Kwanzaa Day 2: Kujichagalia means self-determination

Using white text is catching on! I have been using it for years…I always suspected machines were reading what the naked eye could not see. Now I know it is. As I reflect on the principles of Kwanzaa this year, I can’t help but think about artificial intelligence (AI).

The first time I created a resume using “white ink”, I saw it as adding a personal touch that I knew was there even if its human reader could not see it. I couldn’t afford the fancy linen paper that was often circulated in the 90s on those early career interviews–when T2 was still one of the hottest science fiction movies of the day! Were the questions given to destroy or protect the young woman I was learning to become? Unsure, perhaps even afraid to show who I really was, I would turn the background of every resume gray for myself and print my professional life story out for myself in white text while handing my evaluator the white copy…staying somewhere between black and white, unsure about just what to say…my youth seen as arrogance, my being seen as less; I didn’t know who would show up to tell me what they thought I was…it is strange to hear myself say that I used whiteness to assure myself of truths my reviewer could never see. Wearing a digital mask made of text on a page…

Now, it seems hidden text is everywhere.

Fast forward twenty years, AI tools are reading and writing whole life stories for people–machines are defining us and some of us are co-signing on all of it. Contributing data by the second as we scroll endlessly all day, invoke Siri and Alexa to answer what we refuse to look up and expecting our life to be maintained by the apps at our fingertips.

The tools some imagine to help us get ahead are doing so much more to keep us behind. Like a trap set for vulnerable prey, college professors and other power players are changing expectations even as the technologies evolve (and as they use them to do their own work). They are defining students by the tools they use–classical canons and scholarly traditions, modern discussions with other humans, or the technological strategies and AIs they engage. This new school classification is complicated. Some smart, most dumb, few genius and all cheating. Is anything ever that black and white?

I want to stay somewhere in the gray space. We need to know AI’s promise and its problems. We need to always define ourselves based on our own reflection (in mirrors and in minds), our own cultures (of community, language, art and family) and our own voice. We are carrying the spirit of our ancestors when we do this. We must remember this gift…always.

Suggestions from my 2025 reading list: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom; James by Percival Everett; Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray; Kamau Njama Discovers Secrets of the Vanguard Order by Jomo Mtegi (Youth)