Making Skin Visible through Liberatory Design

Chapter author: Lorna Roth

Page author: jlc

Summary
The photography industry for decades used a photograph of Shirley, a white woman with specific standards of Western beauty, as the reference card to calibrate cameras. Lorna Roth uses the “Shirley norm reference card as a central metaphor for reflecting the change of race relations/aesthetics around the world since 1970s” (276). With advent of video cameras, “color girls” and “china girls” were also used to calibrate skin tones. These cards become problematic because they center these white skin tones as the normal, which affects other individuals with different skin tones in the camera process. Kodak’s company promogulated this problem of perceiving specific color/skin tone over others with their film emulsions, but they decided to finally fix it when furniture stores and chocolate companies didn’t like the quality of their browns. After creating more film emulsions to account for different colors, Kodak also used multi-ethnic image card that attended to skin tones beyond white. Television faced the same issue of skin detection and contrasts particularly when white and black individuals entered the same scene, which prompted new technologies for recognizing both of them. Lastly, Roth advances the concept of “cognitive equity,” which “inscribes a vision of multicultural and multiracial equity directly into the material underside of technologies and products, as well as their emergent practices” (295). This cognitive component seems important because it will engage with “color complex” that individuals have that may make them whiten or change their own skin tone or physical attributes in photos. Overall, then, Roth hopes for cognitive equity through making technologies visible to different skins.

Connection to other readings
Ruha Benjamin’s discussion on the “complex processes involved in ‘exposing’ race in and through technology and the implications of presenting partial and distorted visions as neutral and universal” overlaps with Lorna Roth’s own discussion. It’s very interesting to see how Benjamin and Roth both advocate for the visibility of Blackness in visuality, but they also concern themselves with spaces in which this visibility may become hypervisibility, that is, in the form of surveillance. Benjamin states, “Some technologies fail to see Blackness, while others render Black people hypervisible and expose them to systems of racial surveillance” (202).

Connection to other chapters
I can see some connections between this chapter and "Deception by Design: Digital Skin, Racial Matter, and the New Policing of Child Sexual Exploitation" by Mitali Thakor as it regards, skin, skin color/tone and how it is created, viewed, or visible through technologies. Thakor's research on "Project Sweetie" highlighted how it is that Sweetie, a young Filipino girl, was designed and how a white woman was used to model her facial movements. Although "Deception by Design" does not focus on this point, I think this chapter could allow the opportunty to question Project Sweetie and the methods used in their attempt to replicate skin tones and facial structures of Filipinos.

Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy: While this isn't a direct connection, I think that this chapter's discussion of assistant bots and how they were designed and are used in the digital service industry could be really interesting here.