Tawana Petty

Tawana Petty is an American author, poet, social justice organizer, mother and youth advocate who works to counter systemic racism. Petty formerly served as Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Algorithmic Justice League representing AJL in national and international processes shaping AI governance.

She has also served as the National Organizing Director for Data for Black Lives, and as the Data Justice Director for the Detroit Community Technology Project.. Petty is a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, an alumni practitioner fellow of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), an alumni fellow of the Detroit Equity Action Lab, convening member of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, and founder and Executive Director of Petty Propolis, a Black women-led artist incubator focused on cultivating visionary resistance through poetry, literacy and literary workshops, anti-racism facilitation, and community-centered initiatives.

In light of police brutality against black individuals, Petty and other researchers like Deborah Raji and Ruha Benjamin are working towards putting an end to the use of surveillance technologies like facial recognition in policing. The failure of these technologies to correctly identify darker-skinned individuals raises the concern that these algorithms are biased against Black individuals.

Notable work
Petty has been involved in numerous efforts to center racial equity in data science.

Alongside the Detroit Community Technology Project, Petty has been outspoken against Detroit's "Project Green Light," an attempt to use video footage gathered by private businesses to surveil Detroit residents using facial recognition. She was a member of the curatorial team for DEPTH, an exhibition at Science Gallery Detroit.

As one of the contributors to Our Data Bodies, Petty has focused on working with community organizations across the US to push back against data collection efforts that harm minoritized people. The project "combines community-based organizing, capacity-building, and rigorous academic research." The group has published several interim reports. First, "From Paranoia to Power" in 2016, and then "Reclaiming our data" in 2018.

Petty uses her poetry as a mode of resistance. She uses the name Honeycomb in conjunction with this work, and her first book of poetry was entitled Introducing... Honeycomb. Her second book of poetry, Coming Out My Box, focuses on her lived experience as a Black woman from Detroit. She has a one-woman show by the same name. In addition to her personal poetry work, Petty believes in helping young people find their poetic voice. One workshop she teaches is entitled “Poetry As Visionary Resistance." The organization she leads for this work is called Petty Propolis, which also offers anti-racism training, organizes a yearly arts festival, and has led to the book Petty Propolis Reader.


 * Towards Humanity: Shifting the Culture of Anti-racism Organizing

Awards

 * 2011 Spirit of Detroit Award
 * 2011 Women Creating Caring Communities Award
 * 2012 The Woman of Substance Award
 * 2015 Detroit Awesome Award
 * 2016 University of Michigan Black Law Student Association's Justice Honoree Award
 * In 2021, named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics
 * 2023 CAIDP Civil Society AI Policy Leader Award