"Algorithms of Oppression: A Society Searching" by PhD Safiya Noble examines the impact of search engines, particularly Google on young women of color. I will attest to apprehension entering this comment, instead roused by insightful perspectives broadening mine in the discipline Ive selected - Sociology. Being the science related to culture, the lens I want for focusing on Black girls in this frame is Pop.

     The perpetrator Noble condemns is the algorithm which I bear no lost love for. I see it as a corrupt legal team representing dueling clienteles and subterfuging both with our political, racial, and cultural sects to drive revenue, the root of all websites. I don't see it as the lynch-pin this round, but the entertainment industry and the way Black women have been pedestalled in dualistic fashion as the culprit.

     For my website BatmamaAndRobbers.com, Wix, the service provider uses search maximization for Google. The device for magnetizing viewers is captioning, the procedure that produces image search results and directs site traffic to the target by physically entitling each image. Noble discusses the image barrages concerning Black girls and their "pornification", a cannonade of White stately types when looking for " Professor Style" and what appeared to me to be eclectic as "Ugly". Again, the bearers of these pics themselves dubbed them, ergo their search results.

     In the 1990s I DJ'd at WRFL-FM, an alternative radio station on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington, I hosted a Women's Music show, Girls In the Garage. Then, ladies only got played once per hour in most markets making them exotic, no issue in the 21st century.

     Still, the female voice can be an awesome instrument, and that's why their immersion happened. At our station, rap and hip-hop were strongly in the mix before the MTV adoption led to mainstream saturation. I see female rap as a genre. (Most) women carry rhythm in a different manner than (most) men. The motion from the hips up to shoulders is observable, and I hold this responsible for unique flow combined with the patent registers. At its best: dynamic, exciting, sexy, fluid, and hyper-kinetic.

     In the 21st Century an unforeseeable evolution has occurred in female hip hop many, me included find disturbing, being the validity of the artist judged on "twerking" ability as a serious component in their repertoire. Awards shows on BET have gathered ire for the salaciousness of the performances that many Black women of achievement feel sabotaged by. My Sociologist self objectifies and sees the algorithm answering hypothetically to the demands of a free market created by the predominantly Jewish 1% musical monolith industry, steered by Black entrepreneur producers to the backside being as important as the flow while women like Megan and Nikki are seen as empowered because of obtained wealth, solicited by sex obsessed White youth predominately seeking power over something they could never conquer, much less employment, usually.

     The Black girl no longer has MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt N Pepa, Foxy Brown, Isis, or Missy Elliott to emulate. The downhill slide seems to be gravitational to cattle versus the fictional super-science of "Ironheart" Riri Williams. I love comic books, superhero movies, teenage and female heroes especially. I dont care for Ms. Williams.

     While Noble's piece makes compelling statements concerning young Black females and Science, I have felt the STEM crisis to be artificial. If an individual lacks interest in a field I see bullying them into an immutable area senseless as it doesn't change depending on the complexion of the paycheck endorser. The lack of the demographic in Silicon Valley is unfortunate, I'll agree, and the number of millionaires they're seeing now are rhyming prostitutes their own mothers and grandmothers are attempting to mimic on TicToc. This is not the algorithm at work and making every Black girl, woman, and grandmother on fictional TV and film a doctor or scientist is insulting to Black women in it's artificial inorganic nature. The trope is already overplayed, down to a majority of ads wherein there is never an Asian female to be found. Beyond that is worse - the lunatic drama queen reality star, again applauded for acting like a buffoon but wealthy in result, telling underaged Nubian women it is meritorious.

     What Black girls arent seeing is genuine evolution - African-American Female Earned Success. My TV heroine due for promotion is Food Network's "Delicious Miss Brown", a successful entrepreneur providing a window into her life that is as beautiful in spirit as she in persona, once delivering while prepping food a speech on the fruits slavery would bear to her as a descendant. That talk to me the viewer impacted my outlook on my dark cousins and our relationship from then on and brought tears to my eyes. Girls need to see perspectives like hers on screen - not screaming like a harpy, drunk, fighting, or selling her body. Uplift, hope, and a sense of promise and worth is what these future ladies deserve. Animal Planets "The Vet Life" has two profitable, competent, telegenic, unembarrassing, and entertaining Black leads exhibiting their practices in Atlanta. A distaff rejoinder of ANY field would be manna for young women reaching for the stars. (BATMAMA NOTE: Post-submission, I learned "The Vet Life" was cancelled due to legal issues. I left it here as the archetype stays germane on this topic - RTH).

     "What came back from that simple, seemingly innocuous search was again nothing short of shocking: with the girls just a few feet away giggling and snorting at their own jokes, I again retrieved a Google Search results page filled with porn when I looked for "black girls". By then, I thought that my own search history and engagement with a lot of Black feminist texts, videos, and books on my laptop would have shifted the kinds of results I would get. It had not. In intending to help the girls search for information about themselves, I had almost inadvertently exposed them to one of the most graphic and overt illustrations of what the advertisers already thought about them: Black girls were still the fodder of porn sites, dehumanizing them as commodities, as products and as objects of sexual gratification." (Noble, 2018)

     I will leave with a final thought being that Dr. Noble exists in some echo chamber. If naivete allowed her in post-2015 to believe a dry search would get her anything but the result she got unveils a heartbreaking misunderstanding of the world or the software. Given that she saw the United Nation's sensationalist/sham anti-woman conspiracy for what it was - blaming research into sexism as a viral misogynistic web - I will assume the latter.

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Sources Cited

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Noble, Satiya "Algorithms of Oppression: A Society Searching", 2018

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