In 2020, Emily began to seriously question and investigate their contributions to systemic racism, specifically Anti-Black racism. During that summer, #checkyourself started to circulate, but as a general manager of a small grocery store working overtime in a pandemic, Emily could not immediately see how to do that.

Emily recognised that they needed to learn and contribute to the justice movement on a daily basis if they wanted their actions to align with their beliefs, but they did not want that to mean rereading loads of horrible things from history and present day. They knew that if they were to do this every day, the action needed to be sustainable, and thus it needed to be fun.

With the limited time Emily had between work and sleep, the only thing they could think of was music, so they checked their Spotify® library, and discovered that over 95% of the music they listened to and was recommended by the program was made my white artists. Emily was shocked. They had never taken the time to explore the biographies of the artists they listened to, and therefore had never made selections on artists based on visual appearance and geolocation, so how did this high-white trend manifest?

How did they have a preference for white people in music when they only listened to it and didn’t look at who was singing? How did they develop this unconscious preference when they believed in equality, and had never considered that any one person was worthy of less than another? Where did this high-white trend come from?

After seeing the data, Emily could not ignore that they had a bias, and they sought to backtrack and dissect it to see where it came from and how it manifested. Thus, ‘The 100 Days of Colour’ was born.

In this experiment, Emily challenged themselves and the Spotify® program to force change and embrace diversity through music. Emily wanted to know if the high-white trend was unique to them, or was it prevalent through the entire program. To do this, they stopped listening to white artists unless they were featured on a track by an artist of colour (it began with black artists then expanded), and dramatically increased the amount of artists of colour to see how the program responded.

For 100 days, Emily maintained this trend in input, and they monitored the changes in recommendations submitted to them by the Spotify® program. Then, for another 100 days, they relaxed the criteria and went back to listening to anyone they wanted to to see how the program responded to their new listening habits. Before recording the results for the 100th day, Emily did a deep cleanse of their Spotify® history by going to the very bottom of their ‘Liked Songs’ Playlist and working up, deleting any songs that no longer represented them.

The resultant changes in representation unearthed some ground-breaking insight from within the Spotify® program, that teaches volumes about our relationship to our algorithms, both those online and those of our mind.

There are many sides to ‘The 100 Days of Colour’, one of which is the psychological side. Emily had not anticipated the adverse psychological impacts that came with racial profiling, and this opened up a whole conversation about consciousness and the difference between impulse and instinct. Racism and other forms of discrimination are not instinctual, they are impulsive - meaning they are trained into us by society - so what happens when our impulses are so well-trained that we automatically go against our base instincts?

Emily explores this question and the question of How do good people do bad things? in their book ‘The 100 Days of Colour: Celebrating Frequetic Beauty’. This book includes all the data from the experiment and concurrent figures, highlights from Emily’s research into Anti-Black racism and the psychology of discrimination, and their understanding of how these atrocities are manifestations of our evolution of consciousness.