Amazon Prime and the racist algorithms

The revelation in late April that Amazon has excluded minority neighborhoods in Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Washington, D.C., from its Prime Free Same-Day Delivery service while extending the service to white neighborhoods probably shocked few minorities. They likely saw it as part of the same pattern of racism that has left many minority neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure and housing, poor public transportation, little or no access to healthy food, and few places to buy goods.

But to Amazon, and likely others in the tech world, the decision had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with the facts. Amazon argued that it wasn’t acting on prejudice when it excluded those neighborhoods. Instead, algorithms and the underlying data on which those algorithms were based made it clear that Amazon couldn’t make a profit in them. And, given that Amazon is profit-driven, the company excluded them. Race, Amazon said, had nothing to do with it.

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