Turner Lee is a senior fellow and the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. She has created a new AI Equity Lab at Brookings to interrogate civil and human rights compliance within emerging models.
The White House recently issued an executive order to ensure the safety, security and equity of artificial intelligence technologies in the United States and abroad. This call to action was reaffirmed when Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at the AI Safety Summit in the United Kingdom and she emphasized the need for expanded oversight, and possible AI regulation over machines and models that result in adverse consequences.
For decades, an increasing number of experts, including other Black women in AI, have generated research and policy recommendations around necessary civil and human rights protections, improved data quality, and the lawful compliance of AI and other emerging technologies. While the bold prominence of the vice president at the summit set the stage for more diverse voices, Black women are largely being excluded from these and other high-profile dialogues, which disadvantages any conversations on the design and deployment of more equitable AI.
Black women have led in AI policymaking before its growing popularity and interest. In 2019, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) issued the first version of the Algorithmic Accountability Act with her colleagues to interrogate automated decisions driving housing, creditworthiness and hiring outcomes. In the same year, and after her former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the subject of altered videos, Clarke also introduced the first version of her DEEPFAKES Accountability Act, which would go after video creators who falsified video content and contributed to disinformation, especially around the time of the 2020 election.
After presenting revised updates to her proposed legislation every year following, Clarke’s 2023 versions of both are up again for House consideration. Other Black women in policy like former White House official Alondra Nelson led the development of the first ever national Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights in 2022 that pushed the country closer to more equitable AI.
The indelible marks made by these women have not gone unnoticed. But they are joined by an increasing number of other Black women in AI, whose work includes formidable research and pragmatic policy proposals that bring lived experiences to AI design, deployment and oversight. Despite impressive backgrounds as computer and data scientists, criminologists, sociologists, curators, policy professionals, tech entrepreneurs, and social activists, many of these women are not prominently appearing in highly visible roles and conversations or being asked by policymakers to bring their findings to congressional hearings focused on AI regulation, technical cadences, or harms to consumers and democracy.
Between March 8 and Nov. 29, Congress held various hearings on AI that covered topics relating the workforce to AI’s role in modern communications. Black women were sparsely presented as witnesses to testify on the subject. Of the 125 witnesses who participated in the 32 hearings, only two were Black women, one of whom was me. Until recently, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has worked to increase the number of Black women participating in his recurring AI Insight Forum s, which will undeniably influence the direction of national AI self-regulatory policies, and more prescriptive regulation.
The reality is that when Black women’s voices are amplified, it is usually to discredit their contributions and achievements. AI pioneer Timnit Gebru, a former Google researcher, was terminated after announcing the company was silencing marginalized voices. Algorithmic justice advocate and bestselling author Joy Buolamwini exposed the racial inequities embedded in the design and use of facial recognition technology by government agencies. Yet, law enforcement continues to use it with little regard for the false arrests of Black people due to its technical misidentifications around skin color.
When Black women are not being attacked for their similarly poised expertise, they are relegated to the status of being hidden figures in science and technology – where they are more of an afterthought. In 2016, the world came to know the late Katherine Johnson, a retired NASA scientist and mathematician in orbital mechanics, through a bestselling book and movie both titled “Hidden Figures.” At the age of 96, Johnson’s expertise was finally recognized, especially her work on many critical space missions in her decades-long career, including the aversion of the near-fatal collision of the Apollo mission. Four years after we learned about her significant role in the country’s space programs, she died at the age of 102.
Black women in AI should not be attacked or become hidden figures where their ideas and concepts are invoked by others in privileged conversations and rooms.
If future AI is going to be responsibly designed and deployed, Black women must be included to stop and control how these technologies further racialize or criminalize certain communities. Their participation can motivate more inclusive design and products in AI that better serve and involve the public. As more corporations are dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs that will erode Black women’s visibility in board rooms, and other prominent leadership roles, this call for participation and input are both critical and timely.
Right now, it feels like Black women, whose thought leadership comes packaged in so many disciplines and work streams are largely invisible despite their established expertise. If the federal government, and the companies at the forefront of AI development, desire to achieve the goals of safety, equity and fairness in AI, then it must see and include Black women on Capitol Hill, in university research labs, in civil society organizations and think tanks, as well as in industry war rooms and boardrooms. We must not be memorialized later as hidden figures for the decisions that ultimately got made today about the governance, development and deployment of more ubiquitous AI.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.