Data Justice Research Talk Series: The Algorithmic Racial Proxy presentation by Fanna Gamal

Join us for a research presentation by Dr. Fanna Gamal, UCLA Assistant Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law to discuss her forthcoming paper: The Algorithmic Racial Proxy. 

THE ALGORITHMIC RACIAL PROXY
California Law Review (forthcoming 2026)

To comply with antidiscrimination law, computer programmers tend to exclude race as a data input when constructing a machine learning algorithm. Yet scholars and advocates consistently argue that even these formally race-blind algorithms can nevertheless racially discriminate by relying on so-called “proxies for race,” or variables that have a strong correlation with race such as zip code, income, or prior criminal arrest. While a programmer wishing to respond to this argument might attempt to remove both race and all racial proxies from input data, their task is complicated by a key dilemma. That is, the definition of a racial proxy is far from obvious. In response to this dilemma, scholars, computer programmers, and advocates proffer various approaches to defining a racial proxy and solutions to the problem of racial proxy discrimination. Diverse as they are in their methodologies, these solutions share a common quality. Each relies on an underlying assumption about the relationship between race and the racial proxy, and these assumptions can have far reaching implications for the development and regulation of machine learning algorithms.

This paper examines the myriad definitions of a racial proxy proffered by courts, scholars, and state and private actors to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions that undergird beliefs about what gives a variable its “racial” character. It shows how this racial reasoning is often capricious, paradoxical, or internally inconsistent in ways that impact the regulation of algorithms. In response to the indeterminate definition of a racial proxy, the paper proposes a refocusing of the algorithmic antidiscrimination discussion away from the eventual outcome—the definition of the racial proxy—to the various political and economic processes that supply the outcome. A focus on process reveals that what is at stake in the ability to define a racial proxy is the authority to technologically embed race into the algorithms that increasingly structure human life. This ability to define racial proxies can include the power to produce new and meaningful classes of individuals that can later be exposed to differing resources, opportunities, subordination and privilege. The paper maps this process as a novel form of racial construction and a necessary site of legal thought and regulation.

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12 p.m. - Optional Brown Bag Lunch (Bring your own lunch. DataX will provide beverages and cookies.)

12:30 p.m. - Research Presentation 

Audience Q&A to follow