On the turn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote concerning the conditions and culture of Black people in Philadelphia, documenting also the racist attitudes and beliefs that pervaded the white society around them. He described how unequal outcomes in domains like health could possibly be attributed not only to racist ideas, but to racism embedded in American institutions.
Almost 125 years later, the concept of “systemic racism” is central to the study of race. Centuries of information collection and evaluation, just like the work of Du Bois, document the mechanisms of racial inequity in law and institutions, and try and measure their impact.
“There’s extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequity in essentially all sectors of American society,” explains Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences within the Department of Political Science, who directs the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), where she also co-leads the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR). “Newer research demonstrates how computational technologies, typically trained or reliant on historical data, can further entrench racial bias. But these same tools may help to discover racially inequitable outcomes, to grasp their causes and impacts, and even contribute to proposing solutions.”
Along with coordinating research on systemic racism across campus, the IDSS initiative has a brand new project aiming to empower and support this research beyond MIT: the brand new ICSR Data Hub, which serves as an evolving, public web depository of datasets gathered by ICSR researchers.
Data for justice
“My essential project with ICSR involved using Amazon Web Services to construct the information hub for other researchers to make use of in their very own criminal justice related projects,” says Ben Lewis SM ’24, a recent alumnus of the MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and current doctoral student on the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We wish the information hub to be a centralized place where researchers can access this information via an easy web or Python interface.”
While earning his master’s degree at TPP, Lewis focused his research on race, drug policy, and policing in the US, exploring drug decriminalization policies’ impact on rates of incarceration and overdose. He worked as a member of the ICSR Policing team, a gaggle of researchers across MIT examining the roles data plays within the design of policing policies and procedures, and the way data can highlight or exacerbate racial bias.
“The Policing vertical began with a extremely difficult fundamental query,” says team lead and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Professor Devavrat Shah. “Can we use data to raised understand the role that race plays in the various decisions made throughout the criminal justice system?”
Thus far, the information hub offers 911 dispatch information and police stop data, gathered from 40 of the most important cities in the US by ICSR researchers. Lewis hopes to see the hassle expand to incorporate not only other cities, but other relevant and typically siloed information, like sentencing data.
“We wish to stitch the datasets together in order that we’ve a more comprehensive and holistic view of law enforcement systems,” explains Jessy Xinyi Han, a fellow ICSR researcher and graduate student within the IDSS Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program. Statistical methods like causal inference can assist to uncover root causes behind inequalities, says Han — to “untangle an online of possibilities” and higher understand the causal effect of race at different stages of the criminal justice process.
“My motivation behind doing this project is personal,” says Lewis, who was drawn to MIT largely by the chance to research systemic racism. As a TPP student, he also founded the Cambridge branch of End Overdose, a nonprofit dedicated to stopping drug overdose deaths. His advocacy led to training tons of in lifesaving drug interventions, and earned him the 2024 Collier Medal, an MIT distinction for community service honoring Sean Collier, who gave his life serving as an officer with the MIT Police.
“I’ve had members of the family in incarceration. I’ve seen the impact it has had on my family, and on my community, and realized that over-policing and incarceration are a Band-Aid on issues like poverty and drug use that may trap people in a cycle of poverty.”
Education and impact
Now that the infrastructure for the information hub has been built, and the ICSR Policing team has begun sharing datasets, the following step is for other ICSR teams to begin sharing data as well. The cross-disciplinary systemic racism research initiative includes teams working in domains including housing, health care, and social media.
“We wish to benefit from the abundance of information that is obtainable today to reply difficult questions on how racism results from the interactions of multiple systems,” says Munther Dahleh, EECS professor, IDSS founding director, and ICSR co-lead. “Our interest is in how various institutions perpetuate racism, and the way technology can exacerbate or combat this.”
To the information hub creators, the essential sign of success for the project is seeing the information utilized in research projects at and beyond MIT. As a resource, though, the hub can support that research for users from a spread of experience and backgrounds.
“The information hub can also be about education and empowerment,” says Han. “This information will be utilized in projects designed to show users learn how to use big data, learn how to do data evaluation, and even to learn machine learning tools, all specifically to uncover racial disparities in data.”
“Championing the propagation of information skills has been a part of the IDSS mission since Day 1,” says Dahleh. “We’re excited by the opportunities that making this data available can present in educational contexts, including but not limited to our growing IDSSx suite of online course offerings.”
This emphasis on educational potential only augments the ambitions of ICSR researchers across MIT, who aspire to make use of data and computing tools to provide actionable insights for policymakers that may result in real change.
“Systemic racism is an abundantly evidenced societal challenge with far-reaching impacts across domains,” says Christia. “At IDSS, we wish to make sure that developing technologies, combined with access to ever-increasing amounts of information, are leveraged to combat racist outcomes fairly than proceed to enact them.”
