Decolonizing Information Technology: The Black Pursuit of a New Humanistic Code

This presentation proposes the decolonization of information technology, calling out its misuses and malpractices in revealing the Black human being through scientific cognition, pursuing a new humanistic code as a restoring mechanism. While informed by physics and exact sciences, information technology has largely failed to objectively unveil the Black human being within the realm of humanity and humanism. Born as part and parcel of the legacies and practices of colonialism, information technology has often supported racist (and sexist) ideals of humanity and humanism. Engaging in disfigurement, distortion, and destruction of the Black human being, face, body, and body of knowledge, information technology has often rendered the Black humanity invisible in official computer data, codes, and facial recognition algorithms. This invisibility has scientifically undermined and obscured the truth about what a “human being” is, affecting the Black humanity with post-epistemic trauma, the consequences of epistemic violence or the systemic removal of the colonized from the realm of humanism and scientific cognition. Post-epistemic trauma includes the postcolonial societies’ struggle to find a recognizable technological system of reference because information technology’s logic of invisibilization continues to regulate and rule over the means to humanity and humanism through neoliberalism. To re-enter humanity and re-center humanism, Africans and people of African descent must continuously engage in epistemic decolonization and pursuit of new humanism long envisioned by Frantz Fanon, including the abandonment of racist (and sexist) values, institutions, and practices and assertion of African and African diaspora ways of being and knowing.