In the early 20th century, WEB Du Bois wrote about the conditions and culture of black people in Philadelphia, also documenting the racist attitudes and beliefs that permeated the white society around them. He described how unequal outcomes in areas such as health could be attributed not only to racist ideas, but also to racism embedded in American institutions.
Almost 125 years later, the concept of “systemic racism” is fundamental to the study of race. Centuries of data collection and analysis, such as Du Bois's work, document the mechanisms of racial inequity in laws and institutions and attempt to measure their impact.
“There is extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequity in essentially every sector of American society,” explains Fotini Christia, Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, who directs the Institute for Data, Systems and MIT Society (IDSS), where he also co-directs the Initiative to combat systemic racism (ICSR). “More recent research demonstrates how computational technologies, typically trained or based on historical data, can further entrench racial biases. But these same tools can also help identify racially inequitable outcomes, understand their causes and impacts, and even help propose solutions.”
In addition to coordinating research on systemic racism across campus, the IDSS initiative has a new project aimed at leveraging and supporting this research beyond MIT: the new ICSR Data Centerwhich serves as a public and evolving web repository of data sets collected by ICSR researchers.
Data for justice
“My major project with ICSR involved using amazon Web Services to build the data center for other researchers to use in their own criminal justice-related projects,” says Ben Lewis SM '24, a recent alumnus of the Policy Program and technology (TPP) from MIT. and current doctoral student at MIT Sloan School of Management. “We want the data center to be a centralized place where researchers can access this information through a simple web or Python interface.”
While earning his master's degree at TPP, Lewis focused his research on race, drug policy, and policing in the United States, exploring the impact of drug decriminalization policies on incarceration and overdose rates. He worked as a member of the ICSR policing team, a group of MIT researchers who examine the role data plays in the design of police policies and procedures, and how data can highlight or exacerbate racial bias.
“The policing vertical started with a really challenging fundamental question,” says team leader and professor of electrical and computer engineering (EECS), Devavrat Shah. “Can we use data to better understand the role race plays in different decisions made across the criminal justice system?”
So far, the data center offers 911 dispatch information and police stop data, collected in 40 of the largest cities in the United States by ICSR researchers. Lewis hopes the effort will expand to include not only other cities, but also other relevant and typically isolated information, such as sentencing data.
“We want to bring the data sets together to have a more complete and holistic view of law enforcement systems,” explains Jessy Xinyi Han, an ICSR researcher and graduate student in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program. ) of the IDSS. Statistical methods like causal inference can help uncover the root causes of inequalities, Han says, to “unravel a web of possibilities” and better understand the causal effect of race at different stages of the criminal justice process.
“My motivation for doing this project is personal,” says Lewis, who was drawn to MIT largely because of the opportunity to research systemic racism. As a TPP student, he also founded the Cambridge branch of End Overdose, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping drug overdose deaths. His advocacy led to training hundreds of people in life-saving pharmacological interventions and earned him the 2024 Collier Medal, an MIT honor for community service in honor of Sean Collier, who gave his life serving as an MIT Police officer.
“I have had family members imprisoned. I have seen the impact it has had on my family and community, and realized that over-policing and incarceration are a Band-Aid on issues like poverty and drug use that can trap people in a cycle. of poverty.”
Education and impact
Now that the infrastructure for the data center has been built and the ICSR policing team has started sharing data sets, the next step is for other ICSR teams to also start sharing data. The interdisciplinary systemic racism research initiative includes teams working in areas including housing, health care and social media.
“We want to take advantage of the abundance of data available today to answer difficult questions about how racism results from the interactions of multiple systems,” says Munther Dahleh, EECS professor, founding director of the IDSS, and co-director of the ICSR. “Our interest is how various institutions perpetuate racism and how technology can exacerbate or combat it.”
For the data center's creators, the main sign of project success is seeing data used in research projects inside and outside of MIT. However, as a resource, the center can support that research for users with a variety of experiences and backgrounds.
“The data center is also about education and empowerment,” says Han. “This information can be used in projects designed to teach users how to use big data, how to perform data analysis, and even learn learning tools.” “all specifically to uncover racial disparities in the data.”
“Advocating for the spread of data skills has been part of the IDSS mission since day 1,” says Dahleh. “We are excited about the opportunities that the availability of this data can present in educational contexts, including, but not limited to, our growing set of IDSSx online course offerings.”
This emphasis on educational potential only heightens the ambitions of ICSR researchers across MIT, who aim to use data and computational tools to produce actionable insights for policymakers that can lead to real change.
“Systemic racism is a widely evidenced social challenge with far-reaching impacts across the board,” says Christia. “At IDSS, we want to ensure that developing technologies, combined with access to increasing amounts of data, are leveraged to combat racist outcomes rather than continue to implement them.”
