Paula Moreno, Youngest Minister of Culture of Colombia and Afro-Colombian Trailblazer Delivers Inaugural SICSS-Howard/Mathematica Motivational Address
Paula Moreno
This blog is part of the 2022 series “The Future of Computational Social Science is Black” about SICSS-Howard/Mathematica, the first Summer Institute in Computational Social Science held at a Historically Black College or University. To learn more about SICSS-H/M’s inaugural start, read last year’s blog “Welcome SICSS-Howard/Mathematica 2021” or our first blog “Uncovering new keys to countering anti-Black racism and inequity using computational social science.” If you are interested in applying to participate in SICSS-H/M 2023, check out our website.
Paula Moreno delivered the first SICSS-Howard/Mathematica Motivational Address on June 22, 2022. Moreno, the founder of Manos Visibles (Visible Hands) and the first Afro-Colombian woman and youngest individual to serve as Minister of Culture of Colombia, inspired the event’s participants to dedicate their efforts towards global challenges and elaborated on technological obstacles and solutions for Africans and people of African descent around the world.
Moreno’s “The New Door of Return: Technology, Inequality, and the African Diaspora” address presented her more than 20 years of work on racial equality and highlighted the work of so many before her. She echoed James Baldwin’s quote about racialized peoples saying, “[we] carry our history with us. We are our history” among others. Another slide bore the phrase, “the world is ending, it has ended for us many times.” While violence and trauma are realities of the past and present for African descendants, they can act as motivations for crafting a better collective future or an “Afrotopia” in the words of Senegalese author Felwine Sarr. Moreno quoted Sarr saying that “it is the task of Africans to think and formulate their own future and to find their own metaphors for it.” Moreno’s address was a call-to-action for her audience, asking “How is the African diaspora thinking of these new doors of return, in this new logic of reimagination? How do we make things work given the spaces that we have now?”
Moreno highlighted the fact that the African diaspora is one of the main diasporas in the world and challenged the audience to think about how we can define its power in technological terms. Moreno also challenged her audience to think beyond their academic lens, pointing out that academic representation does not suffice - the goal is “effective power,” which includes political, economic, and technological power in order to set true systemic change into motion and turn the African diaspora into a global force.
She continued on to the main technological trends that are predicted to influence the future, noting that by the year 2030, our world will be entirely dominated by Artificial Intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, blockchain, materials science, gene editing, quantum computing, robotics, and the Internet of Things. For Moreno, while these trends are “accelerating our times'' by changing how we work, live, and even think, they are also “increasing our exclusions, [and] increasing our inequalities.” Blockchain and Web3 will likely disrupt every industry, including work, education, and “the democratization and ownership of content.” She believes that while this happens, it is crucial to identify how tech enterprises can be kept accountable and how different actors can intervene to ensure digital and property rights are established to bolster “racial and territorial equality.” This includes an examination of those who are programming and designing the algorithms.
With this excitement and cautiousness of new technological trends, Moreno was attentive to the fact that members of the African diaspora are still not being brought up-to-date on these trends, and there is a huge disparity in access, a fact that even with accounting for the pandemic has hastened the advancement of and our reliance on technology. She went on to discuss how the pandemic also deepened the structural injustice and discrimination that members of the diaspora have endured for the past 3 years. With this in mind, Moreno questioned, “how are we mapping that? How are we creating an agenda for that?” She emphasized the need to determine who is analyzing data with the goal of making decisions that impact the future of the African diaspora. This data is necessary to foster “narrative building and awareness,” as someone has to name, define, and shape the story around the systemic anti-blackness and oppression that the African diaspora continues to face. Africans and African descendants deserve to compose their own narratives, given that they have the right tools to do so.
According to Moreno, as scholars who have become accustomed to the academic world and the privileges and access it can afford members, it can be easy for us to disconnect from other peoples’ realities and assume that “our conditions are the conditions of almost everybody.” Moreno emphasized the importance of connecting with other peoples’ situations. For instance, in Colombia, the third most populous country for the African Diaspora, only 51.9% of the general population has access to the internet. In areas like the Pacific coast where the population largely consists of Afro-Colombian people, that number drops to merely 3%, and only 23% have access to a computer. She stated that in the past two years, many children there could not attend school and were instead “recruited by guerrilla paramilitaries and criminal structures during that time,” with many becoming casualties of the process. For these kids, no virtual classes were available, and pandemic conditions meant being shut out of the education system entirely. The NGO that Moreno founded and now directs, Manos Visibles, has initiated multiple efforts on this front. They include training children and teachers in digital literacy, training software developers to enter the job market, and creating protective educational environments for youth to engage in STEM learning. Manos Visible also teamed up with Red Nose Day and Universidad Autonoma de Occidente to award scholarships to three promising engineering students in Timbiquí, a town on the Pacific seacoast of Colombia.
While increased tech access can be empowering for Afro-descendant people, Moreno also acknowledged that technological spaces can be dangerous, alluding to issues like the promotion of extremism on social media platforms: “At the same time, we are not present as we should be in this landscape to counter-balance this crisis we are facing.” Pan-African anti-racism efforts are crucial - people of African descent must be able to collaborate transnationally in constructing their plans of action, and social media is an important tool for this. She displayed a graph created by Afroinnova, a Colombian-based Afro-diasporan connection platform within Manos Visibles, showing the disparity between countries in organizations of culture, community, and education by content. The U.S. far exceeded Africa in all listed categories on the graph, which is why platforms like Afroinnova aim to bring African leaders together to learn from each other and mobilize toward a shared vision of the future.
Continuing the focus on collaboration, Moreno pointed out SICSS-Howard/Mathematica’s advantageous location in Washington, DC. She stated that Colombia has worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to advance the agenda on multiple items for the African Diaspora in Colombia and Brazil. She also reminded listeners that their proximity to DC creates unique opportunities for social and data scientists to participate in advocacy, engaging the private sector, and influencing public policy.
In addition to Moreno’s motivational address, SICSS-Howard/Mathematica had a larger focus on the African diaspora this year. On Monday, June 27th, participants attended the SICSS-Africa and African Descendants Inaugural Panel, titled “Interrogating Data Collection Methods Focused on Africans and African Descendants: Challenges and Opportunities.” In the spirit of Paula Moreno’s talk, the panelists named new strategies for data collection in this sphere. Additionally, on June 30th, participants had the opportunity to attend a Bite-Sized Lunchtime Talk with Dr. Mark Duerson from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which aims to advance African security and be a forum for research and idea exchange.
Paula Moreno advised that people who want to make change need to articulate what their plans are with a sense of agency. For her, the key is to not only have ambitions of advocacy but to also aim for action. We look forward to seeing how Manos Visibles continues to grow and make an impact and what journeys SICSS-Howard/Mathematica 2022 participants proceed to undertake after attending this enlightening and instructive talk.
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About the authors
Naniette H. Coleman is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow (Los Alamos National Lab). Her work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically, Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy/Coleman Research Lab at Berkeley. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Amanda Lee received her Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies and minor in Health & Society from Wellesley College. Amanda served as a research assistant and the first lab manager for the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy/Coleman Research Lab. Amanda served as an event manager for SICSS-Howard/Mathematica 2021 and an event assistant in 2022. She currently works at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Ophthalmology, while studying to pursue a career in data analytics.