With impunity, algorithm makers can lower their sights from creating the mind of God to building bias-free code. Hiring can favor Black engineers and those of other marginalized groups. Training can bring to light the historical and cultural issues that give rise to biased code. Data used to train algorithms can be scoured for embedded bias.

International Time Recording Company, which manufactured time clocks for recording workers’ hours; Computing Scale Company, which produced retail weighing scales; and Bundy Manufacturing, which produced key-actuated time clocks and also owned prime real estate in Endicott, New York. Flint rolled these diverse businesses into the

Many had risked their lives on the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and Africa. They had experienced a world where bravery, not skin color, determined their fate.

Black Workers Alliance (BWA), a group of IBM employees who had organized to advocate for the rights of Black workers within the company.

Pullman porters symbolized the subservience that Black men needed to survive slavery and Jim Crow, and that White Americans desired, but they also represented a New Negro, to use a term popularized by Alain Locke, a writer and philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. Having fought and died to save democracy in World War I, Black American soldiers

“Before even one Jew was encased in a hard-coded Hollerith identity, it was only the money that mattered.”29

“Computers will control your life one day. Better if you learn how to control them first.”

Tech companies, after all, were never in the business of altruism; instead, they have always sought to shore up their bottom lines to please their investors. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo cannot provide citizens with unbiased information about critical issues regarding race. Facebook and Twitter cannot host open public discourses that ultimately

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