The recounts an episode from the TV sitcom Better off Ted: a corporation installs automatic technology, but a glitch in the sensors mean they do not respond to people with dark skin. The episode demonstrates how efficiency and productivity often take precedent over equity as companies seek to protect their bottom line. While such technologies overlook Black people, others, such as surveillance technology, make Blackness hypervisible. This exposure also evokes film and the ways that photography has historically been used to depict and substantiate racial classifications. While exposure implies visibility it often implies misreading, where racialized individuals are “constantly exposed as something [they] are not” (101). Some respond to aesthetic judgments by insisting on their beauty, while other scholars, such as Mia Mingus, call for an assertion of one’s own aesthetic value that is not concerned with beauty at all.

In the late twentieth century, exposure techniques for photography did not adequately account for a variety of skin tones, leaving darker-skinned subjects blurred. On the other hand, Polaroid’s ID2 camera faced backlash for implementing an added flash to improve pictures of Black South Africans for their passbooks, documents used to restrict the movement of Black people during apartheid. In both cases and many others, photo technologies repeatedly privilege light-skinned subjects.

Visibility opens individuals up to others’ gazes, which interpret, despise, or fetishize what they see. Further, facial recognition technologies developed in an ethnically homogenous region often have difficulty distinguishing faces of people from elsewhere. The majority of software worldwide has the most difficulty distinguishing Black faces, leading to people being unfairly suspected.

Some scientists and governments idealize eugenics, but it is racist and ableist; it pursues a subjective human perfection that is falsely framed as objective. Eugenics, Benjamin argues, is genetic tailoring. It also encourages the reproduction and preservation of some lives over others along racial and class lines.

Genetic science has produced Forensic DNA phenotyping. This perpetuates the practice of relying on stereotypes to assume someone’s criminality. Though facial recognition technology struggles to identify Black faces, privacy is least accessible to oppressed people. With DNA science as with forensic DNA phenotyping, data that is hardly sufficient is weaponized to make assumptions about people, their character, and the perceived criminality.