to kind of get the water to run. And sometimes it's a structural design that the water doesn't run from my hand when I wave it in front of it. This happened to me in Toronto this summer going into the stores where they had those automated hand disinfectants and I had on like, I tried to be fashionable and I had on like black gloves like black plastic gloves, you know, whatever latex gloves and it wouldn't work at all right? And because it's like how it's being reflected or again, it's like the you know, the need that you say you have to use a ring light so that your face can be read by this software to answer the question, is anybody there? Of course, you're there, my hand is there, but what kind of hand was it designed to expect? And that is the prototype of whiteness, right?

That's what I mean about white prototypicality to exist, it has to have that counterpoint. And that counterpoint is, like, this is invasive, kind of more intimate kind of biometric technology, is iris recognition. But there were times when the technology was designed that it could not register, brown irises, just blue. I mean, who designed something just for white faces, just for blue eyes? Well, we know who designed something—people who have white faces and blue eyes. Sometimes people want to blame it on the training data, oh, we only use these colour eyes or these people. Well, it's who’s designing that data set that didn't even like, or rather absented other people from making this technology something that could be they could be legible in. When I say that, its reliance on dark matter for its own meaning, I think we could extend that to think about the category of whiteness, relying on the dark of blackness, what gets categorized and then we go back to your question about Finon. He says, I'm splattered by black blood, they rendered my body back to me, in triplicate. So this is like the stereotypes, all of these things that have long histories in literature, in film, in the killing of Philando Castile, a few years ago, where his partner, Diamond Phillips, was recording it for Facebook.

And the cop said it was because of his wide-set nose. He was looking for somebody with a wide set nose. All of these, stereotypes I guess, is the shorthand, but you know, a lot of work, what goes into producing and reproducing and continuing these stereotypes. And so that is one way in which biometric technology does that. And the idea, it's like, I forgot the name of the person here. Meredith Broussard, and she talks about techno-chauvinism. Like, you know, it's a technology that's going to save us. This is her critique, right. The critique is of people saying that the technology is always right, it's true. It's what's going to liberate us. And it's so steeped in all of these histories, in its own formation. It's the formation of these technologies that, you know, we can't discount colonialism, we can't discount us slavery, we can't discount genocide. When we think about, you know, the states in which these technologies are created.

MN: 28:37

What is one thing, one concept that came up was white gaze and the black gaze? Can you compare the two?

SB: 28:47

I'm just thinking of an answer that might be somehow interesting, or relevant. And it reads basically, I feel like it's some of the same. I don't want to always rely on phenomics because there's so many things about that. It's not like white people and black people looking but all these things, all these histories, that shape the white gaze. Right now, this week in Minneapolis, we have the case of the cop who killed George Floyd. We have the 20 year old Daunte Wright, who was killed, murdered by a cop. And the reason for the stop was—it's illegal to have, this is not the reason—this is like the alibi given afterwards.

But the excuse is that it's illegal to have an air freshener on your rear-view mirror, which is also illegal in Ontario, Canada as well too, but that becomes the justification for the stop. So it's not about literal seeing, but like, how is this kind of oversight when you think about surveillance guards, all of these things, how are these ways of seeing blackness of reading blackness as always and already criminalized or some type of negative racialization a product of the white gaze. I mean, that could be one way of seeing it.

I think maybe another example, which I used at the end of the book was, you know, these two workers were testing out a camera at a store, this was a HP camera that also had automation. And you might use this for a conversation that so many of us are having now on zoom or whatever. And so the camera would be able to pan and move as the person was using it, making for a good user experience, supposedly. One worker, Desi, called himself Desi, and the other worker, black Desi, and white Wanda, they would both use it, and the camera would like, you know, move and work perfectly for Wanda, but for Desi, it was not able to like pan shift or tilt or anything. And so those are two separate ways in which one design for the computer was only made useful for one body. That is the white gaze or white way knowing, or like placing whiteness or white bodies or lightness, as, like, the prototype is one way. Another thing is like, you know, we've been seeing so much of Permit Patty, or Karen with the calling on the barbecue, or, you know, something, and the way that, you know, Karen is a cop and the way that the policing, that becomes another way of using 911 as like, you know, a policing customer service, as a right, as a demand. I think I'm kind of just getting that, like, the white gaze is about governing and policing who is in and out of place, it's policing categories of race. It cannot be sustained. We need to demand a whole new world.

MN: 33:01

Yeah, absolutely. My next question is—how can we, as black people, mitigate our vulnerability to the surveillance state, and they're also now proliferating, privatized, surveillance regimes.

S: 33:15

It’s an uphill battle, you know, when we think about mass incarceration, it is really an uphill battle. But the models, I think, must come from mutual aid. And knowing that the state is not going to save you. I think the example for that is what happened in a space like Texas, and so many other spaces as well too, just earlier this year, when you know, when we see that, that climate change could look like people dying. Well-resourced people even have to break down their fences and burn their furniture, to survive. And what people relied on in those time are the networks that were already in place of mutual aid to get unhoused people who are outside living into hotels, into shelters, to get people food, all of these ways that surveillance state will just—what Ruth Gilmore calls organized abandonment—it will just continue to abandon. The way to challenge that I think is collective. It's about abolition, and it's about mutual aid. On the flip side, you know, we don't have to have everything. Like the Super Bowl commercial with Michael B. Jordan? He was basically voicing the stalker state, what Hamid Khan calls the stalker state, of basically voicing one of these home digital assistants like, Alexa or an Amazon Echo or something.

And sometimes it's really cheap, or easy to use our fingerprints or our face to secure our devices, but we have to continually ask like, what happens to our data? Who is it being sold to? And if it's not being sold, like, who is it being shared or traded or rented to, when we surrender these things, you know, for convenience, for so called security. So, you know, sometimes it's good to take a pause on the new or the hot new thing and think about, you know, what are the potential harms of these things? And, you know, for me, you know, sometimes it's just like, oh, there's just so much stuff to, how am I going to manage all of these passwords, or like you'd like, rather than writing them down on a piece of paper? Or, you know, what's the big deal if I just use, IMessage rather than, you know, some type of secure messaging system, and you know, that there's, a lot of times people say things like, well, if you've got nothing to hide, then what's the problem? And those types of answers are so individualized and require a really involved, deep investment that you're like, you're on your own here, you just have to concern yourself with yourself.

And what got me to, you know, to think about really being mindful about my own kinds of security, when it comes to communication is like, what happens to the students that I speak to that are at risk, that could be, you know, without state documents, what happens when I put them at risk, because of the way that I might be sloppy or not concerned with secure digital communications? So to think about, like, the larger kind of community concerns, not just with using something like Signal or, you know, end-to-end encryption with WhatsApp or whatever, but to think about not yourself only, but like other people that you are in community with that you might not even know. I'm in community with the person that could see outside my window right now.

MN: 37:30

For my final question, I would like to flip the question you posed in your conclusions back on to you. What happens when blackness re-enters the frame? What is the frame and how is it necessarily reframed by censoring the conditions of blackness when we theorize surveillance?

SB: 37:48

Yeah, the thing is like, did the blackness ever leave? It’s a good question. And that question came from Desi, who was like, using the HP computer, and he says, watch what happens when my blackness enters the frame. And what happened is that the technology did not work for him, it wasn't able to capture him. And what's like revealing about that is like, you know, to get us to think about what it means to be uncaptured or illegible, like, there might be something liberatory about opting out or not, not calling for demands for, you know, we must make facial recognition, like work for everybody. Tech equity is not about all of us being able to be managed and governed by Google, or, you know, whoever it is.

And so, that question about what happens when we enter the frame was, in that case, for this, like little book was like to put black studies in conversation with surveillance studies, because I found that at the time, and this has, like, changed so much in the last, you know, few years or so, is that there was a real absenting into, like, how the conditions that the black folks, of black people globally in the diaspora, we're not being factored in to how we think about, you know, surveillance as a post-9/11 formation. Without thinking about how, like, the Panthers and other groups and other people were, you know, surveilled by the FBI. Long before, you know, something like the Patriot Act. So you're thinking about, like, C. L. R. James, you know, having a huge FBI having a huge file on him, and, you know, various other writers, the duration of theorists and other people. I just think it's, there's so much to learn about, and to think through and to move with when we think about, you know, you know, what happens when we centre the conditions of black people, when we when we think towards, you know, liberation?

MN: 40:20

On that note, do you have any suggestions for books or media that our listeners would be able to get more involved into learning more about surveillance studies and the work that you do?

SB: 40:34

Yeah, so this week I taught Nicole Fleetwood’s ‘Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration’ and it was like, ‘care full’. She talks about the methodology of care work, of the way that carceral aesthetics and people who are incarcerated mark things like penal time, time in prison, using what she calls penal matter—what kinds of ways are people creating art in clandestine ways to critique, to survive and to get through being incarcerated. People making art in solitary confinement. And I thought that was a fantastic book. There’s a film that came out a few years ago called Nas and Malik. And, maybe it’s not like, the greatest film, but I thought it really got to what we talked about in the ways that the FBI has and continues to surveille Muslims in New York City. Not only the FBI but the NYPD at the time, through acts of infiltration and other types of surveillance. There are also some great documentaries. I like Bee Street, which is a movement for Black lives activists. There's a really old documentary called Life and Death by Stephanie Black, that looks at structural adjustment policies and how they affect life in Jamaica. And I think that, you think about structural adjustments, whether it’s the World Trade Organization or IMF, is about surveillance, and governance, and management, and neo-colonial relations. So, I think those are a few texts that I would suggest.