Manufacturing Whiteness: How Colonial Logic Shapes AI Embodiment

The paper interrogates the racialized assumptions embedded in the design, representation, and conceptualization of human-like robots. it explores how, despite the pervasive discourse of technological neutrality, robotics and AI reproduce colonial hierarchies of race. The paper discusses the racial logic behind human-lik robot design and aims to explore how the absence of Blackness in robotic embodiment reflects deeper historical and ideological structures rooted in colonialism. It raises the provocative question: Why are there no black robots? and further examines how the default “whiteness” of human-like machines mirrors colonial epistemologies that associate technological advancement with Eurocentric ideals of humanity while relegating racialized others to categories of labor, servitude, or invisibility.