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ALGORITHMS OF OPPRESSION: HOW SEARCH ENGINES REINFORCE RACISM Safiya Umoja Noble New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018, 229 pages $26.60 (paperback)
Critical scholars name and interrogate the discrepancy that exists between the espoused value of diversity and reality of structural oppression embedded in higher education institutions (Poon, 2018). Whenever I teach critical approaches to higher education and student affairs, my students tend to struggle with the social construction aspect of these analyses. They agree with the espoused values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, but have a difficult time unpacking the inequities baked into seeming neutral institutional policies and practices. I have been looking for a textbook that can present these often abstract ideas in a way that is more tangible for students. I may have found it in Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
The first two chapters of the book provide an analysis of how search engines (primarily Google) give the impression of neutral information sharing while, in actuality, crafting a highly biased presentation of knowledge. Noble opens the book with a story about Googling "black girls" and receiving mostly pornographic results. Noble goes on to explain that she Googled "black girls" a couple of years later while looking up fun activities for her stepdaughter's birthday party. The results were still almost exclusively hypersexual, even on her own computer with an Internet history replete with Black feminist material that should suggest a user that might be interested in more than a pornographic perspective. These experiences led Noble to raise the following questions, which guide the analysis in the pages that follow:
This best information, as listed by rank in the search results, was certainly not the best information for me or the children I love. For whom, then,...