Internet Enraged When Racist Soap Dispenser Surfaces

Once again, the seemingly perpetual debate on race and diversity has reached a fever pitch, so much so that some people are now referring to pieces of technology as being inherently racist.

Yes, you read that correctly. Non-sentient machines are being accused of holding a racial bias, such as a touch-free soap dispenser that fails to dispense any soap for people with dark skin.

The U.K. Daily Mail reported on a viral tweet sent out recently by a Nigerian man named Chukwuemeka Afigbo, who works for Facebook and is head of the platform partnerships in Africa and the Middle East.

In his tweet, which has earned over 193,000 “likes” and more than 141,000 “retweets” over the past couple of days, Afigbo demonstrated how the soap dispenser had no issues dispensing soap into the white hand of his friend, and would even dispense soap onto a white paper towel, but not a single drop came out when his own darker hand was placed under the wall-mounted machine.

If you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech and its impact on society, watch this video pic.twitter.com/ZJ1Je1C4NW

— Chukwuemeka Afigbo (@nke_ise) August 16, 2017

“If you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech and its impact on society, watch this video,” Afigbo wrote on the viral post.

While many have seized on this short clip as evidence of racial bias and a lack of diversity in the tech industry, there is actually a legitimate explanation for what happened — not that anyone actually wants to hear it, as it doesn’t particularly further the diversity narrative all that much.

The soap dispenser, believed to have been designed and manufactured by Shenzen Yuekun Technology in China, utilizes an infrared beam of light to recognize a hand beneath it, bouncing back to a sensor and triggering the release of the soap.

However, as was explained in a 2015 article in Mic.com regarding a similar occurrence, such technology has always had issues detecting people with darker skin color, due to the simple fact that light tends to reflect better off of light-colored surfaces and is absorbed by dark colored-surfaces.

As such, “If the reflective object actually absorbs that light instead, then the sensor will never trigger because not enough light gets to it,” explained Richard Whitney, vice president of products at Particle.

“In order to compensate for variations in skin color,” Whitney added, “The gain, (or) sensor equivalent to ISO and exposure in cameras, would have to be increased.”

There have been other issues of this kind with other pieces of technology that utilize infrared beams and have trouble detecting or recognizing black people, and while there are almost always cries of racism and a demand for increased diversity in the tech industry — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself — simply improving the designs and sensitivity of the beams and sensors would likely go a long way to solving this “racist technology” problem.

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