5 Shocking Ways People Keep Making Technology Racist

The cards were named after Shirley Page, Kodak studio model, human calibration tool, and possessor of skin whiter than fresh snow on an American Apparel store. As you might imagine, equipment tuned to make Shirley shine her brightest made those with darker skin appear "dulled and darkened," but no one much gave a shit up until the 1970s. That's when Kodak competitor Polaroid stepped in, not with a new type of printer, but with a new type of camera flash designed to better reflect black skin. We'd laud Polaroid's efforts ... if not for the fact that they only did it to better aid South Africa in enforcing apartheid.

In the end, it wasn't humanism, but consumerism that leveled the film development field. When producers of dark chocolate and dark-stained furniture complained that Kodak film made their products look shitty, Kodak finally took note. More modern Shirley cards feature not just a single, pearly white Shirley, but an entire mixed-race gaggle of them.

It's not the only time a camera spelled out its racist tendencies more clearly than your uncle's Facebook page. In 2009, coworkers Wanda Zamen and Desi Cryer discovered that HP's face-tracking webcams had the same priorities as a Texas Congressman.

On the plus side, if we need someone on a heist to get past motion sensors ...

HP issued a public apology explaining the camera's shortcomings in regards to tracking black faces, but Google wasn't listening. When scrolling through his photo roll in 2015, Oluwafemi J Alcine noticed that Google Photos' automated tagging algorithm had labeled cars as cars, bikes as bikes ... and him and his African-American friend as gorillas.

This PokeRedlining was a result of Niantic, the game's developer, recycling the maps from their previous game Ingress, which boasted mostly white male players. A similar snafu struck retail monolith Amazon, when a Bloomberg report found that the company's same-day delivery service redlined African-American neighborhoods in cities from Atlanta to Chicago to Boston. In determining service availability, Amazon relied on factors like an area's proximity to fulfillment centers, and its number of Prime members -- factors that, wouldn't you know it, favored mostly white neighborhoods.

That's a video of Dragon Con attendee T.J. Fitzpatrick, who discovered that the soap dispensers in an Atlanta Marriott hotel worked just fine for his white friend, while altogether ignoring his own black hands. The technology depends largely on the skin's ability to reflect infrared light -- and, you guessed it, black skin reflects back significantly less. It doesn't end there: Wellness tracking devices such as the Fitbit rely on a similar tracking method -- shining light onto skin and measuring what gets reflected back. Laser skin treatments for cosmetic and tattoo removal purposes are also affected, albeit in a more horrific fashion: until very recently, such treatments were off limits to those with darker complexions, lest they risk "permanently charred skin."

As a consequence of sloppy, improperly tested technology like this, people of color couldn't play Pokemon in their neighborhoods, couldn't remove that regrettable Sexy SpongeBob tattoo, and couldn't even wash their hands at a nerd convention. That last one might be some kind of twisted war crime.

Saikat Bhowmik is a kid who has grown beard to look like a grown-up. He has a Serious account at Twitter and an Amuzic (that's not a spelling mistake) YouTube channel.

Know what technology isn't racist? This dancing robot toy. Just don't look into his Reddit comment history.

Also check out 6 Jobs That Are Super Racist, And Nobody Seems To Care and The Racist Pencil Test: 5 WTF Quack 'Tests' Humanity Devised.

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