A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”

几年前，全球咨询公司麦肯锡公司开始发布一系列关于“自动化”和未来工作的日益紧迫的报告。该公司将自动化广泛定义为人工智能和“其他数字技术”，并在其报告中承诺，它可以建议公司如何做好准备。在这一系列的出版中，麦肯锡发表了几篇专门针对“美国黑人工作的未来”主题的文章。有了“一个新的专有数据集”——一个专有读者没有特权看到它的数据集——麦肯锡声称，“自动化”将对美国黑人，尤其是黑人的就业前景造成比以往更深、更广泛的伤害。美国的任何其他人口群体。麦肯锡似乎相信，黑人所从事的工作，恰恰是机器人表现最好的那些。对于麦肯锡的分析师来说，这一结论几乎是显而易见的，首先考虑到美国黑人被种族主义排斥在社会资源之外，其次考虑到获得美国黑人不成比例地从事的工作所需的教育水平，比如“卡车”司机、食品服务人员和办公室文员。”