At the turn of the 20th century, W. E. B. 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 can be attributed not only to racist ideas but also to the racism embedded in American institutions.
Nearly 125 years later, the concept of “systemic racism” remains central to the study of race. Centuries of data collection and analysis, such as Du Bois’s work, document the mechanisms of racial inequality in law and institutions and attempt to measure their impact.
“There is extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequality in essentially all sectors of American society,” explains MIT professor Fotini Christia, who directs the MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), where she also co-chairs the study Initiative on Combating Systemic Racism (ICSR). “New research shows how computational technologies, typically trained or based on historical data, can further perpetuate racial biases. But these same tools can also help identify racially inequitable outcomes, understand their causes and effects, and even contribute to proposing solutions.”
In addition to coordinating research on systemic racism on campus, the IDSS initiative is pursuing a novel project aimed at amplifying and supporting this research beyond MIT: a novel ICSR Data Centerwhich serves as an emerging public online depository for datasets collected by ICSR researchers.
Data for the justice system
“My main project with ICSR was using Amazon Web Services to build a data center that other researchers could use in their own criminal justice projects,” says Ben Lewis SM ’24, a recent graduate of the MIT Technology and Policy program Program (TPP) and current PhD student at MIT Sloan School of Management. “We want the data center to be a centralized place where researchers can access information through a simple web interface or Python.”
While earning his master’s degree at TPP, Lewis focused his research on race, drug policy, and policing in the United States, examining the impact of drug decriminalization policies on incarceration and overdose rates. He served as a member of the ICSR Policing team, a group of researchers at MIT examining the role that data plays in the design of police policies and procedures and how data can highlight or exacerbate racial bias.
“The Police Division started with a really difficult, fundamental question,” says team leader and professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Devavrat Shah. “Can we use data to better understand the role that race plays in various decisions made throughout the criminal justice system?”
So far, the data center offers 911 dispatch information and police arrest data collected from 40 of the largest U.S. cities by ICSR researchers. Lewis hopes the effort will expand to include not only other cities but also other relevant and typically hidden information, such as sentencing data.
“We want to combine the datasets so that we have a more comprehensive and holistic view of law enforcement systems,” explains Jessy Xinyi Han, ICSR researcher and graduate of IDSS’s Social and Engineering Systems (SES) PhD program. Statistical methods such as causal inference can assist uncover the root causes of inequality, Han says, “untangle the web of possibilities” and better understand the causal impact of race at different stages of the criminal justice process.
“My motivation for this project is personal,” says Lewis, who was drawn to MIT in immense part by the opportunity to study systemic racism. As a TPP student, he also founded the Cambridge chapter of End Overdose, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping drug overdose deaths. His work has led to the training of hundreds of people in life-saving drug interventions and earned him the 2024 Collier Medal, an MIT community service distinction in honor of Sean Collier, who gave his life while serving as an MIT Police officer.
“Members of my family were in prison. I saw the impact it had on my family and my community, and I realized that over-policing and incarceration was the antidote to problems like poverty and drug use that can pull people into a spiral of poverty.
Education and influence
Now that the data center infrastructure has been built and the ICSR Policing team has started sharing data sets, the next step is for other ICSR teams to start sharing data. This interdisciplinary systemic racism research initiative includes teams working in areas such as housing, health care and social media.
“We want to take advantage of the abundance of data now available to answer difficult questions about how racism results from the interaction of multiple systems,” says Munther Dahleh, professor of EECS, founding director of IDSS and co-chair of ICSR. “We are interested in how different institutions perpetuate racism and how technology can exacerbate or combat it.”
For the data center’s developers, a major sign of the project’s success is the exploit of data in research projects at MIT and beyond. However, as a resource, the center can support this research for users with different experiences and backgrounds.
“The data center is also about education and empowerment,” Han says. “This information can be used in projects aimed at teaching users how to use big data, how to perform data analysis, and even learn machine learning tools, all specifically to uncover racial disparities in data.”
“Supporting the spread of data literacy has been part of the IDSS mission since day one,” says Dahleh. “We are excited about the possibilities that sharing this data may have in educational contexts, including but not limited to our growing suite of IDSSx online courses.”
The emphasis on educational potential only increases the ambition of MIT’s ICSR researchers, who want to exploit data and computational tools to create actionable insights for policymakers that can lead to real change.
“Systemic racism is an abundantly documented social challenge with far-reaching impacts across the board,” Christia says. “At IDSS, we want to ensure that evolving technologies, coupled with access to increasing amounts of data, are used to combat the effects of racism, rather than continuing to be implemented.”