Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Palo Alto’

Nobody likes being stared at. But ethnic people seem to have a special aversion to it. The more ethnic, the more they don’t like it. I can’t count the number of times–in my younger years–I asked, was asked, or witnessed the asking of whether someone (or I) had a “staring problem.” The staring usually ended right there. If you ever wanted to intentionally provoke a beef with an ethnic person, all you had to do was mad dog them for a little while.¹

¹Mad Dog (verb) To stare fixedly at someone in a hostile manner. Generally used to convey anger or disdain, can be a signal that a fight is about to happen.

[from Urban Dictionary]

So when I heard the story of “racist” malfunctioning in the new HP Deluxe Webcam, I immediately knew what was going on.

Hewlett Packard’s new camera includes innovative face-tracking technology, which follows a user’s face – even if it moves out of frame, or zooms in when the user is farther away.

This technology wasn’t working for one African-American consumer – the webcam didn’t move at all for him. But for his white co-worker, who was right next to him at the time, the face-tracking feature worked perfectly.

And so the man…had a message for one of the largest technology companies in the world: “Hewlett Packard computers are racist,” he says.

[Excerpted from theGrio.com]

This, I’m afraid, is no glitch. But it’s also not clear-cut racism. The device is just making a calculated assessment of the circumstances at hand.

Put yourself in its shoes.

Here you are, a nice deluxe-webcam from Palo Alto, California and, all of a sudden, you got a black dude in your face. The guy may look and sound friendly, but you know that even the friendliest ethnic people are liable to get pissed if you look at them too long, never mind follow them around the room with your “tracking lens.”

So, you play it cool, disregard your programming, and look away–while keeping an eye on him from the corner of your lens.

That’s not racist.