Review of Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence

Whiteness and white supremacy have long occupied the central axis of almost all forms of power in the global north and west. In an age of technological ubiquity and smart algorithms, one may hope such injustices could be absolved, but the opposite has been the case: white hegemony has intensified in the age of AI. The term Artificial Intelligence was coined by American mathematician John McCarthy at a 1956 meeting of all male attendees at Dartmouth College. The nascent field was ripe for a postwar milieu when the Pentagon’s research agency (ARPA, later renamed DARPA) was dedicated to computer intelligence. Throughout the text, Katz is careful to suggest that what makes artificial intelligence isometric with white supremacy is not only the largely white male bodies that produced it, but also, the ideology of exclusion embedded in its very logic and operations. Artificial Whiteness offers an early effort to integrate the history of technology and critical whiteness studies, a crucial one for technology studies and the history of computing in the 21st century.