Understanding Digital Racism: Networks, Algorithms, Scale

Digital technologies are proliferating and transforming racism, complicating our understanding, and making contemporary racism increasingly harder to challenge. Digital racism takes many forms, such as viral memes circulating via social media platforms; the swarming of networked users targeting people of colour; hidden algorithmic classification and sorting; and the racial profiling of policing and surveillance systems. The variance and complexity of technologically mediated racisms begs the question of whether adequate attention has been paid to digital processes and environments through which race materializes.

Understanding Digital Racism analyzes the digital realm as a race-making technology, by exploring the rise, dissemination, and evolution of contemporary racism. Sanjay Sharma offers an innovative approach for understanding how racism─as informational and im/material post-racial phenomena─is manifested and remade through digital technologies. Digital racism is grasped through foregrounding the sociotechnical entanglements of racism and digital technologies. An analysis of networked relations, information flows, subjectivation and affects are critical to addressing the production of digital racism.