This week, we welcome Vicki White, President of Chicago Books to Women in Prison, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that distributes paperback books to incarcerated women. For more than 15 years they’ve provided a critical intervention into an oppressive system by offering the self-empowerment, education and entertainment that reading provides.

Volunteers meet every weekend to fulfill requests from women in state and Federal prisons nationwide, as well as in Cook County Jail. They match requests to an inventory of thousands of donated paperback books. Every woman receives three carefully chosen books or a blank journal—free of charge, hers to keep, no strings attached—along with a personal note. In 2017 the group mailed 4,690 packages of books and blank journals—20% more than in 2016. Vicki discusses how and why they do this work.
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Technology and design aren’t neutral. But how can we correct course on histories and technologies that have too often left out Black voices, with oppressive results? Tonight at After Dark, we’ll consider this question through two lenses: design history and machine learning.

This program features:

Join graphic designer Silas Munro as he explores Black Design in America, which presents a history of design that centers marginalized designers and cultural figures—particularly BIPOC and QTPOC people—while also considering how design has been used as a tool of oppression. Silas Munro is an educator and the founder of poly-mode, a design studio that uses design to inspire people to better themselves and improve society. (Begins at 03:45)

As technologies driven by machine-learning systems become increasingly widespread, it’s become clear that these systems, often used in surveillance or for decision-making, lack the neutrality they promised. Hear from Deborah Raji about the ways in which machine-learning systems reinforce human bias and racism—and engage with her thoughts on how we can “debug” the systems of their discriminatory data and applications. Raji is currently a fellow at Mozilla and was recently celebrated as a key innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review. (Begins at 35:14)
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Vicki White, Chicago Books to Women in Prison