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101 B.U. L. Rev. 191 (2021)
Autocorrecting for Whiteness

handle is hein.journals/bulr101 and id is 197 raw text is: AUTOCORRECTING FOR WHITENESS RASHMI DYAL-CHAND* ABSTRACT Autocorrect presumes Whiteness. Across a range of products and applications, autocorrect consistently corrects names that do not look White or Anglo. Sometimes autocorrect changes names to their closest Anglo approximations (as in Ayaan to Susan). Sometimes it suggests replacements that are not proper names (as in DaShawn to dash away). Often, autocorrect asserts the implausibility of non-Anglo names by underlining them in red. Autocorrect's changes to names such as these are not just trivial product glitches. In a world rfe with the multiplying effects of algorithmic bias in increasingly essential domains of decision-making, autocorrect produces social and cultural harms that disproportionately affect communities of color and those who do not have Anglo identities. Harnessing both empirical evidence and theory, this Article argues that while autocorrect's Anglo bias harms such individuals and communities, it adds value to the intellectual property of autocorrect's proprietors as well as to the status property of more privileged users. We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect. Yet autocorrect incorporates a set of defaults-including dictionaries-that help some of its users to communicate seamlessly at the expense of others who cannot. It is a simple but powerful means of self-realization, providing a modern forum for the reinstantiation of Cheryl Harris's concept of Whiteness as property. It is a medium for governing social relations that depends on the devaluation of non- Anglo names. It is a form of smart technology that maintains structural racism today. The essential nature of autocorrect technology-and its far-reaching effect in structuring social, cultural, and even epistemic understandings of our world- demands legal intervention to fix autocorrect's Anglo bias. Drawing on core * Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Interdisciplinary Education, Northeastern University School of Law; Affiliate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University. I am grateful to Libby Adler, Nestor Davidson, Benjamin Ericson, Howard Erlanger, Sonia Katyal, Joseph William Singer, Ari Waldman, Patricia Williams, and participants in the 2020 Progressive Property Conference at Fordham Law School for extremely helpful comments on the manuscript and also to Joseph William Singer for his scholarship on public accommodations. I received superb research assistance from Kyle Berner, Andrew Farrington, Emily Garrett, Robert Gullo, and Jacob Steinmann. 191

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