SMITH: No, Princeton, technology cannot be ‘anti-racist’
On this week’s episode of the Campus Countdown, Video Reporter Addison Smith explains the problem with Princeton’s “Can We Build Anti-Racist Technologies?” course.
The course, which aims to “build and test systems that embrace anti-racism as a core value”, complains that “soap dispensers” are problematic because they supposedly “ don’t see dark skin”, as well as facial recognition tools that fail to “misidentify black faces”.
Smith took aim at this analysis by pointing out that, “technology can’t be racist. It can’t be evil or immoral at all. Now, technology can be abused and used for other racist or immoral purposes, but that doesn’t seem to be a distinction that Princeton bothers to try and make… They’re saying that technology itself is corrupt”.
Drawing on gun control, Smith said that the accusation “makes sense” when you consider that the left blames guns for deadly shootings, rather than holding the person responsible to account.
“They never want to blame people for mass shootings… they just immediately jump to demands for gun control. ‘The gun is the problem’, they say, not the people using them. It’s the same thing here”.
In the rest of the episode, Smith criticized a UT Austin professor who said that Critical Race Theory is “much needed” in academia, and broke down Notre Dame students and faculty who are protesting the potential incoming of Chick-Fil-A to their campus due to LGBT controversy. In the woke tweet of the week, Smith discussed UNC student body president Lamar Richards’ enthusiasm for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenureship at Howard University, calling it, “The beginning of a revolution”.
Watch the full episode above.
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