Hands-free toilets and faucets are certainly smarter now than when they first came on the market. Pete DeMarco told me that when automatic fixtures first got popular in the early 1990s, they had difficulty detecting dark colors, which tended to absorb the laser light instead of reflecting it back to the sensor. DeMarco remembers washing his hands in O'Hare Airport next to an African-American gentleman. DeMarco's faucet worked; the black man's didn't. The black guy then went to DeMarco's faucet, which he had just seen working seconds before; it didn't work. This time DeMarco spoke up, telling him to turn his hands palm side up. The faucet worked.
Ah...structural racism at work.
5 comments:
What "structural racism"? Who's at fault? Perhaps you blame God (the "designer" (FSM?)) for allowing black a more efficient absorber and white reflective?
I suppose the sarcasm wasn't as apparent as I'd like it to be. Faucets are not racist (to the best of my knowledge).
I actually don't think it's *too* far-fetched to make an argument about structural racism here. No choice of technology (e.g. laser-operated automatic faucets -- instead of, say, pedal-operated ones). Presumably the people who designed the faucets were white, and so when they were thinking of ways they could make an automatic faucet, they thought of things that would work for white hands. Then they went and tested them with a bunch of white people, and came to the conclusion that they worked just fine, and then went ahead and installed them all over the place. Structural racism led to a mostly-white R&D establishment, which in turn led to black people's needs being overlooked in the design of technology.
(Oops, that should say "No choice of technology (e.g. ...) is inevitable."
Oh dear...I really mucked this post up, didn't I? Tone is so hard to bring across in blogs.
No, I'm not seriously upset about faucets being racists--this is not a call to arms. But yes, Stentor is right that structural racism does have a role to play in this case. The upshot is this was supposed to be a rather light gibe--a very minor, inconsequential case, but still a case.
But that was poorly communicated. Mea Culpa.
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