CONCEPT
Technological Redlining
Safiya Umoja Noble’s term for the way data-driven systems profile, sort, and channel opportunity along lines of race and other protected characteristics, reproducing in code the mid-century practice by which banks and government agencies drew lines on maps to deny opportunity to communities defined by their racial composition.
Redlining was the systematic practice by which banks, insurers, and government agencies drew lines on maps—often literally in red ink—around neighborhoods deemed too risky for investment, neighborhoods that were defined by the race of their residents. To live inside the red line was to be denied a mortgage, charged higher rates, refused services, cut off from the accumulation of wealth. The practice compounded across generations and produced much of the racial wealth gap that persists today.
Safiya Umoja Noble introduced the concept of technological redlining in her 2018 book
Algorithms of Oppression to name the digital reproduction of this harm. The new lines are drawn in code rather than on paper maps, and they are far harder to see: an algorithm that quietly steers a person away from a job listing, a credit offer, or accurate information operates invisibly, its discriminations buried in computation the affected person never