At the most recent faculty forum held, Professor Allan Farrell delivered a presentation, held at the Weeks Lounge in Pearsons Hall from 12-1:30 p.m. on Sept. 30. Farrell, an assistant professor of sociology, was joined by a diverse array of faculty members for a talk about his research on racial inequality and artificial intelligence. The forum was catered by Bon Appétit with a Middle Eastern buffet.
Farrell’s area of research is focused on perceptions of racial identity and changing demographics. Just this year, Farrell published a solo-authored paper titled “Reinscribing the Racial Order: Reflected Whiteness and the Anticipated Racial Hierarchy among Multiracial Americans” published in Social Currents, along with several co-authored papers as part of a research team in publications such as Ethnicities, Social Sciences, Sociological Spectrum, The Journal of Child and Family Studies, and the Dubois Review. Farrell has eight manuscripts under review.
Farrell opened the presentation by reflecting on moments in American history where the institutions that distribute resources across society are disrupted. And in these moments, the American people are forced to ask whether or not this is the end of racial inequality, if racial inequality will reduce at this moment, or if it will transform and become something that really re-entrenches racial inequality back into society.”
Farrell proceeded to enumerate such moments, like the Reconstruction era, the civil rights movement, and the unstable modern era. Despite the seemingly durable gains made during each period, such as enfranchisement for Black men during Reconstruction and civil rights in the mid-20th century, they were subsequently rolled back in periods of political turmoil, such as Jim Crow. He pointed out that we are now seeing backsliding on even civil rights-era gains, particularly surrounding voting rights. “… A lot of what looked like long-term changes will turn out to be fairly temporary overall,” he said.
Farrell delivered a timeline of his own life, including some of the major changes he himself has experienced. These include the introduction of dial-up internet, what he calls the supposed “great equalizer,” the introduction of multi-racial categories to the census, and the election of Barack Obama“The great equalizer, the internet, ended up sorting people very efficiently into existing hierarchies,” Farrell said. “The post-racial decade, concluded in 2016, the election that … many interpreted to be a response to the very diversification that I heralded when I was growing up.”
Extending this history of disruption, Farrell argued that this moment will bring about major changes as well. The forces driving this change are, in Farrell’s eyes, demographic changes as well as technological advancement. However, he expressed doubt that these changes are guaranteed to bring about the hoped-for utopia.
Farrell said his research seeks to address “how certain racial inequality measures are sustained in the face of these changes.” This breaks down into what he called three different “working clusters.” The first of these, he said, is shifting boundaries,” “As demographics change, for immigration, moves, and blurs, racial factories in the United States, what happens to the hierarchy and the mechanisms that sustain it?” he said. He answered this question by saying that racial hierarchy is anticipated in such a manner that “… people who mix ancestry, people in interracial families, more generally, don’t experience themselves as living beyond the racial order. Rather, they anticipate how people would place them and organize their lives around that anticipation.” This is what he terms “the anticipated racial hierarchy.”
The second cluster concerns religion. “As the country becomes more diverse, religiously and racially, religious institutions are adapting to communities that look less and less like the ones that they evolved to serve in the first place,” Farrell said. “The question is whether they adapt to that in ways that are reducing equality.” Farrell said he finds that the increasing fusion of racial and religious identities “helps shape Americans’ reactions to the increasing religious and racial diversity that they are living in every single day.”
The third and final cluster regards emerging technology, specifically large language models. Farrell delivered the product of his research, which demonstrated that, despite being the most adversely affected by the distributive powers of artificial intelligence, communities of color are no more skeptical of it than white people. In order to address this tension, Farrell asked who artificial intelligence has in mind — or more accurately, who the builders of AI have in mind.
He argued that this is the result of a double bind effect. “Neither the builder nor the regulator is presumed to be on the side of non-white individuals.” This means that people of color are just as distrustful of regulatory discourse around AI and state mechanisms of enforcement as they are of the technology itself. This is exemplified by the rates of skepticism distributed across racial demographics.
The talk concluded and opened up to questions from staff and faculty. The next faculty forum will take place on Nov. 11, with speaker Tom Stojsavljevic.
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’28
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