At the turn of the twentieth century, WEB Du Bois wrote in regards to the living conditions and culture of black people in Philadelphia, and in addition documented the racist attitudes and beliefs that prevailed in the encompassing white society. He described how unequal outcomes in areas resembling health are due not only to racist ideas, but additionally to the racism embedded in American institutions.
Nearly 125 years later, the concept of “systemic racism” stays central to the study of race. Centuries of information collection and evaluation, just like the work of Du Bois, document the mechanisms of racial inequality in laws and institutions and try to measure their effects.
“There is extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequality in virtually every area of American society,” says MIT Professor Fotini Christia, who directs and co-directs the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Initiative to combat systemic racism (ICSR). “Recent research shows how computer technologies, that are typically trained or based on historical data, can further entrench racial biases. But these same tools may help discover racially unequal outcomes, understand their causes and effects, and even help suggest solutions.”
In addition to coordinating research on systemic racism across campus, the IDSS Initiative has a brand new project aimed toward strengthening and supporting this research beyond MIT: the New ICSR data hubwhich serves as an evolving, public web repository for datasets collected by ICSR researchers.
Data for Justice
“My principal project with ICSR was to make use of Amazon Web Services to construct the info hub for other researchers to make use of in their very own criminal justice projects,” says Ben Lewis SM '24, a recent graduate of MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP). and current doctoral student on the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We want the info hub to be a central location where researchers can access this information using an easy web or Python interface.”
During his master's degree at TPP, Lewis focused his research on race, drug policy, and policing within the United States, examining the impact of drug decriminalization policies on incarceration and overdose rates. He worked as a member of the ICSR Policing team, a research group at MIT that studies the role data plays in shaping police policies and procedures and the way data can highlight or reinforce racial bias.
“The police industry began with a very difficult fundamental query,” says team leader and professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Devavrat Shah. “Can we use data to raised understand the role of race in several decisions across the criminal justice system?”
To date, the info hub provides 911 emergency call information and police stop data collected by ICSR researchers in 40 of the biggest cities within the United States. Lewis hopes the hassle will expand not only to other cities, but additionally to other relevant and typically isolated information, resembling criminal data.
“We need to put the info sets together to get a more comprehensive and holistic view of law enforcement systems,” explains Jessy Xinyi Han, a colleague at ICSR and a doctoral candidate within the IDSS Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program. Statistical methods resembling causal inference will help uncover the causes of disparities, Han says — to “unravel an internet of possibilities” and higher understand the causal effect of race at different stages of the criminal justice process.
“My motivation behind this project is personal,” says Lewis, who was drawn to MIT primarily due to the opportunity to research systemic racism. As a TPP student, he also founded the Cambridge branch of End Overdose, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing drug overdose deaths. His dedication led to a whole bunch of individuals being trained in life-saving drug interventions and earned him the 2024 Collier Medal, an MIT community service award honoring Sean Collier, who gave his life as an MIT Police officer.
“I had members of the family imprisoned. I saw the impact it had on my family and my community, and I spotted that overpolicing and incarceration are a band-aid on problems like poverty and drug use that may trap people in a cycle of poverty.”
Education and impact
Now that the infrastructure for the info hub has been built and the ICSR police team has began sharing datasets, the following step is for other ICSR teams to also start sharing data. The interdisciplinary systemic racism research initiative includes teams working in areas resembling housing, healthcare and social media.
“We need to use the wealth of information available today to reply difficult questions on how racism results from the interaction of multiple systems,” says Munther Dahleh, EECS Professor, IDSS Founding Director and ICSR Co-Lead. “Our interest is in how different institutions perpetuate racism and the way technology can exacerbate or combat it.”
For the creators of the info hub, a very powerful sign of the project's success is that the info will likely be utilized in research projects at MIT and beyond. However, as a resource, the Hub can support this research for users with different experiences and backgrounds.
“The data hub can be about education and empowerment,” says Han. “This information will be utilized in projects aimed toward teaching users the right way to use big data, the right way to conduct data evaluation, and even to learn machine learning tools, all specifically to uncover racial disparities in data.”
“It has been a part of the IDSS mission since day one to advertise the spread of information skills,” says Dahleh. “We are excited in regards to the opportunities that making this data available in educational contexts, including but not limited to our growing IDSSx suite of online course offerings.”
This emphasis on educational potential only increases the ambitions of ICSR researchers at MIT, who need to use data and computational tools to generate actionable insights for policymakers that may result in real change.
“Systemic racism is a widely documented social challenge with far-reaching effects on all areas,” says Christia. “At IDSS, we wish to be sure that evolving technologies, combined with access to ever-increasing amounts of information, are used to combat racist outcomes reasonably than proceed to implement them.”
