Racist Search Engines will get you Every Time

Oh, today I have a RANT, !

The erasure of (and thus violence against) Black bodied people is pernicious and everywhere all the time. 

I'm working on an email for the upcoming Black Goddess: Liberated Summit. I wanted to insert a gif of a Black woman holding a map, so I did a search.

What did the Gif site return? The first picture below.

I ultimately found an appropriate gif with Queen B, but certainly she is not the only worthy representation of Black womanhood.

Next, I needed a picture that conveyed options, so I then searched for "Black woman choice." The results are here:

I mean, COME ON!

There are literal oodles of gifs and images on this planet….

I read a study a couple of years that reported that we had generated more images in the previous year than we had in the entirety of HUMAN EXISTENCE.

And you mean to tell me, we can’t do better than Wonder Woman, Jack Black, Meghan Markle, and an eye-popping non-Black man?

I MEAN COME ON!

To validate my super scientific research I then searched "Black Woman." What do you see?

We get an antagonistic Oprah, Black woman with gun, and attitudinal animated Black woman in a Family Guy hair salon?

I am reminded nearly EV. ER. Y. DAY. of just how powerful the stereotypes around the Black body are.

Search engines are determinants of culture, and they have conscripted Blackness to negative caricatures of the fullness of the Black lived experience.

On this last day of 2023’s Black History Month, I invite you in to unravel the roots of the stereotyping and unearth the origins of the dehumanization of Black folks.

I’ll drop all the links to Liberated Bodies below, but know this is for Black-bodied women and femmes as well as non-Black Allies.

If you want to acknowledge and address the systemic racism that seeps into all facets of contemporary living

AND

You know you can’t do this by yourself.

Then join me as we endeavor to create a world full of Liberated Bodies!

Black bodied women, let's chat.  Use this link to find a time!

Non-Black Allies, discover more about Liberated Bodies for Allies here.

peace

love

Dr G

PS - I'm not making up this biased algorithm thing. Dr Safiya Noble, UCLA Professor, wrote a book about it. Check it out here: Algorithms of Oppression.