UMich hiring three ‘Racial Justice & Technology’ professors to battle ‘the new jim code’

As part of an “Anti-Racism Faculty Hiring Initiative” underway at the University of Michigan, the school has announced it will soon hire three “Professorships in Racial Justice & Technology.”

The scholars will battle what the job description calls “the new jim code,” an apparent play on words referencing the Jim Crow racial segregation laws from over a half-century ago.

The job description argues that emerging artificial intelligence, facial recognition cameras and various algorithms that claim to be unbiased are anything but.

“[T]here is growing concern that they reproduce and accelerate racist exclusions, violence, and exploitation via what is variously referred to as ‘surveillance capitalism,’ ‘algorithmic inequality,’ and ‘the new jim code,’” it states.