Vanessa Taylor

As technology continues to develop, surveillance does too and although it existed long before computers, the digital age has allowed it to rapidly expand, putting communities of color at increased risk.

Describing itself as the “new neighborhood watch,” Neighbors is designed to allow users to receive real-time crime updates from their neighbors. On the surface, it seems like an innocent project. However, Neighbors is a strong example of how surveillance companies like Ring manufacture paranoia to sell back to you.

On the internet — where nothing ever dies — past behaviors are much easier to recollect. Clips like Silverman’s blackface sketch may have been buried if it weren’t for the existence of gifs, blogs, and digital memory. But here’s what’s important to remember about cancel culture: it’s not the enemy.

While the cries for Omar to be “sent back” to Somalia are ugly, they’re unfortunately not a surprise for many Muslims, who have been targeted by politicians and the media before.

Shows like CSI may have tricked you into thinking that DNA testing is a perfect science, but that’s just not the case.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, developers make a lot of bold claims about what their programs can do.

There are a multitude of issues with facial recognition. Like technology in general, artificial intelligence is not autonomous. It does not decide on its own to uphold social biases. However, not only can programs teach themselves — as seen with Amazon’s recruitment tool that learned to prioritize male candidates over women — but they can be deployed in efforts to regulate or even re-define Otherness.

Although facial recognition may be riddled with errors, even a perfect program does not belong in the hands of police departments who would then be able to turn it against already vulnerable communities.

Three years should be enough for some sort of change, but it has meant nothing to the inflexible landscape of the Twin Cities.

Amazon is entering into a framework developed by an anti-Black state and privatizing it. Essentially, Amazon is helping surveillance go digital, and taking a cut of the check in the process.

Essence could have chosen to critically engage Kamala Harris’ campaign as a way to actually support and serve Black women.

In days that stopped making sense, nights spent curled up in the backseat of a car or facing down a line of police, I found Islam through and in my own life.

To ever hope to know Islam in America, you have to actually know Black Muslim women. To recognition of this history, four Black Muslim women share their experiences with Islam — as a source of comfort, a tool for liberation, and a means to survive in a world that seems pitted against every facet of their identities.

The de-veiling — and general maltreatment — of incarcerated or detained Black Muslim women is a symptom of wider issues relating to anti-Black Islamophobia. Black Muslim women are regarded as inherent threats due to both their Blackness and their Islam.

It is tempting to see all this as a one-time, isolated occurrence - an individual mistake - but it is not. This type of social media-related opportunism has many manifestations and is very much rooted in Muslim celebrity culture and trauma tourism inspired by Orientalist attitudes.