Technologies of antiblackness: Black matter, racial bias, and the haunting past of the spirometer

This article utilizes the case of the spirometer, a medical instrument used to measure vital lung capacity, to tender an expansive argument on the entangled history of antiblackness and technology. It mobilizes the notion of the “apparatus of bodily production” to show how the spirometer produces knowledge about the bodies it measures while also enacting racialized Black bodies as allegedly flawed matter. The article demonstrates that such construal points us to the antiblack past of the instrument, which continues to haunt Black bodies and lives in the present. Moreover, the article evinces that race does not refer in such a framework to something that can be found in bodies, whether in the sense of a purported biological truth that resides inside bodies or as a sociocultural inscription on the surface of bodies. Instead, race emerges as a relational phenomenon, an effect of historical materialization that traverses some bodies and not others. Thus, the article demonstrates that recent demands for less biased technologies such as spirometers in medicine and other domains run the risk of evoking the idea that technology can be neutral or that measurements can be objective.