By Whom?
We contribute to this conversation as people concerned, first and foremost, with the learning and development of an anti-racist, intersectional race critical framework for all. Benjamin (2019) identifies the need for our contribution as educators in the technology space when she says, “Justice… is not a static value but an ongoing methodology that can and should be incorporated into tech design. For this reason, too, it is vital that people engaged in tech development partner with those who do important sociocultural work honing narrative tools through the arts, humanities, and social justice organizing” (pp. 192-193). Our personal politics as authors are important as our beliefs compose the many sides of our personal abilities to function like qubits.
We employ an intersectional feminist definition of anti-racism as that which should be understood when working with the CRQC because we espouse such work ourselves. We believe in a definition of justice that recognizes the baseline work of liberation for all people as being most well-represented by the liberation of trans Black women. Scholars of CRT argue that the most oppressed person in the world is not just Black women, but transgender Black women. Transgender Black women face overt, legalized, and de facto sexism, racism, misogynoir, transphobia, and transmisogynoir. For example, transgender women of color face increased homelessness, medical discrimination, hiring discrimination, and domestic violence--as compared to white transgender women and cisgender people of all races (Graham 2014, Jackson et. al, 2018, Jackson et al. 2020, Mulholland 2020, Williams 2016). The liberation of transgender Black women would represent progress to the degree of liberation for all. Therefore, anti-racism recognizes the intersecting mechanisms of power and oppression as they act not just along lines of race, but also gender, sexuality, class, ability, language, time, space, and scale as well. “Intersectional” has already been defined by scholars as including considerations of the ways in which power and privilege operate in conversation with each other across age, gender, ability of all kinds, socio-economic status, sexuality, religion, and geographic location (Crenshaw, 1989; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2011), as well as across the micro/macro scale of societal interconnectedness (Kaba and Murakawa, 2021; maree brown, 2020; Mingus, 2016). This definition holds particular importance since it’s precisely this definition we seek to unpack and better understand through the framework of the CRQC.
But to the extent that our perspectives are simply those of ~8 billion qubit-like humans on planet earth, the shared tool holds far more importance than our own perspectives as authors. We also recognize that in the same ways that a coder’s biases impact the codes they write, so too are our own biases likely to show up throughout the establishment of this tool and concept. We acknowledge the CRQC as an open concept tool for continuous co-creation among those who take it up and those who write the code.
Table of Contents