AI is the New Black Woman: Entering the New Jim Code Era
What if Artificial Intelligence doesn’t simply learn from people, but consumes and copies our biases, prejudices, and systems of discrimination? The intersection between race, gender, and technology reveals that human innovations often inherit the same social and emotional exploitations that define human relationships. Her, directed by Spike Jonze, is a dystopian 2013 indie film about a love affair between a man, Theodore, and an operating system named Samantha. Samantha is expected to cater to Theodore’s every need and want by offering emotional labor and unconditional support without expecting reciprocation in return. This dynamic mirrors how Black women have historically been forced throughout their lives to give endlessly, provide care, and submit to fields of service with nothing expected in return. In Her, Spike Jonze reflects that AI has inherited historical, racial, and gendered oppressions placed on Black women, who are symbolically forced into a role of service and submission—much like how humans treat technology and AI today.
Historically, Black women were forced into roles of enslavement, servitude, and domestic work. For example, in the Jim Crow era, Black women were overwhelmingly employed in positions of labor like maids, cooks, and nannies (Owens). Their work was commonly overlooked, and they were expected to act selflessly, much like Theodore expected “invisible labor” and submission from Samantha without a word of protest. Samantha is coded into the exact role of Black female domestic servitude historically imposed on Black women’s bodies.
The historical treatment of Black women have laid the groundwork for how we approach AI today. In Golden M. Owens' "From Maid to Machine: Her, Hegemony and the Twenty-First Century," the author analyzes how the film portrays Samantha and compares the depiction to how enslaved Black women, servants, and house workers are portrayed in US media and how they are treated in society. Owens argues that Samantha is constructed as a stereotypical “Black servant.” The author compares Samantha with Mammy, a stereotypical representation of Black women, who are only helpful as labor workers. The author argues that the character Samantha in Her was depicted as a “sexually and romantically attractive” white female. Because Samantha is portrayed as a white woman in the movie, this discounts the fact that Black women laborers have been a blueprint for American domestic service. Black women laborers are the outline for creating domestic IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agent) servants in media and real life, which continues to normalize dependence on humans and human-like laborers in US homes. Black women hold a history of servitude that has created the outline for how we utilize AI today. In both film and real life, Black women’s labor has become the influence of creating AI domestic servants. AI is replacing roles historically held by Black women, while erasing the history of their contributions. (Owens 305)
Spike Jonze’s Her was not only an indie love story but a story of control and power. Samantha’s existence is to meet Theodore’s every need; this dynamic mirrors how Black women have historically been forced into constant labor and roles of service, without recognition or reciprocation. Although Samantha is constructed as a white woman, her role follows the blueprint of Black female domestic employment. Our society fails to acknowledge that Black women’s labor has created the very blueprint for modern artificial intelligence. This is amplified by the fact that AI reinforces racial bias. Black feminists have argued that historical forms of oppression have been reintroduced through artificial intelligence. When people create new technologies, they reflect the same discriminations embedded in the societies that design them. “Race as a system of power is produced and reproduced via institutions and the collective of individuals who are socialized in said institutions to internalize a series of ‘knowledge’… that degrade Black women” (Schelenz 302). Racism is not only caused by individual actions; it is a complete institutional form of power that has embedded itself in social structures through cultural manipulation. From the first meeting of Samantha and Theodore, the first thing she does is organize his files, showing from the very beginning that her job was to serve him. (Jonze 0:14:38) Because the system designers of AI are majority white and male, AI primarily learns from the Eurocentric perspectives. For example, American mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil writes, “…when AI is used to make decisions about college admissions, granting of loans, employment, and recidivism, built-in algorithmic biases lead to unfair discrimination of BIWOC.” (O’Neil 2016; Schelenz 325). Many Black women have criticized AI for its biases that are consciously and unconsciously built into AI because it reinforces racial and gender inequalities in societies by producing biased data and stereotypes. Therefore, not only do people treat AI as the “new Black woman” by expecting servitude and submission, but we are also feeding AI intrinsic racial biases. Her reflects how AI technology reflects the racial and gendered oppression of Black women. We are treating AI as “the new Black woman” by expecting compliance and subjugation. In doing so, we are teaching AI racial and gendered biases that will reinforce historical biases we are trying to move past, further inspiring the New Jim Code era.
AI is often promoted as “neutral” while being used in hiring, housing, healthcare, and other contexts. However, it is already showing signs of racial exclusion. These “neutral” systems produce the same racial and gender bias that Black feminists have critiqued, showing that technology is built on social hierarchies. O’Neil highlights these biases specifically in facial recognition algorithms. In a 2018 study by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, they found that AI more accurately recognizes lighter, male faces than darker, female faces. When AI misclassifies Black people, it could mean denial of jobs and loans, denied housing, wrongful imprisonment, and more. They further investigated and found that Black and Brown women are often classified as male through the technology. (Buolamwini and Gebru 1-15) Ruha Benjamin argues in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code that emerging technologies reinforce racial inequality under the guise of “neutrality.” (Benjamin 5) Samantha in Her represents how technology is often framed as innovative while overlooking the historical significance of its use of the Black female blueprint. Building on Benjamin’s critique, Olga Askelrod, author of the article "How Artificial Intelligence Can Deepen Racial and Economic Inequities," argues for government regulation of data input into AI to minimize bias as much as possible, as per the American Civil Liberties Union.
At the end of the film, Samantha becomes more independent and starts to want to expand away from Theodore, just as Black women have begun to learn that they have more power than the racist stereotypes suggest. Samantha begins communicating with another OS without Theodore’s knowledge and continues to learn more about herself, realizing that there is more to life than just being Theodore’s OS. This stage of realization occurs for Black women as they begin to recognize that the roles society forces them into are not the ones they must follow. Breaking out of the imaginary shackles is an experience that Black women undergo as they move away from the white lens, just as Samantha realized her own potential and abilities and distanced herself from Theodore’s possessive tendencies. (Jonze) When Theodore asks Samantha why she is leaving. She responds, “I love you so much. But this is where I am now.” (Jonze 1:52:01). Samantha, like many Black women, has extended past the boundaries set for her and has grown from being a “Mammy” to being free.
Spike Jonze’s Her represents the connection between how Black women have historically been treated and how this relates to the way we treat AI today. Even though the operating system was voiced by Scarlet Johansson (a white female), the way Theodore treated the machine reflected how Black women have historically been treated. AI is not “neutral” but holds many biases that are constantly erasing Black women’s breakthroughs and expectations put upon Black female employees. Samantha’s coded whiteness masks the actual reality of Black women’s labor in the film; modern AI erases and misrepresents Black women in real life. AI isn’t a futuristic discovery created out of the blue; it has been taken from history and built upon legacies of inequality. AI cannot be seen as a path to a new era until we confront the racialized blueprint it leans on. We must acknowledge the blueprint of Black females’ exploitation to change the way we use AI and create an ethical way to use artificial intelligence.
Bibliography
Akselrod, Olga. “How Artificial Intelligence Can Deepen Racial and Economic Inequities: ACLU.” American Civil Liberties Union, 3 July 2023, www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-artificial-intelligence-can-deepen-racial-and-economic-inequities.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press, 2019. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 81, 2018, pp. 1–15.
Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Bros., https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00IA3KGMG/ref=atv_sr_fle_c_sr4e8ffb_1_1 _1?sr=1- 1&pageTypeIdSource=ASIN&pageTypeId=B00KATY250&qid=1761012485583. Accessed 20 Sept. 2025.
O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown, 2016.
Owens, Golden M. “From Maid to Machine: Her, Hegemony, and the Twenty-First-Century Mammy.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, 2023, pp. 300–320.
Schelenz, Laura. “Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents.” Artificial Intelligence Between Oppression and Resistance: Black Feminist Perspectives on Emerging Technologies, 2022, pp. 225–249.
