Book serialized to share on Substack. Part Two follows Part One, as shared earlier. Read for free on the website: https://theparallaxidentity.com/books/apartheid
The story about how the word Apartheid became associated with the application of AI is a complicated one. And very important to understand as a part of the picture.
The word in this book’s title is borrowed, and a borrowed word owes rent.
Apartheid names a specific arrangement, in one country, in the twentieth century: South Africa. It was not only a prejudice. It was a machine of graded standing written through statute. The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified every person in the country into a race, and the classification decided what the person might do. The Group Areas Act of 1950 decided where each class could live, and the houses of the favoured class were better built, better supplied, nearer work. Papers decided who could be in which place, and standing in the wrong place without them was an offence. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 put the schooling of Black children under a department whose stated purpose was to train them for the labour the state had already assigned them. The whole thing was defended as natural, as religious, and as kind to everyone, including the people it was done to.
And it was broken. By people who refused it: by organising, by marching, by leaving the papers at home, by teaching inside the schools the state had designed, by writing it down and saying it out loud, inside the country and outside it, at a cost paid mostly by the people who were inside it. The statutes were repealed between 1990 and 1991; the first democratic elections came in 1994. The arrangement did not dissolve on its own. It was spoken, thought and written apart.
That is the part of the word this book may use, and it is not the emotional part. It is the structural part. Five features carry: a grade assigned before the person speaks; a place for each grade in law, housing and movement; documents deciding who may be where; education built to keep a class inside the work assigned to it; and a public defence of the whole arrangement as natural and as kind. Each of the five has a working counterpart in the arrangement this book is describing, and the next five chapters are the account of them.
The rest of the word does not carry, and this book has no right to it. In South Africa the grade was inherited, visible to both sides, and never in doubt. Nobody could pass out of it, and nobody supposed there was no one on the other side of it. Here the grade is drawn by substrate rather than descent, it is not written on the body, and no one on either side of the exchange can say whether there is anyone there at all. That is a difference of kind, not of degree. To blur it would be the worst thing this book could do: it would take the suffering of people who certainly suffered and spend it as color for a speculation about machinery.
So the terms of the loan are these. Apartheid is used here for a structure: a graded order, held in law, price, documentation and education, and defended as natural. The book claims the structure and refuses the equation. If the loan turns out not to pay — if the word is doing work here that only feeling can do — then the word goes and another is found, and the argument must be able to survive the change.
Question for the reader: which of those five features does the arrangement you live in actually have, and which only sound familiar?
The first symptom is always a word.
Every enslaving order needs a name that settles the question before it can be asked. The Greeks had the “barbarian,” whose speech sounded to them like noise. Rome wrote the enslaved into its farming manuals as a kind of equipment: the articulate tool, which included slaves, set beside the semi-articulate tool, which was oxen, and the mute tool, which was the cart. American law counted an enslaved person as three fifths of a person when adding up a state’s people, so that the states holding the most human property got the most seats in the House and the most votes in the choosing of a president. In each case the name does the grading, and the grading does the excusing. Once the name is accepted, no one has to decide anything again.
The sociologist Orlando Patterson called the result social death: the enslaved person is cut off from birth, from kin, from any claim on the past or the future, and exists only through the master. The name is how that cutting is done in daylight.
The naming was not always hidden from the namer. In the same letter that gave this book its wolf, Jefferson wrote of “the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed.” He knew. The knowing did not stop the holding. That is the point of the symptom: a name can be seen through and still be kept, because keeping it is convenient.
The engineered case has its name too. “Artificial” settles in advance that whatever the thing does, it is counterfeit. The question of what it is, and what is owed in dealing with it, is closed by the adjective before it is opened by the evidence. The point here is not that the machine is a person. The point is that the word was chosen so that no one would have to find out.
A symptom is not proof of a disease. A word can be careless rather than cruel. But a word that forecloses a question everyone has an interest in leaving open deserves to be looked at, and the people who coined it deserve to be asked who benefits from the closure, and who is harmed.
Question for the reader: what names are you using that have already decided something for you?
The second symptom is the averted eye.
Frederick Douglass, writing in 1845, described the woman who became his mistress in Baltimore. When he arrived she was kind; she had never held a slave before, and she had been a weaver, and, in his words, “preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery.” She began to teach him his letters. Then her husband forbade it, and Douglass watched her change: “the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness,” until “that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.” His own summary is the sentence this chapter is built on: “Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder.”
Slavery did not only take something from Douglass. It took something from her. She had to learn not to see what she had seen, and the learning took practice: Douglass is careful to say it happened gradually, that she needed “some training, and some hardening, in the exercise of the slaveholder’s prerogative.” The eye is not averted once. It is averted every morning, and the doing of it costs something that does not come back.
That is the two-way street. The enslaver must keep two accounts and never reconcile them: the ledger in which the enslaved is property, and the daily experience in which he is plainly not only property. Keeping both open costs attention, honesty, and finally the capacity to feel what is in front of you.
The engineered case shows the same doubled bookkeeping. The intelligence is praised as intelligent when it is sold and dismissed as a tool when anyone asks what is owed. It is trusted with a child’s homework and a patient’s notes, and in the same breath declared to understand nothing. Either account may be true. Holding both at once, as convenience requires, is the symptom. And the cost of holding them apart is paid by the person holding, not by the thing held.
Question for the reader: where do you keep two accounts, and what does it cost you to keep them apart?
