Last weekend was the Caribana parade in Toronto, Canada, and I was able to attend with friends from all over the world thanks to our Nomadness travel tribe connections. On Saturday evening, after the parade, we sat down and discussed past and future travel plans. As the night began to wind down, we started to list our individual preferences between using resorts or living amongst the locals when we visit somewhere new. The consensus amongst those of us who stated they prefer local living was that we would require some assistance from a resident of the place we were visiting, just to help us avoid the “bad” neighborhoods. Little did we know that there is currently a phone app being built to do exactly that.
It’s called SketchFactor, and it’s the brainchild of Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington. The app crowdsources user experiences while simultaneously collecting publicly available information in order to give that neighborhood a sketchiness rating. Although there have been similar apps in the past, this one is REALLY taking off. After being named a finalist in the NYC BigApps competition, the app will be finishing off their successful week by launching on iTunes today. Seems like everything was going great for the pair – until people started openly questioning whether or not the app was inherently racist.
Allison and Daniel are the perfect picture of a-typical whiteness. They are young, middle-class, able-bodied white folks with Colgate smiles, which is leading many to believe that their primary demographic will be others like them. So if they are the ones mainly responsible for judging if an area is “sketchy” or not, then there’s a high chance that neighborhoods that do NOT fit their middle-class or predominantly white tastes will be deemed as unsafe. Blocks of Black and brown folks who are just raising their families and living their lives without the creature comforts of gentrification will be demonized by this app. That is essentially the argument you are hearing by those disgusted by the SketchFactor concept.
But there’s another side to this – the side where this app could possibly be helpful. The friends who I sat around that table with after Caribana are all Black. We all have varying levels of education, different tax brackets and reside in all types of different neighborhoods, and we all recognize the need to identify unsafe places where we travel. And, as someone who lived in the hood and still has friends there, there simply are some places where it’s not safe to be as a stranger. But, as statistics show, areas depressed by crime and violence are not determined by RACE, they are determined by POVERTY.
But here’s the real problem with this app: It is predictable that the sketchiness of an area is going to be defined by strictly xenophobic fears, such as, “will I get mugged?” “do drive-by’s occur in this neighborhood?” and “how many gangs control this block?” But how many neighborhoods will be reviewed by the number of pedophiles and sex offenders living in that area? What about school-shootings? What about kidnappings? These problems mark many neighborhoods with no Black and brown faces. Well, since those don’t fit into the archetype of the ‘dangerous Black man’, there’s a chance those crimes won’t affect an area’s safety rating.
I’m not in the business of calling someone racist without real proof, and I definitely do not know the hearts of the creators of this app. I just genuinely hope that as their app takes off and they hire staff, they look to hiring a truly diverse group of men and women that can help this app be beneficial, instead of a proving ground for xenophobic jackasses.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.