As collaborators, we met over zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 had a sobering effect in that there were so many facets of inequality, inequity, and injustice which became too blatantly invisible to ignore -- from the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, to the white-supremacist demonstrations in Summer 2020, to the blatantly racist rhetoric around voter suppression and “legitimate votes” in the November 2020 election. The COVID-19 pandemic itself made inequity even more visible. The differences between zoom workers, essential workers, the unemployed, and the elite class were laid bare, and the country debated whether it was biology or culture (rather than inequity) underlying the reason certain populations got sicker from COVID-19. Behind every public health discussion -- whether to open restaurants indoors, whether to require masking, or whether to travel -- were assumptions regarding what responsibilities individuals had to protect others from the spread of such an inequitable disease. Friends and family erupted into arguments over the morality of eating inside a restaurant, visiting Mexico, attending a Black Lives Matter protest, or going for an unmasked walk. It’s fair to say that in 2020, inequity was forced into our national consciousness in a way that it hadn’t ever been before -- and the responses each of us as individuals, communities, states, and counties had -- have changed the world in a way that we likely won’t fully understand for years.

In our zoom discussions, what began as connections made based on shared interests became regular meetings--with the topics of inequity, divisive rhetoric, and current events often taking a forefront in these conversations. One day, one of the cisgender white men among us asked, “How do you make certain you aren’t replicating oppressive structures in your interactions?”

Another of us offered, “You can’t make certain. Every context is different, every scenario unique. Instead, you have to develop the ability to read each unique moment at every level. Our tendency to ask questions like this one, which presumes an answer where no definitive answer should be found, is of limited utility to that work. It sets up a false binary.”

Another noted: “This question in general is particularly important work for people who hold privileged identities -- e.g. white, cisgender -- in America. When one’s social location is that of ‘the oppressor’, almost every interaction holds the potential for the reification of systemic forms of violence. The suggestion that one should be able to ‘make certain’ not to replicate oppressive structures is fraught.” Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” carries a reminder that the presumption and expectation of perfectionism, certainty, and either-or thinking (what we refer to here as binary thinking) are functions of white supremacy culture (Okun, 1999). Equity does not function on certainty, perfectionism, and binary thinking, but instead on a plurality of states existing at once.

In response to the question of certainty and reproducing oppressive structures, we likened the work of anti-racism to a quantum computer. While normal computers run on binary code where bits operate as either 1s or 0s, in a quantum computer, code gets written for qubits, which exist as 1, 0, or simultaneously as both(1). The metaphor seemed to work on a number of levels. Rather than thinking of issues relevant to the work of anti-racism in binary ways like the way our question was posed we agreed that complexity, nuance, and the willingness to push each other to think more deeply about this question were necessary. Instead of making certain, we have to do our best to make certain and acknowledge that certainty is an imperfect metric. One must be constantly vigilant in their abilities to ‘read the room,’ assess dynamics of power and privilege, be conscious and open to how gender, class, ability, language, etc play out differently in each situation, and how the inputs and outputs of each situation have ramifications far beyond the situation itself. Additionally, as individuals, we’re more likely to act in a way such that our actions may support the liberation of some, but not all, and thus exist between the two ends of a liberation-oppression spectrum. In other words, a single human being is far more like a qubit than a classic bit.

From what little we knew about quantum computers, the comparison between these concepts, the work of critical race theory, and the practice of anti-racism seemed well-aligned and helpful to supporting the understanding of these complex topics(2). We wondered what other parallels might be drawn between these spaces. We considered concepts such as amplitude, quantum superposition, and probability strings (Hidary, 2019; Trabesinger, 2017, and identified analogous pairs in critical race theory (e.g., the amplitude of a qubit (Hidary, 2019) mapped onto the critical framework people must develop to do anti-racist work (Freire et. al, 2018; Kendi, 2019); quantum superposition mapped onto the recognition of multiple, valid lived realities (Delgado et. al, 2017; Okun, 1999); the concept of fractals put forth by adrienne marie brown (2017) in Emergent Strategy shared important and powerful similarities to probability strings.

We recognized the potential of bringing two seemingly unrelated concepts into conversation with one another. The Medici Effect, by Franz Johansson, identifies the potential for innovation when connecting two seemingly disparate topics or ideas. Johansson would call concepts like quantum anti-racism an intersectional idea(3). Intersectional ideas, he claims, change the world by giant strides in new directions whereas directional ideas evolve in generally predictable, linear patterns. (Importantly: this is not to be confused with the concept of intersectionality, a foundational paradigm in Black feminism first framed by Kimberle Crenshaw (Crenshaw, 1989) that offers a framework to understand how aspects of one’s identity--race, class, and gender, for example--overlap to frame one’s experience of the world.)

A critical and timely similarity is how these technologies are perceived. Those in the quantum computing space working to communicate the technology to the general public run up against the challenge of people avoiding the topic altogether for its seeming complexity (Aaronson, 2021). Critical race theory has become particularly shrouded in propagandist obfuscation, especially in recent months. Attempts by Republican politicians in states like Tennessee, Idaho, Iowa, and Oklahoma have sought--somewhat successfully--to outlaw the inclusion of critical race theory in public schools at the state level, largely through the promotion of gross misunderstandings of the concept (Sawchuck, 2021). Another example--in a high-profile story, the scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones was originally denied tenure at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina, for the controversy ignited by her Pulitzer-Prize winning project, “1619”--which draws from critical race theory among other disciplines to tell the story of how the construct of race developed and was made canon in US history.

Arguably, those who dismiss critical race theory also wish to avoid the topic for its complexity: the complexity of one understanding of “history” juxtaposed with another valid and less-well-known one--one that acknowledges oppression, genocide, and instituionalized segregation.

In the same way that quantum computing may serve to help delineate anti-racism and critical race theory, perhaps this metaphor might also help clarify some of the concepts in quantum computing for a broader audience(4).

To achieve a more just and liberated world, people must operate more like the qubits we actually are, we surmised — complex beings operating between many spectra simultaneously — rather than residing within a simplistic binary like bits, as pictured in Figure 1. The goal of a given scenario may be to avoid the replication of oppressive contexts, but it may also be to eradicate those contexts altogether. Humanity must evolve beyond binary understandings of concepts that require more complexity than a “0s-and-1s” understanding if we want to build a world that operates with life, humanity, and love at the foundation. The metaphor of a quantum computer felt important to understanding how we might maintain a complex, non-prescriptive attitude towards the everyday work of liberation. The outcome of this work is a heuristic we’re calling the Critical Race Quantum Computer (CRQC) and a concept we’re calling Quantum Anti-Racism.