Tawana Petty

Tawana Petty is a Detroit-based Black social-justice organiser, poet, author, and facilitator (see Person entry) whose published output and organising record over the last decade have made her one of the most-cited US grassroots voices on data justice, facial-recognition surveillance, and the political question of who decides how AI and algorithmic systems are deployed against Black communities. She is currently Founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, the Black-women-led artist incubator she founded in Detroit, and a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, where her named project — Embodying True Safety — extends through theatrical performance, popular education, and workshop curricula the framing that has carried through her organising for more than a decade: that the conflation of "safety" with "surveillance" must be broken before Black communities can address the AI / facial-recognition / data-extraction layers of contemporary technology on their own terms. She is tracked here as a Voice because her named published output — the July 2020 Wired op-ed "Defending Black Lives Means Banning Facial Recognition", the 2018 Digital Defense Playbook: Community Power Tools for Reclaiming Data co-authored with Tamika Lewis, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Mariella Saba under Our Data Bodies, the May 2020 Logic Magazine interview "Safe or Just Surveilled?", the A Critical Summary of Detroit's Project Green Light report co-produced with Our Data Bodies, the poetry collections Introducing... Honeycomb (2011) and Coming Out My Box (2016), and a sustained named-keynote and conference record (Stanford PACS Digital Civil Society Lab Non-Resident Fellow 2019-2021; named on Business Insider's 2024 AI Power List for Policy and Ethics; 2021 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics; 2023 Center for AI and Digital Policy AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award) — has carried her organising frames well beyond the Detroit base they were developed in.

Petty is the corpus's first US Black-grassroots-data-justice Voice — a register structurally distinct from the framework-author Voice anchored by Sasha Costanza-Chock and the algorithmic-bias public-scientist Voice anchored by Joy Buolamwini. Where Costanza-Chock's Voice rests on the Design Justice framework as a published analytical apparatus and Buolamwini's on the public-facing scientific findings of facial-recognition audits, Petty's is the organiser-and-essayist Voice — grounded in a specific city's fight (Detroit's against Project Green Light), carried by named coalition convening (the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition 2016-2024) and a long-running data-justice organising programme (the Detroit Community Technology Project's Data Justice Directorship and the National Organizing Directorship at Data for Black Lives), and articulated through the named framings ("safety and surveillance are not synonymous", "co-liberators rather than allies", "visionary resistance", "the last remaining Black mecca") that the published essays and interviews have carried into wider US tech-justice discourse.

Detroit and the Project Green Light fight

The single load-bearing arc in Petty's organising is the Detroit fight against Project Green Light — the public-private partnership led by the Detroit Police Department that installed green-flashing-light surveillance cameras at participating local businesses across the city from 2016 onward, and onto which facial-recognition processing was subsequently layered. Petty's framing of the campaign, carried across the Logic Magazine interview and the Our Data Bodies report, is that the City and the Detroit Police Department tried to separate the cameras from the facial-recognition processing layered on top of them in public communications, and that the substantive resistance had to take the form of community-led counter-organising rather than narrowly technical opposition. The named counter-campaign Petty co-developed with the Detroit Community Technology Project — Green Chairs, Not Green Lights — proposed community presence and neighbourhood relationship as the alternative to camera-and-algorithm safety, and is named on the Stanford PACS fellowship-project profile as one of the campaign's load-bearing deliverables. The framing Detroit produced — that surveillance piloted in a majority-Black city becomes a national model unless it is resisted at the pilot site — is the working argument the Wired op-ed carried into national civil-society debate during the summer of 2020.

The Detroit fight sits inside Petty's longer Detroit Community Technology Project tenure as Data Justice Director, through which she anchored "dozens of DiscoTech events" — the multimedia mobile neighbourhood workshop fair format developed by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition in 2011 — and the production of the Guidelines for Equitable Open Data made to the City of Detroit. The Coalition itself — of which Petty has been a convening member since 2016 and through 2024 — is the longest-running named institutional vehicle of the Detroit data-justice movement Petty's organising sits inside.

Our Data Bodies and the published data-justice toolkit

The 2018 Digital Defense Playbook: Community Power Tools for Reclaiming Data, co-authored by Tamika Lewis, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Mariella Saba, and Tawana Petty under Our Data Bodies, is the most widely-circulated single artefact of Petty's collaborative published work. The Playbook — a popular-education manual on data-justice for community organisers, with named tools for documentation, security, advocacy, and collective storytelling — is the named published deliverable of the participatory research project Petty co-led across Charlotte, Detroit, and Los Angeles, and the working translation of Our Data Bodies's research base into community-organising practice. The earlier ODB report Reclaiming our data (2018) and the named co-authored piece From Paranoia to Power (2016) sit alongside the Playbook as the published programme outputs of the same project.

The Algorithmic Justice League AI-governance years

From 2021 onward Petty served as Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Algorithmic Justice League, the named role through which AJL was represented in US and international AI-governance processes. The AJL appointment is the corpus's most direct point of overlap between Petty's Detroit-grassroots organising base and the federal-policy-and-international-governance layer of the make-AI-good field — the institutional bridge through which the data-justice framing developed in Detroit was carried into the federal-policy and international-governance venues where AJL's Joy Buolamwini was already an established public voice. The named AJL role formally tracks against Petty's identification as one of Business Insider's 2024 AI Power List for Policy and Ethics and her 2023 Center for AI and Digital Policy AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award.

Petty Propolis and the current organising arc

Petty Propolis — the Black-women-led artist incubator Petty founded and continues to direct — is the current institutional vehicle through which her organising work proceeds. The incubator's named focus areas — poetry and literary workshops, anti-racism facilitation, political education, and community-centred initiatives — sit alongside the 2023-2025 SSRC Just Tech Embodying True Safety fellowship project, whose named deliverables include a theatrical performance, popular-education tools, and workshop curricula extending the Detroit safety-and-surveillance framing into performance and embodied-education forms. The current arc is the carrying-forward of the Detroit organising work into national- and international-circuit advocacy from a Black-women-led artist-and-educator base.

The wider published-output record

Beyond the named campaign artefacts, Petty's published-output record runs through:

• The Wired op-ed. Defending Black Lives Means Banning Facial Recognition (Wired, 10 July 2020), the named published essay carrying the framing "for Black people, surveillance ain't safety" into a major US technology-magazine audience in the summer of 2020 — written from Petty's Stanford PACS fellowship perch following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others.
• The Logic Magazine interview. Safe or Just Surveilled?: Tawana Petty on the Fight Against Facial Recognition Surveillance (Logic, 4 May 2020), the most-cited single long-form Petty interview, in which the named framings — safety and surveillance not synonymous; co-liberators rather than allies; Detroit as the last remaining US Black mecca; the deceptive public-private form of Project Green Light — are most directly stated.
• The Stanford PACS project record. Legitimizing True Safety (2019-2021), whose named published deliverables include the Critical Summary of Detroit's Project Green Light, the Green Chairs, Not Green Lights community-safety campaign, and the forthcoming "Detroiters Know Safety" zine.
• The poetry record. Introducing... Honeycomb (2011) and Coming Out My Box (2016), under the Honeycomb poetic name Petty uses for her poetry work, with the second volume also developed as a one-woman performance — the long-running creative-writing record alongside the named non-fiction prose collections Petty Propolis Reader: My Personal and Political Evolution (2017) and Towards Humanity: Shifting the Culture of Anti-racism Organizing (2018).
• The co-authored short-form record. From Protecting Ourselves to Taking Care of Each Other (2021, with Una Lee), Watched and Still Dying (2020), and the Our Data Bodies report Reclaiming our data (2018, with Mariella Saba, Tamika Lewis, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Virginia Eubanks).

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Petty's published output — the named essays, the Digital Defense Playbook, the Critical Summary of Project Green Light, the long-running poetry and prose record, the named conference and keynote appearances, and the framings carried across them — is the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track. The corpus's US Black-grassroots-data-justice Voice register — the organiser-and-essayist register grounded in a specific city's fight, distinct from both the algorithmic-bias public-scientist Voice anchored by Joy Buolamwini and the framework-author Voice anchored by Sasha Costanza-Chock — carried no anchor before this entry; this entry gives that register its first Voice. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.