Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

The Social Optics of Race 117
what color are those bodies who will be taking care of the bodies (and
houses, yards, pets, and children) of those people who are jacked in, busy
scrubbing, manipulating, buying, selling, and transmitting these images?
Considerations of the racialized political economies of computer culture are
inseparable from the ways in which we ought to read these texts. Postmillennial
science fiction texts provide us with a plethora of images of race in relation
to computing and interface culture, the scene of new media image production.
In this representational economy, images of blacks serve as talismans
to ward off the consuming power of the interface, whose transparent depths,
like Narcissus’s pool, threaten to fatally immerse its users.
Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, also dramatizes the
scene of interface use and posits whites as uniquely privileged subjects of
interactivity because of their transparent and thus privileged relations to the
computer. However, Minority Report dramatizes the ways that the postmillennial
social body has become an object of surveillance via biometrics
and crime databases. Networked digital imaging devices that perform retinal
scans in public spaces like subways and department stores set in motion a
web of state and commercial disciplinary mechanisms. While The Matrix is
concerned with real versus unreal bodies, singular versus replicated bodies,
Minority Report envisions the future regulation of the criminal body as the
work of dataveillance, and the gradual interpellation of its white hero into
this system’s critique and destruction as part of a process of re-racialization
that calls the notion of the “whole” or singularly racialized body into question.
Minority Report was released in the same year as Stephen Frears’s independent
film Dirty Pretty Things, which is set in present-day London and
concerns the doings of African and Turkish illegal immigrants who are
involved in the world of organ harvesting and trafficking. The biotechnological
revolution, part of the network economy that grew to maturity during
the same period as the Internet did, has borne fruit in the world of Minority
Report: human organs can be bought and sold using conventional credit cards,
and there is a thriving black as well as white market in such commodities. It
is when the technology of state-controlled vision extends into the organs of
vision themselves that we can see the way that whiteness is also critiqued in
this film, replaced with a resistant image of a transplanted, patched-together,
socially marginal body that opposes itself to the dataveillant systems that
demand, create, and control singular bodies. The social optics of race are
hacked in this film, a film that posits a visual culture in which the act of
seeing itself has become inseparable from the political economies of race,