NOMIS-Lecture: Race’s Many Metamorphoses: Racial Vision from Skin Tone Studies to Artificial Intelligence

Anna Skarpelis, NOMIS-Fellow

18th century doctors obsessed over the question of what “caused” Black skin. 21st century computer vision engineers are trying to generate synthetic Black faces in order to balance racially biased machine learning datasets. Both projects are outgrowths of substantively different political economies: slavery-based capitalism, and modern democracy.
 
That both locate race in measurable bodily characteristics could lead us to describe contemporary developments in artificial intelligence as continuous with a physiognomic past, especially on account of shared essentializing and biological notions of race. Such a position has many merits.
 
The lecture however proposes a supplementary view that shifts the interpretive lens from continuities of racial essentialism, to those of what I call racial metamorphosis — the changing of race of a single person within their lifetime. Drawing on one example from the history of medicine, and another from contemporary computer vision engineering, the lecture addresses questions of continuity and change within scientific practice and situates them within larger, complex histories of race and racism.

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