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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.