Data for Black Lives

Data for Black Lives (D4BL) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based movement organization using data science to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people, mobilizing a national network of over 20,000 scientists, activists, and organizers to contest algorithmic systems that harm Black communities across criminal justice, surveillance, finance, and public services. Founded in November 2017 by Yeshimabeit Milner and Lucas Mason-Brown, D4BL operates at the intersection of data science and racial-justice organizing — pairing technical expertise with movement infrastructure to challenge what Milner has named "data weapons": technologies deployed to surveil, police, and criminalize Black and Brown communities.

Founding and structure

Yeshimabeit Milner and Lucas Mason-Brown founded Data for Black Lives in November 2017, emerging from Milner's organizing background — she began working against the school-to-prison pipeline as a high school senior and later witnessed racial discrimination and police violence affecting peers at Brown University. The organization is structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and operates as a movement intermediary: it does not build AI systems or litigate directly, but provides research infrastructure, popular education, and convening capacity that grassroots organizations need to contest algorithmic power. Milner serves as founder and CEO; the organization maintains a distributed, networked structure spanning data practitioners from academia, civil society, and community organizing. The MacArthur Foundation has provided $900,000 in general operating support — $400,000 in 2019 under its Technology in the Public Interest program and $500,000 in 2021 for Equitable Recovery — confirming the organization's national scope and movement-infrastructure framing.

Abolish Big Data

D4BL's signature early campaign, Abolish Big Data, was first distributed as a pamphlet at the second Data for Black Lives conference in January 2019 and subsequently presented at the United Nations in Geneva in March 2019, as part of the International Decade for People of African Descent's "Data for Racial Justice" working group. The pamphlet — co-released with the Data & Society Research Institute — frames Big Data not as a neutral collection of technologies but as "an ideological regime" that concentrates decision-making authority in corporate hands while subjecting Black communities to surveillance in criminal justice, education, and finance. The campaign calls for redistribution of data power to those most affected and for dismantling surveillance architectures — gang databases, facial recognition, predictive policing — that function as instruments of racial control. Milner delivered the Abolish Big Data address at D4BL II's opening, as well as at the UCI Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, establishing the campaign as a framework that percolates across D4BL's subsequent work.

#NoMoreDataWeapons and the "data weapon" frame

The #NoMoreDataWeapons campaign, launched in 2021, put a sharper operational frame around D4BL's contestation work. The term "Data Weapon," coined by Milner, names any technological tool used to surveil, police, or criminalize Black and Brown communities — gang databases, social media monitoring programs, predictive risk scores used in bail and benefits decisions, facial recognition deployed at protests. The campaign targets specific policy fights rather than general awareness, building collective momentum around legislative and regulatory interventions to abolish particular data weapons. This frame informed Milner's FAcct 2021 keynote, where she called on AI-fairness researchers to move beyond transparency and accountability demands toward justice, power, and self-determination for affected communities. The "No Humans Involved" keynote (September 2022) extended the analysis to generative AI, foregrounding questions of whose labor and data train systems that deny the humanity of the people they were built on.

Abolish FICO and financial data systems

In August 2023, Milner delivered remarks at a White House roundtable calling for the abolition of FICO credit scores. The Abolish FICO campaign extends the data-weapons analysis into consumer finance: FICO scores, D4BL argues, embed historical redlining and discriminatory lending into algorithmic credit allocation, locking Black borrowers into higher-cost credit cycles not through active discrimination but through the systematic laundering of historical inequality as baseline data. The White House engagement marked D4BL's reach into federal financial-policy arenas and connected the Abolish Big Data framework to the concrete economic infrastructure of housing and credit access. The "Apartheid Is an Algorithm" keynote (October 2023) further extended the framing to connect data regime-building to apartheid-era segregation logics operating through technical means.

The Switchboard and Movement Scientists Program

D4BL's infrastructure assets support a federated movement ecosystem. The Switchboard is a secure digital platform connecting data practitioners with social-justice activists in the D4BL network, enabling resource sharing, talent recruitment, and collaboration across organizational boundaries. The Movement Scientists Program provides training, workshops, mentorship, and one-on-one coaching to organizations seeking to build internal data capacity — supporting what D4BL frames as the reclamation of data as a community tool rather than a corporate weapon. In August 2024, D4BL announced its inaugural Movement Scientist Fellows cohort, formalizing a fellowship for practitioners who center liberation, equity, and justice in the creation and deployment of data and AI tools. The annual D4BL conference, which brought together scientists and organizers at the MIT Media Lab for its first two iterations and continues as D4BL III, functions as the primary convening site for cross-sector relationship-building across the data-science and racial-justice ecosystem.