cOdeD Racism: How to appease a Racialised Webcam?
Image by Laurentiu Robu
Teaching yoga online brings a number of technical challenges to everyone. This is compounded for me as a Black yoga teacher, when students regularly complain they cannot see me clearly - even with a HD webcam and additional powerful lighting. And despite coaxing my webcam to bring a deserving level of focus to my Black skin, it continues to resist by bleaching, blurring and blending away my Black skin tones. To stand a chance of being in plain outline view by this petulant webcam, I have discovered I need to wear what seems to be its favourite colour - white. Colorism privileges light over dark. Why is my webcam not seeing it’s being complicit in this? Answer - the racial bias that privileges whiteness is hiding in its encoded algorithms.
Sarah Lewis, assistant professor at Harvard University, points out that the measuring stick for colour balancing in digital film technology is white skin tone. This goes way back to Kodak’s ‘Shirley card’, which calibrated colour, shadows and light to make sure this white woman, Shirley, (who actually worked for Kodak), looked good. Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias (2020), follows the experience of MIT scientist Joy Buolamwini, who discovered that the racist algorithms embedded in facial recognition technology, were most likely to recognise her Black skin if she wore a white mask. In his book ‘White’, Richard Dyer argues that we are confronted by good images of whiteness to reinforce prevalent ideas of humanity.
Sanctifying whiteness and white skin is at the heart of colorism which grades Black people’s value according to their colour proximity to white skin. Blending in or masking oneself to appear less threatening, are autonomic survival imperatives that Black people may unconsciously use to navigate safety in a white dominant culture. We live in a non interrogated world of white privilege, masquerading as neutral - indulging it’s own image, while dehumanising Blackness. It seems Black People are habitually blended out by colour coded algorithms that have the power to distort how we appear, even to ourselves.
My mistakenly, innocent webcam, seems to be reacting uncomfortably to my Black skin tones - obscuring and misrepresenting them without my permission - privileging and nuancing white hues of its own accord. The dogma that colour balances my Black skin with a racially biased lens, means I am seen most clearly as contrast to my ethereal, white coverings. It’s like my white garments are wearing me - appealing to my webcam’s treacherous algorithms - casting unwelcome shadows on me, to bring their likeness to the fore.
It took me a while to realise that my webcam is not neutral, but part of the insidious system of racism that centres and favours whiteness, without us even noticing it. Systemic oppression hides and manoeuvres in the unnamed - in the absence between words and numbers, in the structure set by commas, colons, and codes. Being able to sense this ghostly binary syntax, and name it, is a first step to bringing it out of a light so pervasive, it deters our focus from being able to see this ubiquitous veil of white supremacy and hold it to account.
Find out more or join a free online Unapologetically Black yoga class for Black people here:
https://unapologeticallyblackyoga.co.uk/
Oya Heart Warrior - Unapologetically Black Yoga
