AnDRE BROCK

Full Transcript



Karen Holst:

Hi, and we are live. I'm Karen Holst and I'm here with Douglas Ferguson. We're authors of Start Within. Today, we have such an incredible guest, Andre Brock. He's an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech and his scholarship examines racial representations in social media, video games, black women and weblogs, whiteness, and techno culture. He has published innovative and groundbreaking research on Black Twitter and on digital research methods. His first book titled Distributed Blackness: African-American Cybercultures was published with the NYU Press in 2020, and it theorizes black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.

Karen Holst:

All of that was a big mouthful of very thoughtful work that has gone into something that is so deep and heavy, and you've put decades of research into this and the moment that we're in... I reached out to you earlier after seeing you quoted and talking through a CNN piece around the Karen meme. My name is Karen. I hold the quotes of Karen. When I read that piece, I was just humbled in understanding more of the history of a meme and how it then helped me navigate more exploration and what it means to be white and how to be an ally in this moment? I would just love to give you a moment to chat on that.

Andre Brock:

Karen and its most recent manifestation is a description of white womanhood, trying to exercise a power role in any particular situation. Often, usually the most banal and mundane of situations. There was recently an incident where a white woman was walking her dog and a black man asked her to put her dog on a leash and she threatened to call the police on him because he was African-American. Right? It's this exercise of power in a vicious fashion, particularly given what's going on with the process around George Floyd. It's not hard to understand that calling the police on black people can end up being a really fraught moment, right? But they are up what these white women are apt to. Often, they rely upon the presence of state violence in order to control the situation where they think their resources are being threatened, right?

Andre Brock:

I've seen manifestations of this in places like Starbucks, which I frequent where women have threatened to call the police and the barista for not making their latte hot enough, for example. Right? Just little stuff. The reason why it became linked to the name Karen, at least for this recent one, there's been a meme over the last few years about a white woman named Karen. I attributed to a number of sources. One of them was Dane Cook's comedy bit back in the mid-2000s about Karen being a douchebag. Sorry Karen, but there is a... That's the most recent... Well, not the most recent. That's one of the commonly acknowledged start points for this particular name being linked to it. Right? But as we've gotten into this social media era, there was a pushback recently by white women who felt that the name Karen was somehow misogynist, right? By identifying white women by this particular name.

Andre Brock:

Apparently, Karen is a fairly common name among a certain age of women. They felt that people were being misogynists and being disrespectful towards them. Right? In some ways, it fits into a longer narrative about a colorblind ideology where people feel that if their racist actions are identified by others, that makes the other people racist, not them, right? But there's also this other mode where the privilege, and I hate using that word, so I will not come back to that in a minute, but the resources and entitlements that are accorded to white womanhood in Western American and American society, these women feel like they're under threat and they will do whatever they can to protect them. That has been manifest in online spaces through that particular clap back by white women to say, "This is misogynist."

Andre Brock:

I follow Black Twitter. Black Twitter took the expected humorous cultural critique, a dark humor and said, "Well, if that's how you feel, we'll never use the K word again. All my Ks, you guys just have to follow back because we don't want to disrespect you." That's where this meme really came to my attention because I studied Black Twitter and that aspect of flipping the script, right? Instead of saying, "You can't use the N word anymore," you start saying, "You can't use the K word anymore." Changing Tupac lyrics to using cut and replace to replace all the uses of the N word with the K word. Right? These types of things to make fun of this idea that somehow white womanhood is under threat simply by people recognizing when they're out of order. That's just a little bit. I'm sorry, I know we don't have a lot of time.

Karen Holst:

No. I just want to say my name is Karen. I don't like the memes. It has not kept me from marrying the person I love. It has not kept me from societal benefits. It is not the same, and I just really appreciate your perspective on that.

Andre Brock:

My mother-in-law's name, Karen. She's black, but she said, "Given how things are going, she's decided to become an Asian Karen," because they seem to be getting away with a lot more these days.

Karen Holst:

Love it. I love it. Yeah. Tell me more. We talked a little bit before we went live about white privilege and I was sharing that I grew up in South Texas. I went to the University of Texas at Austin and university, I had later in life very formative years. My first experience in recognizing my white privilege, I signed up for 101 rhetoric class in a large university like that. They place you in different topics and it spits out my courses and it's rhetoric of rap. I'm like, "Wow. Yeah. I want to take that class. I love rap music and this is going to be really great."

Karen Holst:

Man, was I schooled by a professor who really changed my viewpoint on who I thought I was and mistakes that I was making and needed to be schooled on. I would imagine she had a lot of students like me that came in there and she really made an impact in my life and has come to my heart today and what we're facing and reevaluating those same feelings for me, but when I've mentioned that to you, you had kind of knee jerk reaction to the word privilege. I want to talk more about that.

Andre Brock:

I find that it's difficult to break free of the connotations of privilege in part because of the beliefs that Americans hold about themselves in this meritocracy that we live in. Right? I try to step away from that word more so to focus on intersectionality, to pull out a right wing talk word, but intersectionality in the concept that yes, your parents did work hard to give you the life that you have in your suburb with their six figure incomes. But that means, again, you have resources and entitlements that you expect to fall back on. They're not privileges per se. They're more permissions than anything else. Trying to do that helps me work around that really strong response because many American kids... I've taught Iowa farm kids. I've taught kids from both coasts out here.

Andre Brock:

The southern middle-class perception of itself is very different from other parts of the country. Right? But they all kind of tense up when I say privilege. Trying to decontextualize that, trying to decenter the idea that they have privilege allows me to open up a conversation where we can talk about, "Well, if you may not have privilege, what are the things that you have that you are able to identify that other people don't?" Right? From that point, we can start a different conversation.

Andre Brock:

I will say it's easier to do it if we start from gender than if we start from race. That's the other part about your anecdote that really struck me is that race is a difficult thing to talk about. In many cases, many folk encounter race through the prism of hip hop, right? My students love XXXTentacion and all these other new age rappers. They feel how they're so revolutionary, but they don't really connect with them on any part other than a love for the music and the rebellion that they feel, but can't express. Right? Trying to get a move from the aesthetics of rap or the rhetoric of rap to the realities of understanding rap in the current socio historical moment is a task, but it's a task that I like taking on.

Karen Holst:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think one of the things that we talked about in the class was we're going to do a thesis around pick an artist and write about their album. One of the artists that I have listed was the Beastie Boys and my professor was like, "Hell no. You're not writing about the Beastie Boys in a rhetoric of..."

Andre Brock:

What?

Karen Holst:

I'm like, "Well..."

Andre Brock:

The Beasties are crucial.

Karen Holst:

This was an opportunity for me to explore something other than what I related to. Really, I remember feeling that embarrassment of even coming up with that, but then now with maturity and retrospective thinking, of course that was a group that I drew to. That's who I listened to and I related to more. Then, when she called me out and put me in a more uncomfortable place and made me think about things in a different way. It would have been easy for me to have written about that. It was much harder for me to find a different type of artist that it didn't relate to and write about that. I think that was the right call on her part.

Andre Brock:

Okay.

Karen Holst:

Yeah. As you think about this moment that we're in and how technology has the opportunity to have a positive effect, and certainly we've seen negative, right? There's lots of examples of misinformation and abusing hashtags. I'd like to start on the positive side of how can we help support technology in this moment and making sure that we're being progressive?

Andre Brock:

Yeah. That's a good point. I'm teaching Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology this summer. One of the things she talks about is that private institutions and the state have really come to over rely on sorting algorithms that make decisions for them. I think Amazon had a moment where they tested out a hiring algorithm only to find that it tended to prefer white men who played lacrosse named Jared over any other candidate. Right? They couldn't really understand why that was. I go back to that example because even if the algorithm does suggest that there are certain decisions that should be made, I pushed back and say, "There's always that human factor involved." This is really where algorithms encode certain beliefs. The human layer that the three of us represent also represents a moment where we can break the chain of supposition that that algorithm has and encode it and add a layer of moral and ethical values.

Andre Brock:

Recently, I was denied an application to an apartment that I was looking in here in Midtown Atlanta. They're like, "Well, the third party service that we use says no." I said, "Well, can you appeal this?" She's like, "Well, no. We can only go by what it says." I had to make an appeal basically saying, "I'm a professor." Strange how that works. "My wife is a nurse. We can afford this apartment. It's actually cheaper where we live. I'm asking you to... I'm appealing to you as a human being to understand that this is a place that we would like to live to continue having a good quality of life." Se caved. Caved is not the right word. She acquiesced, right? But it's important to realize that there are moments where we can push back on algorithms.

Andre Brock:

We are not duty bound. It may require a little bit more work, which is the thing about doing social justice work. It requires us to step away from the complacency that algorithms offer to actually include your moralistic perspective and not in a bad way, but your moral understanding of human agency and heterogeneity in order to make the system work equitably. Right? That's the thing I would love for your audience to take away from this, that you do have a moment in many cases where you can intervene and add that additional human layer to computation and make it in a way such that people who would normally fall get unconsidered or not considered at all or deprecated suddenly can regain their agency through your own actions.

Douglas Ferguson:

Andre, I have a question. This is something I've personally been struggling with a lot, which is I see a lot of people taking to the streets. I see a lot of behaviors that are misunderstood. It's even hard to track actually what's happening because there's reports of people potentially even being instructed to institute violence to just be disruptive. In this day and age talking about the algorithms, that's hard to even know how to make sense of any of that. Knowing that that's difficult and how do we even tease that apart, what's your recommendation? What can you offer folks as far as... I don't personally feel... You may disagree with me. I don't feel that running out to the streets is going to solve anything. I think that creates a lot of attention and noise, but what can we do? What conversations should we be having? Where are the pillars of support that we might be able to have real change? I'm just curious where your thoughts are because I'm personally searching and looking. I'm hoping that I discover something before November rolls around, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Andre Brock:

The riots are important. Karen and I talked about this briefly and that they rupture our infrastructure, right? The ways that we carry out our everyday lives, which often don't require or allow reflection upon the things that happen to people who are not us, the riots have really brought to attention that many people are having problems with the way society is currently constructed. Right? In my class, my students often asked me from day one to the last day of the semester, how can we solve racism? Racism is not a problem to be solved, not by any of us. If anything, it's a long slow march through the years, through the decades to try to address the problems that racism is encountered, but it's almost the same as trying to encourage a fish to breathe above water.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right. It's evolutionary.

Andre Brock:

It's an evolutionary moment. It's not a quick change moment. In many cases, the progress that's made by people pushing for social justice or anti-racism can get rolled back. We saw that with the Trump administration and how they immediately began rolling back all the things that the Obama administration put through, not because they were bad regulations, but because Trump has a problem with Obama, right? I say this to say instead of understanding racism as a problem, I encourage my students to think of it as a problematic, right? The difference between the two is that a problematic is how you constitute something so that you can ask questions of it, right? While rioting may not solve something, asking why these people are rioting brings you a different understanding of what they're going through and what they're interested in. Right? Similarly for technology and in many cases, people like us are asked to come up with quick technical fixes for social problems.

Andre Brock:

The more important thing than a technical fix is asking why technology is the space you turn to, to fix these problems in the first place? That's something that I really work hard on trying to educate my students at Georgia Tech and at Michigan before this, many of whom go on to corporate positions where they're coding or being engineers or the like to ask why this particular strategy? What do you gain from this strategy? More importantly, what are the beliefs encoded in this strategy, right? Doing so gives you... It may not necessarily endear you to your colleagues because many of your colleagues want the next code review to go smoothly and they don't want you to ask them moral questions, right? Or they may want to say, "Well, marketing and the VCs want us to do it this way. Why should we try to buck them because they're the ones putting money in our pockets?"

Andre Brock:

But being able and interested in asking those questions is a necessary step for any kind of social change. Does that make sense? It's interesting too, because LinkedIn just had a moment where they were asking their employees over a group wide BlueJeans meeting to talk about what exactly these riots mean for a space like LinkedIn, which is sort of a social media space, but very much also a professional networking space. Many of the employees apparently, according to reports, were pushing back saying they didn't understand why black people didn't just suck it up. I'm sorry, my dog has found someone worthy of [inaudible 00:17:29]. Cooper, come here, puppy. Come here. It's okay. Okay.

Karen Holst:

[inaudible 00:17:38] sweet.

Andre Brock:

LinkedIn employees, and I didn't understand how much of a global population they are, really have problems because they believe that black people were kind of responsible for their own problems they experienced through structural discrimination. I find this to be a common attitude in technology organizations. Many of their employees come from certain backgrounds or are recruited for certain things, technical intelligence, genius, but not necessarily social and emotional considerations. Right? They find it hard to believe from a rational objective basis that black people didn't bring their troubles on themselves. Right?

Andre Brock:

I can't fix that. What I can do though is encourage them to say, "Okay. While black people may have a specific problem, what is it that you're bringing to this situation that encourages you to think in this way? Be reflective upon your own placements, your own entitlements, the own things that you have in your environment, which allow you to live the way you live and then ask, why is it that certain groups do not have the same access?" It's certainly not an accident of birth, right? It kind of is, but it's certainly not any inherent deviance or the like. It's something that we should consider as people who would incorporate technical solutions and infrastructures. It's something that we should consider as these things are built out. Sorry about the dog interruption.

Douglas Ferguson:

That was really good.

Karen Holst:

Yeah. We're wrapping up our time here, but one thing that I've been doing personally is... We talk about it and start within, there's the five layers of assumptions and how those get in the way of an idea of doing work within an organization. If you're thinking about change in general, who you are, and at the core, you're not going to be able to uncover every assumption, every bias and accepting that, but still trying to move forward. One of the things I'm doing is talking about my layers with people coming from different backgrounds. I'm not sitting around and talking about it with my friends that I grew up with.

Karen Holst:

I'm reaching out to people like you, Andre, to really shake me to the core and my belief system to understand where there are hidden biases, where there's not so hidden biases and how to continue to move forward? By addressing myself and then peeling the onion and going from the inside, bulls eye out, the people that I surround myself by, the organizations that I give my time to, the global... Everything. All the different layers of assumptions that that's part of the work I need to do personally, is work on myself first and then figure out how I can bring others along,

Andre Brock:

Right. That's a really good way to put it. I think that's [crosstalk 00:20:19].

Karen Holst:

How can people find your book, your work, keep track of what you're doing?

Andre Brock:

I sent you a link to my book, which is available in open access on the nyupress.org site. Feel free to read it and fall asleep to it. I write heavily about Black Twitter, which a lot of people are not as familiar with as I would wish. But I started to look in Black Twitter because my degree is in social informatics, which studies the integration of computers in organizations, and it became interesting because it's social informatics, not cultural informatics. At worst, they were concerned with which level of employee was incorporated with which technology. To that, I began to be curious about what would it mean if gender was incorporated? If you look at the movie hidden figures, it makes a difference, all of a sudden, if you realize that black women were the coders and mathematicians behind the Apollo space lodge. It suddenly changes both the idea of diversity, right? Because that diversity wasn't apparent before.

Andre Brock:

Before that, it looked like this monastic cult of Arian Christian following Wernher von Braun and the like. Arian Christian rocket scientist, but suddenly you realize these women had an integral role, right? That perspective is available. Once you begin to interrogate what role culture has informing the tech organizations that we have. My book is a way to try to address that from a black perspective, but I think it's also possible to apply that to white perspective as well. I think whiteness is really fascinating. Well, it is fascinating to me because in so many cases, it's uninterrogated. Right? It's never questioned as to why it's the norm or even why certain aspects of whiteness are the norm. I'll close with this because I know I tend to run at the mouth, but there was a website in the mid-2000s called Stuff White People Like.

Andre Brock:

I don't know if you guys remember that. Right? It was founded by a guy who was a former PhD student in Bloomington, Indiana, the Midwest of the Midwest. Right? One of the articles that I wrote about was a 63-word blog post about Obama and how certain white people liked him. A the time I started studying it in 2012, the article was written in 2008 and in 2012, it had 13,000 comments. When I looked at it again, my browser had trouble loading it because it had grown to 27,000 comments in 2019. Right?

Andre Brock:

In those comments are white people saying, "I'm not that kind of white person. That's a particular kind of white person in the Midwest. My Philly whiteness, my Staten Island whiteness, my California whiteness, my Texas whiteness is all very different." Right? But I think that that's something that is not immediately evident from the ways that whiteness is portrayed in media or on the internet. It's really fascinating to start thinking through what your positionality as a white person may bring to the technologies that you use. It's my hope that my book can try to get people, jolt people into understanding and being reflective about their own positionality with respect to technology.

Karen Holst:

I love it. I will share the link. That's great. I will share the link both in the note section here, but also just separately, I think this is really important work. I appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us and talk about it.

Andre Brock:

Thanks for having me. I would love to have you guys come talk to my class. If that's something you guys would be interested in and available for, because my students are really hungry for more industry perspectives. Right? Because they feel like I'm in the ivory tower and I don't really know what I'm talking about. I'm like, "But I work for Microsoft. I have the..." They don't care.

Douglas Ferguson:

I know what you're talking about. I can totally relate.

Andre Brock:

If you guys are interested...

Douglas Ferguson:

Man, I had trouble asking questions because I was just soaking it all in. It's amazing.

Andre Brock:

I appreciate that. Yeah. If you guys are interested, I would love to have you guys come talk to my class virtually, of course.

Karen Holst:

Yes. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for your time. To everyone that's tuning in, I will share the link there. Our book is Start Within. You can find that on Amazon and we want to continue to have these kinds of conversations. If there's change or ideas that you're trying to launch within your company or organization, if you're looking at this moment that we're in and feeling you want to know how to move forward, that's what we're talking about. Reach out to us. We would love to have people that are thinking about this type of work as guests, or to continue to help us think about what topics are helpful. Thank you again. Bye-bye.

Andre Brock:

Can I act normal now?