By Dr. Carolyn Haliburton Carter, Guest Columnist

Exploring the collision of race, identity, and machine logic—how data-driven technologies are reimagining old racial hierarchies in digital form. Artificial intelligence (AI) was supposed to free us from human bias. Instead, it’s learning our worst habits with frightening accuracy.

Algorithms now decide who someone hires, who the police flag, who receives a loan, and even how someone defines ancestry. Controversies around race and machine learning have sparked debate among computer scientists over how to design machine learning systems that guarantee fairness (Benthall & Haynes, 2019).

Yet beneath the surface of data and design lies something older than the microchip: America’s centuries-old obsession with race and purity.

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