Empowering systemic racism research at MIT and beyond

At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about 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 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 data collection and analysis, like the work of Du Bois, document the mechanisms of racial inequity in law and institutions, and attempt to measure their impact.

“There’s extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequity 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-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 can also help to identify racially inequitable outcomes, to understand their causes and impacts, and even contribute to proposing solutions.”

In addition to coordinating research on systemic racism across campus, the IDSS initiative has a new project aiming to empower and support this research beyond MIT: the new ICSR Data Hub, which serves as an evolving, public web depository of datasets gathered by ICSR researchers.

Data for justice

“My main project with ICSR involved using Amazon Web Services to build the data hub for other researchers to use in their 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 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We want the data hub to be a centralized place where researchers can access this information via a simple web or Python interface.”

While earning his master’s degree at TPP, Lewis focused his research on race, drug policy, and policing in the United States, exploring drug decriminalization policies’ impact on rates of incarceration and overdose. He worked as a member of the ICSR Policing team, a group of researchers across MIT examining the roles data plays in the design of policing policies and procedures, and how data can highlight or exacerbate racial bias.

“The Policing vertical started with a really challenging fundamental question,” says team lead and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Professor Devavrat Shah. “Can we use data to better understand the role that race plays in the different decisions made throughout the criminal justice system?”

So far, the data hub offers 911 dispatch information and police stop data, gathered from 40 of the largest cities in the United States by ICSR researchers. Lewis hopes to see the effort expand to include not only other cities, but other relevant and typically siloed information, like sentencing data.

“We want to stitch the datasets together so that we have a more comprehensive and holistic view of law enforcement systems,” explains Jessy Xinyi Han, a fellow ICSR researcher and graduate student in the IDSS Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program. Statistical methods like causal inference can help to uncover root causes behind inequalities, says Han — to “untangle a web of possibilities” and better 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 in large part by the opportunity 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 hundreds 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 family members 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 can trap people in a cycle of poverty.”

Education and impact

Now that the infrastructure for the data hub has been built, and the ICSR Policing team has begun sharing datasets, the next step is for other ICSR teams to start sharing data as well. The cross-disciplinary systemic racism research initiative includes teams working in domains including housing, health care, and social media.

“We want to take advantage of the abundance of data that is available today to answer difficult questions about 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 how technology can exacerbate or combat this.”

To the data hub creators, the main sign of success for the project is seeing the data used in research projects at and beyond MIT. As a resource, though, the hub can support that research for users from a range of experience and backgrounds.

“The data hub is also about education and empowerment,” says Han. “This information can be used in projects designed to teach users how to use big data, how to do data analysis, and even to learn machine learning tools, all specifically to uncover racial disparities in data.”

“Championing the propagation of data skills has been part of the IDSS mission since Day 1,” says Dahleh. “We are 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 use data and computing tools to produce actionable insights for policymakers that can lead to real change.

“Systemic racism is an abundantly evidenced societal challenge with far-reaching impacts across domains,” says Christia. “At IDSS, we want to ensure that developing technologies, combined with access to ever-increasing amounts of data, are leveraged to combat racist outcomes rather than continue to enact them.”