Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble (review)

Critical scholars name and interrogate the discrepancy that exists between the espoused value of diversity and reality of structural oppression embedded in higher education institutions (Poon, 2018). Whenever I teach critical approaches to higher education and student affairs, my students tend to struggle with the social construction aspect of these analyses. They agree with the espoused values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, but have a difficult time unpacking the inequities baked into seeming neutral institutional policies and practices. I have been looking for a textbook that can present these often abstract ideas in a way that is more tangible for students. I may have found it in Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

The first two chapters of the book provide an analysis of how search engines (primarily Google) give the impression of neutral information sharing while, in actuality, crafting a highly biased presentation of knowledge. Noble opens the book with a story about Googling "black girls" and receiving mostly pornographic results. Noble goes on to explain that she Googled "black girls" a couple of years later while looking up fun activities for her stepdaughter's birthday party. The results were still almost exclusively hypersexual, even on her own computer with an Internet history replete with Black feminist material that should suggest a user that might be interested in more than a pornographic perspective. These experiences led Noble to raise the following questions, which guide the analysis in the pages that follow:

This best information, as listed by rank in the search results, was certainly not the best information for me or the children I love. For whom, then, was this the best information, and who decides? What were the profit and other motives driving this information to the top of the results? How had the notion of neutrality in information ranking gone so sideways as to be perhaps one of the worst examples of racist and sexist classification of Black women in the digital age yet remain so unexamined and without public critique? (p.18).

These words and many others in the book jolted me out of my naiveté about the role Google plays in shaping my own reality. Although I know intellectually that Google is a commercial product created for the purpose of making money for shareholders, it does not feel that way. Google feels benignly neutral, diligently answering my queries and serving them up in a convenient, user-friendly list. Even when I read news stories about Google's nefarious acts, they lack staying power because of Google's ubiquity. Noble made me think about how a single article killed the Chick-fil-A for me, but multiple accounts of Google's bad behavior never made me even consider boycotting it.

Part of the issue, of course, is that Chickfil-A is much easier to avoid than Google. This point presents a good opportunity to discuss hegemony in a way that is relatable to students. I have not yet assigned Algorithms of Oppression in class, but I have brought it into discussions; students seem to connect to the concepts of ubiquity and hegemony more readily in the context of Google than examples I have tried to use in the past. Noble's work has helped me to articulate my own revelations about Google as a non-neutral, decidedly ideological structure, which stimulates students to generate their own examples.

In the middle two chapters of the book, Noble highlights the consequences of allowing corporate entities domination over a public good, a situation highly analogous to the current state of higher education. Noble unpacks how Google and its defenders argue that their results simply reflect popular searches and that it is therefore not the company's job to intervene. She reveals this policy as not objective reality, but rather an ideological position that chooses to ignore minority perspectives. She raises the important question, "If majority rules in...