Though the origins of neoliberalism, design, and racism are situated at disparate moments in time, these systems support, reproduce, and reify one another in the United States today. Some contemporary design practices – especially Design Thinking – tend to simultaneously compound and conceal the oppressive effects of both neoliberalization and racism. Rarely does design proactively seek to unsettle racism from its own operations or the larger set of power hierarchies, which it upholds. This essay documents how neoliberalization has pushed design, capitalism, and racism to converge in formative ways; it interrogates the role of innovation in binding these systems together and producing new forms of racism and design; and it articulates how design reinscribes racism into its operations by dissecting elements of visual language, problem- framing, and empathy as a design sensibility in Moneythink’s IDEO.org-designed app for teens. This essay concludes by calling for an approach to social design that forces a reckoning with racism.
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