[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Tue Aug 18 09:37:11 PDT 2015

Matt hits on the key passage of what I understand as the article's point:
Unix is not a direct cause of racism nor is Unix inherently racist,
instead, certain programming practices reflect broader cultural ideas about
modularity and standardization.  These ideas also manifest in ideas about
race during the Civil Rights movement and beyond.  Again, I think David
Golumbia's *The Cultural Logic of Computation* expresses this more fully to
highlight that computation is not simply about the technology itself but
has broad implications for how we conceive of and think about the world
around us.  McPherson shows that the sort of thinking that manifests itself
in "color-blind" policies and civil rights backlash have parallels with the
sort of rhetoric expressed in Unix programming manuals.

I think the response to this article has a lot do with broader ideas about
what constitutes the "history of computing."  Articles like this one are
common or at least not out of place in critical code studies, platform
studies, American studies departments, English departments, and cultural
studies departments.  As Thomas Haigh notes in his excellent overview of
the field "The History of Information Technology," there is little of the
cultural or linguistic turn in history that has been taken by historians of
computing.

Paul's recommendation, I think, represents a good example of how different
disciplines conceive of what is important.  The book he mentioned, which I
admit I have only briefly looked at, is about African American individuals
at NASA but it does not go in depth on the ways that racial assumptions
manifest themselves in technological production or use.  That, I think is
the more important point of this article rather than if there is a direct
causality between racism and Unix.

Sincerely,

Nabeel

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Christopher Leslie <chris.leslie at nyu.edu>
wrote:

> Thanks for initiating this interesting discussion, Janet. We had
> considered making Diversity the theme of this year's SIGCIS workshop, and
> maybe we dropped the idea too soon.
>
> I agree that McPherson's article is not fully developed, but then again,
> it's not a journal article. She conspicuously labels sections fragments and
> is writing to explore. It's heartening to hear that several people are
> using this as a conversation starter in their classrooms.
>
> McPherson cites Winner and other scholars who border on a deterministic
> analysis, and her writing walks that line too. However, we could also fault
> her article for going the other way. Cultural determinism is as much a
> fallacy as technological determinism, and we could fault her question that
> way as well: just because Unix was developed in an era when racism was
> keenly felt, does Unix have to somehow bear the mark of that culture?
>
> However, the keenly expressed antagonism to this question seems
> disproportionate. As a profession, we're willing to say that personal
> computing carries traces of cold war culture (thanks to Edwards and
> others), or that the economic and political system of the USSR made it
> unlikely that a distributed communication system would develop (thanks to
> Gerovitch). It's clear that we don't have the full picture of how the
> interaction between the predominantly white, male culture at the time of
> Unix's development would result in particular design decisions. At the very
> least, though, we could assert that the particular kind of time-sharing we
> got worked well with a community that was lacking in diversity.
>
> Asking these kinds of questions is important because we are still dealing
> with a community that is finding it difficult to diversify. The medical
> profession, which also was largely white and male in the 1960s, made it a
> professional imperative to diversify with the result that medical school
> admissions are much different than they were 50 years ago. Engineering and
> computer science have not been successful in that regard, despite noble
> attempts in various corners. SIGCIS and other groups could make an effort
> to explore the reasons for this failure.
>
> Chris Leslie
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 8/18/15 7:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 8/18/15 6:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul wrote:
>>>
>>>> Who came up with those
>>>> changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> peek and poke were microcomputer additions
>>>
>>> The string editing things were additions from Tymshare for Super BASIC
>>> on the SDS 940. I was told Super BASIC's extensions on the Harvard TSS
>>> 940 system was the influence for those functions in Micro-Soft BASIC.
>>>
>>> RSTS BASIC on the PDP-11 had many of the same extensions which carried
>>> forward into DEC's other implementations of the language.
>>>
>>>
>> I found a collection of BASIC users manuals for many different systems in
>> the CHM archives a while back, so bitsavers.org has a collection of
>> many of them filed by manufacturer. I had been researching where the
>> language changes originated from for a paper, which I never finished.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Christopher S. Leslie, Ph.D.
> Co-Director of Science and Technology Studies Program
> Faculty Fellow in Residence for Othmer Hall and Clark Street
> Vice Chair, IFIP History of Computing Working Group 9.7
>
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