My critical race theory professor is Angela Smith, a sister from the Midwest who’s an expert in human-computer interactions (HCI) and is now a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas in Austin.
Her exact title is assistant professor of social justice informatics. It was my honor to be in her first seminar at the iSchool, last semester—INF 385T Special Populations. The fact is that we never quite heard her views on critical race theory because it wasn’t on the syllabus. Even though Professor Smith was advertised before her arrival at UT as a CRT expert.
Nonetheless my preference now, in casual conversation, is to begin sentences, “Well, my critical race theory professor says ….” even though she didn’t say anything in that regard, it still sounds cool and might make headway with a liberal chick who you’re trying to charm, and would give state leadership a coronary if they heard you say it. In fact it would justify every fear the Board of Regents probably already has about what really goes on at this end of Guadalupe Street, at Forty Acres. And because, as the descendant of slaves in Texas, my feeling is that it’s time for a little CRT on campus even if it’s not on the syllabus. Long story short, white people including white academics need to worry about Professor Smith but not for the reasons they think. You feel me?
Basically my takeaways from her class, sixteen long motherfucking weeks, not to sound ignorant, were two. In research—the readings showed, and our discussions concurred—there needs to be a greater effort to provide information on the researcher’s positionality: who he or she is, in other words, because even in the case of scientific research, who is crunching the numbers has a lot to do with what the results turn out to be.
Takeaway #2 is also imperative and requires participatory design in the study’s architecture—especially in the case of vulnerable populations. That means not just circling back to tell the people whose data you collected what the results were, but getting the subjects of the study involved in study design in the first place. To avoid exploitation. This is a hard sell even in academia because it means taking power from researchers and giving it to the people being researched.
If you’re wondering what is an instance of a special population—Governor Abbott would be a good example. He uses a wheelchair. Although Professor Smith didn’t speak explicitly about the governor, white people like Greg Abbott who are part of the majority demographic can also be members of special populations, as Professor Smith taught in class. Other examples that we considered included people who have regularly been screwed in the past—like Native Americans—prisoners used in research—people who have a disability, as mentioned above—and immigrants. Black people were not the focus of Professor Smith’s class, which was more about anyone who is vulnerable to researchers and to society-at-large. Democrats and Republicans were never mentioned in class or in the readings—at least not in those read by me—but the powerful and powerless were mentioned in different contexts. This couldn’t even be considered Marx Lite but there’s almost certainly someone in the State Capitol who would call Professor Smith a Commie. In Texas common sense need not apply. In 385-T, btw, we had Dr. Smith and eight students. Two Taiwanese chicks, one Chinese American, one tech-type originally from Nepal, two white women who were into other cultures, one Latina. Me and Dr. Smith were the only bloods. Only one male—yours truly—which made me a special population too, you feel me?
My experience as a black man in America is that PhD-earning sisters like Dr. Smith can make short work of un-highly-educated brothers like me, therefore my decision early in class was to establish my own positionality. What real estate the black man decided to defend, you could call it, in an academic setting. As it turned out Dr. Smith was completely cool, there was no male-bashing, but a black man can never be too careful. Our first assignment was actually a short paper to describe our own positionality. My paper was part-territoriality—in an effort to fend off any possible feminist in class, not to repeat myself. Part of my effort in class was also to develop the “toolbox” that they keep telling us about in graduate school, that we need to get hired after we have a diploma. My positionality was like a lion defining his territory, not to sound Old School, peeing on rocks and bushes in order to let others know that this is where not to tread, as part of a psycho-social-gender dialectic. So, like, as defined for 385T: Growing up in a single-parent African American household of the 1960s, heavily “influenced” by my strong mother and three older sisters, sometimes with a backhand across the mouth. Attended segregated schooling. Today working in a profession—nursing—where women have been on my ass almost non-stop, for a quarter-century. That is my positionality, yeah.
Throughout the semester Professor Smith kept a poker-face. Once, answering a question that all the other students had already replied to, and parsing my response, my feeling was that Professor Smith’s bullshit meter was going off, like a bomb, as she listened to me, but she didn’t call me out. She encouraged us to speak more than her telling us what to think. You may ask what does all of this—positionality/territoriality and critical race theory—have to do with the School of Information at the flagship university in blood-red Texas? Which was a prime mover of the Confederacy and where Jim Crow has never quite died?
Those are good questions.
The iSchool is what was formerly the School of Library Science and while some of the students still follow a tract that will lead to work in libraries or in archives—the current curriculum is much more digital, including data sets, and even programming. A Taiwanese chick told me in Starbucks one day, like a couple of years before my application to the program, that a lot of foreign-bred Asian kids apply to the iSchool at UT because they think it’s computer science. Which it is not, although it’s getting closer. A.I. for Health Care was one of my earlier classes, taught by Professor Ying Ding who is from Beijing and is one of the best instructors in my entire history of public education, since 1960. Another class was Data Storytelling which was problematic but useful. Everything regarding information is being redefined, including the definition of information itself. That is where critical race theory and Professor Smith come in.
During the first semester my instructor for Principles of information, which is the single required course in the master’s program—the other ten or so all electives—he told us there is still a lot of debate among informaticists about even a definition of the word “information,” which is not a good sign for my new career. This guy said that by the time we graduate we should have developed a definition of our own—not one that will satisfy other informaticists everywhere, but to satisfy ourselves. This is the beginning of my last semester and a definition of information still eludes me, as we look toward the iSchool exit. My inclination is to borrow from thermodynamics and say that information involves a change in state. Something was something and becomes something else and the difference between the two states is information. Not all the details on my theory have been worked out. A more practical plan is to use my degree to help sort out some of the data tsunami from the pandemic. Critical race theory is important to me not to beat white people over the head, although that can be fun. Overall, my view is that racism is kind of a losing proposition for whites as well as for blacks. It’s kind of like being on a treadmill that you can never get off.
Nonetheless many American public libraries have collections that are skewed by centuries of white ethno-centricity and that still need to be addressed and where else to do that than in the former School of Library Science? White writers, white editors, white professors—not to forget Ms. Jones, the nice white lady who chose books when we were kids and set up expositions in the local public library for so many years. All these people made a lot of mistakes. Based upon their unexamined positionality. That would be my whole critical thesis, you feel me?
My sense of Professor Smith—although we have not discussed her views on CRT—is that she is less concerned about the past and more concerned about the future, especially regarding human computer interactions, which is her thing. We spent a lot of time in class going over bad A.I. algorithms, for example, that can be just as racist as Huck Finn but more pertinent than the trip down the river, at least to me. Angela Smith’s bio page at Northwestern, btw, whence she came, when they were asking her what books are at her bedside, lists, The Wonder Weeks by Frans X. Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt; Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life edited by Ruha Benjamin, How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin; Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock; She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan. If you can’t even understand the title, that must be some high-level shit. Take note that there’s no Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Color Purple to make the lieutenant governor lose his lunch. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, btw, was actually written by Alex Haley, btw, who also wrote Roots and kind of started the ball rolling that led to critical race theory, in my humble view, although Roots was clearly fiction. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a great book in the same way that Malcolm X was a great man but you don’t see it as much on campuses and in libraries—as a foundational work of American literature, which it is. Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird which is everywhere all the time because white professors and white librarians and white readers like it. To Kill a Mockingbird is a white savior novel, which is kind of a bullshit genre, actually, that still sells a lot of books. That’s CRT, probably, although we didn’t go into that in class either, only bad A.I. and bad participatory design. We digress.
The School of Information needs a little CRT of its own because its record on diversity is horrible. If you look on the University of Texas’s diversity website, the demographics for the iSchool are worse than anywhere else on campus except the medical school, which is run like a plantation. Overall, on campus, blacks represent one-half of one percent of instructors and one-half of one percent of students. In the iSchool there are like 9 blacks total out of about 350 students and my personal experience is, during both of my first two semesters here, of being followed into the building and asked to show identification to establish my right to be there, when Asian and whites were coming and going at will. When will we be free? My programming instructor, who is a white Southerner, has practiced microaggressions in our interactions outside class. Among iSchool faculty there are now two blacks, Dr. Smith and another female tenure-track assistant professor, and a handful of Asian women, which is good because the Asian women and the sisters know their business. Or they wouldn’t be there. Although you can’t always say that about white people, because privilege has influenced their success, as part of a critical race dialectic and seen through an equity lens.
Among the students two-thirds are female, mostly white or Asian. The high number of foreign (primarily Pacific Rim) students is good, actually, in a different kind of race dialectic, because they’re great students—which helps to improve the games of American students. Even a bad Chinese student is better than a good American one—and they pay higher tuitions—which is important to the university, in effect subsidizing the rest of us. What’s missing from the iSchool and universities across the country now are men and specifically men of color. But that lesson has yet to be learned at UT, although we have a new president and a new provost who appear to be prioritizing change. The iSchool dean btw is a research guy named Eric Meyer who came to us from Oxford and who has had the job for three years which is long enough to have done better but he did hire the excellent Professor Smith. Even knowing what her theory was and that it is controversial in a Southern state, which is a very good thing. You may say, well, the only reason you’re praising Dr. Smith is because she’s black but that’s not true. It’s not about skin color. It’s about adherence to a revolutionary dialectic, which has been around a long, long time.
During breaks in class, or when we were arriving and settling in—as one of the only two Negroes present—my remarks to her were, like, what did she think about so-and-so—Dave Chappelle being an ass, for example—or the latest voting outrage coming out of the Capitol. She never answered. It wasn’t me trying to set her up, either.
Three hours a week for sixteen weeks, that’s a long time in the Year of the Plague, there are breaks, there was chit chat but not much. It didn’t seem like she was being coy, either. Or that she was trying to be politically astute in order to avoid problems later, when her tenure vote comes up for example. She was just focused, and reserved. In fact we students were told nothing about her personally, except that she has a little boy and she considers Austin hot compared to wherever she came from. Her page at Northwestern says that Professor Smith’s profile became more prominent based upon a paper that she and colleagues wrote, called “Critical Race Theory in Human Computer Interactions.” Which is how academia works, one supposes, you write something timely or astute and people start to pay attention. My point would be that Professor Smith is potentially dangerous to white privilege, as a revolutionary might say, not because she’s spouting dogma, but because she has judgment and knows—not just what to say—but when not to speak.
When it’s not on the syllabus or she hasn’t seen the data.
These PhD-holding sisters are very impressive and enormously useful to African American liberation, as long as you can get them pointed in the right direction, which is in any direction away from studying black men. She gets my tenure vote, therefore, not that anyone has asked.
And the positionality thing—that could be invaluable. You could be at a party, for example, if people after COVID go back to being socially intime, and somebody is being completely clueless or talking about shit of which they clearly have not the least fucking idea. Or they’re hiding their own personal interest in the subject, because a declaration of positionality works for undisclosed self-interest too. You know what you do? You turn to him or her—even if he or she is not talking directly to you, and you say, really casually, “So, what’s your positionality?”
The words come out, in translation, do you know what you’re talking about or are you hiding some critical conflict that influences your opinion? Many times it shuts his or her shit down right there. That was a big takeaway for me from Informatics 385T, taught by Professor Angela Smith, in the Fall Semester of 2021, in the second year of The Plague.
