Truth and Reconciliation for Analysts
What if we learned that the foundations of our modern corporate analytics practices contained the rot of systemic racism? Data professionals: we need to take some time to examine our own practices this Truth and Reconciliation Day.
This is our second National Truth and Reconciliation Day. As Canadians, it’s a time for us to reflect and learn and listen about our country’s shameful actions toward the Indigenous people and take steps toward meaningful reconciliation. For the data professionals among us, it’s a good time to start learning about what we can do in our field to promote reconciliation.
I don’t think most people set out to be overtly discriminatory in their approach to data. Most data professionals are passionate about using data to illuminate the truth and drive positive action from that pursuit.
Data is power. On the news, in boardrooms, in policy decisions, data is used more and more as the deciding factor in affirming an opinion, making an investment decision, or allocating funds to a neighbourhood. Whoever has the data on their side “wins”, because data holds so much value in our society. That makes the data professional by extension a power broker.
A common misconception that people have about data analysis is that the numbers never lie. Data is cut and dry. Not true. Data can be massaged, visualizations skewed, and interpretations fudged to fit a certain narrative. At the source, data can be collected in a way that deliberately feeds into the story we want to tell. These are examples of overt manipulation of data.
More insidious are the systemic ways that data is collected and used to support narratives. These systemic processes, the language used, and the metrics developed are harder to identify. They may have been developed a century ago or more, or reflect a certain agenda, and now simply accepted as fact. They may pop up in our work as internalized stigmas, unconscious biases, predisposing our opinions about a topic before we can even use data to confirm the truth.
If you have the institutional power, and control the data, you can control the narrative. That’s a big power to wield.
That’s what makes it so important for us to learn about how our “typical” western framework of data collection and analysis can perpetuate the harm that is being done to Indigenous folks. That we apply our western cultural lens against all cultures under the guise of “standardizing” data practices. This approach may give uniform data that conforms to our expectations when analyzing it. But an approach that cuts Indigenous people out of their own data can erase the Indigenous perspective, or worse, actively harm Indigenous populations.
Consider this example from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dashboard data about COVID-19 was released by the State of New Mexico, including zip code data about Indigenous people that were published without that nation’s permission[i]. A hospital in the area was found to have a secret policy discriminating against pregnant Indigenous women based on the information in this dashboard and required additional testing of the mother even if they had no symptoms.
These weren’t 15-minute rapid antigen tests: they took 3 days to come back with results and caused Indigenous women to be separated from their perfectly healthy babies at birth for no reason.
It’s well documented that keeping mother and infant together after birth has immense positive impact[ii]. Using the power of data, someone denied these mothers this once in a lifetime opportunity to connect and heal with their babies. Mothers separated from children by an institution… it has been a common theme through our history, and here with a modern, sinister, data-driven twist.
We might think that publishing as much data as possible is helpful. Maybe whoever created that dashboard thought it was useful information to be transparent about how COVID-19 cases were distributed. But, this example shows that a failure to recognize Indigenous people’s sovereignty over their own information can empower others to weaponize this information against them.
This is happening, today, still. And like peeling a rotting onion, I keep reading more and more terrible real-life examples of how the status quo of data collection and usage practices is causing harm to Indigenous folk.
Data professionals are powerful in our society. We have a responsibility – an obligation - as data professionals to provide insights that are accurate representations of the world around us. That means that part of our job is developing as true of an understanding as possible of the environment we operate in. We need to assess whether conscious or unconscious biases, systemic or overtly discriminatory practices are factoring into the work we present.
I don’t know everything. I’m learning. For my own small part, I’m committing to reading, listening, and sharing what I learn as it relates to decolonizing the analytics space. I don’t know yet what actions I can take but I hope that starting this process will help make me a more inclusive data professional. I’m also including some resources and links that I’ve been reading over the past few days.
If you want to add your voice to this effort, have resources to share with me, or want to chat, please let me know.
Photo by chris robert on Unsplash
Resources I’ve been reading
British Columbia First Nations’ Data Governance Initiative (BCFNDGI) https://www.bcfndgi.com/
A First Nations Data Governance Strategy (2020) https://fnigc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/FNIGC_FNDGS_report_EN_FINAL.pdf
Decolonizing Digital blog series (2019), Animikii blog https://animikii.com/news/decolonizing-digital-contextualizing-indigenous-data-sovereignty
Carroll, Akee, Chung, Cormack, Kukutai, Lovett, Suina and Rowe Indigenous Peoples’ Data During COVID-19: From External to Internal. (2021), Frontiers in Sociology https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2021.617895/full
B. Furlow, A Hospital’s Secret Coronavirus Policy Separated Native American Mothers From Their Newborns (2020), ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/a-hospitals-secret-coronavirus-policy-separated-native-american-mothers-from-their-newborns
Muyoya, Jimenez Cisneros, Ph.D., Železný-Green, Ph.D. 6 Steps to Get Started on Decolonizing Data for Development (2022), Data.org https://data.org/news/decolonizing-data-for-development/
[i] B. Furlow, A Hospital’s Secret Coronavirus Policy Separated Native American Mothers From Their Newborns (2020), ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/a-hospitals-secret-coronavirus-policy-separated-native-american-mothers-from-their-newborns
[ii] J. Crenshaw, RN, MSN, IBCLC, LCCE, FACCE, Care Practice #6: No Separation of Mother and Baby, With Unlimited Opportunities for Breastfeeding (2007), National Library of Medicine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948089/
