Algorithmic Racism in Surveillance Tech: How Biased AI Systems Criminalize Black Bodies Globally
Original framing: “My own security system flagged me, a Black woman, as an animal” — The Conversation - Global
The misidentification of Black women as animals by AI is a direct descendant of the 19th-century pseudoscience that classified Black bodies as 'other' in racial hierarchies, as seen in works like Samuel Morton’s craniometry. This history extends to 20th-century eugenics, where Black women were sterilized under the guise of 'public health,' and the COINTELPRO-era surveillance of Black activists, which normalized racial profiling. The current crisis is not a bug but a feature of a system that has always treated Black lives as disposable, now automated for efficiency. Understanding this lineage is critical to dismantling the present, as it exposes surveillance tech as a tool of ongoing racial control.
The incident of a Black woman being flagged as an animal by her own security system is not an isolated technical failure but a symptom of a much larger crisis: the entanglement of racial capitalism, colonial legacies, and unchecked technological expansion.
The framing of this as a 'bias' problem obscures the fact that these systems are designed by institutions that benefit from the criminalization of Black bodies, while marginalized communities—particularly Black women—bear the brunt of their failures. Historical patterns, from eugenics to COINTELPRO, reveal that surveillance has always been a tool of racial control, and now it is being automated for efficiency. The solution lies not in incremental fixes but in dismantling the systems that produce these harms: divesting from surveillance capitalism, centering Indigenous and decolonial frameworks in tech governance, and amplifying the voices of those most affected. Without this systemic shift, the next generation of AI will simply replicate the same injustices with greater precision.