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runlai_jiang

Black Representation in Government - 0 views

  • Although the 15th Amendment passed in 1870 legally prohibited denying black men the right to vote, major efforts to disenfranchise black voters promoted the passage of the Voters Rights Act in 1965. Prior to its ratification, black voters were subject to literacy test, false voting dates, and physical violence.
  • Constance Baker Motley was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1921. Motley became interested in civil rights matters after she was banned from a public beach for being black. She sought to understand the laws that were being used to oppress her. At an early age, Motley became a civil rights advocate and was motivated to improve the treatment received by black Americans. Soon after she became the president of the local NAACP youth council.
  • Harold Washington was born on April 15, 1922, in Chicago, Illinois. Washington began high school at DuSable High School but did not receive his diploma until after World War II — during which time he served as first sergeant in the Air Army Corps. He was honorably discharged in 1946 and went on to graduate from Roosevelt College (now Roosevelt University) in 1949, and Northwestern University School of Law in 1952
tongoscar

'Fresh Off the Boat' and the Asian American Entertainment Boom | Hollywood Reporter - 0 views

  • Even as the ABC series slipped in quality, it was instrumental in helping launch a boom in big- and small-screen Asian American representation.
  • Without Fresh Off the Boat, the current Asian American boom in Hollywood wouldn't — couldn't — look like it does today. When the ABC series debuted as a midseason replacement in February 2015, it was the first Asian American family sitcom since the cancellation of Margaret Cho's All-American Girl after one season two decades prior.
  • I wrote my personal eulogy for the sitcom back in 2018, shortly after the Season 5 premiere, and shortly before I regretfully quit watching.
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  • But around the fourth season, Jessica became the show's petulant brat needing growing up — a mother of three school-age children who regularly taught her life lessons.
  • Fresh Off the Boat likely hit its artistic peak in the two-part Season 3 finale, when the Huangs briefly move into a mansion they can barely afford on the rich part of town, where they have no friends and can barely keep the lights on.
  • Today's Asian American boom likely would have happened at one juncture or another, but it is genuinely remarkable how many Asian American projects — and how many different kinds of Asian American representation — have come out of Fresh Off the Boat. To briefly play Sliding Doors, if ABC had never taken a chance on Fresh Off the Boat, it's harder to imagine Crazy Rich Asians being greenlit with nary a recognizable star, especially one like Wu, who had garnered much good will in the show's early seasons by advocating for Asian American issues off screen as well.
  • For a series based on a chef's autobiography and regularly set at a restaurant, food has played a relatively minor role on Fresh Off the Boat.
  • It's entirely possible that plenty of Asian American progress would've happened in the Sliding Doors version of our universe where Fresh Off the Boat never made it onto the air.
katherineharron

The national security adviser says there's no systemic racism in policing. Studies sugg... - 0 views

  • When a Trump administration official said he doesn't think systemic racism exists in policing, many were stunned -- especially after studies have shown different races are often treated differently.
  • "There is no doubt that there are some racist police," O'Brien added. "I think they're the minority. I think they're the few bad apples, and we need to root them out."
  • "Of course there is" systemic racism, St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell said. "It's not just in police departments across this country. My goodness, there's systemic racism within pretty much everything in this country."
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  • frican-Americans are at greater risk of being killed by police, even though they are less likely to pose an objective threat to law enforcement, according to research by Northeastern University Professor Matt Miller.
  • Among those who were "unarmed and appeared to show no objective threat to police, nearly two-thirds of the victims were Hispanic or Black," the researchers found.
  • "there is profound racial disparity in the misdemeanor arrest rate for most -- but not all -- offense types,"
  • The 2017 study found that black residents were more likely to file complaints than white residents -- but "NCPD sustained complaints filed by Black residents only 31 percent of the time compared to sustaining complaints filed by White residents 50 percent of the time," the study says. "NCPD defines 'sustained' as 'the allegation is supported by sufficient evidence to justify a reasonable conclusion that the allegation is factual."
  • Latino youth are 65% more likely to be detained or committed than their white peers, according to a 2017 report from The Sentencing Project.
  • African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites, the NAACP said.
  • But they found that "blacks were 2.7 times more likely to be pulled over in an investigatory stop," NPR station KCUR reported. "Blacks were also subject to searches five times more often than white drivers."
  • But black drivers who had an infraction like a burnt out light were more often "questioned about what they were doing in a particular neighborhood, where they were heading, and whether they were carrying drugs," the report said. "Many were subject to vehicle searches."
  • "When you have the national security adviser saying he doesn't see systemic racism, well you know what? White folks also didn't see systemic racism even in the 1960s," Wise said.
  • "If white America didn't get it even when it was obvious in retrospect to everyone, what in the world would make the national security adviser believe that he or anyone else knows what they're talking about now? I think it probably stands to reason that black and brown folks know their reality better than we do."
  • "Especially after a tragedy like we saw in Minneapolis, we need to do two things -- take a hard look at our own actions and conduct, correct them where necessary, and to regain that trust by continuing to hold ourselves to the highest possible standard in a transparent way."
katherineharron

FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
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  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
katherineharron

Coming or going, Meghan gets the blame -- and it's because of her race - CNN - 0 views

  • From the moment Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made their relationship known to the public in 2016, the message many Britons sent to her was clear:You aren't one of us, and you aren't welcome.
  • Meghan, a biracial, divorced American actress, was far from what many envisioned as a fairy-tale match for a beloved member of the British royal family. While many in the UK welcomed her, the British tabloid media and a large swath of the Twitterverse were not kind.
  • While Meghan identifies as biracial, she is being treated as a black woman. Every black woman, including myself, knows what that means. As far as the world is concerned, your entire being is filtered through the color of your skin.
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  • As a black woman, it's been infuriating to watch how Meghan has been treated.
  • From the memes that say, "Prince Harry married a black woman and she made him move out of his mama's house," to journalist Piers Morgan tweeting that Meghan "ditched her family, ditched her Dad, ditched most of her old friends, split Harry from William & has now split him from the Royal Family," a narrative has formed that the duchess was the driving force in the decision.
  • The couple's 2018 royal wedding featured a black minister and music by a black cellist and a gospel choir. But aside from some symbolic touches, Meghan the Duchess hasn't given much reason to be linked with racial issues.
  • For Meghan this must be all the more discouraging given that -- according to her -- for years many people had no idea she was a woman of color.
katrinaskibicki

One paragraph that puts the white-black life expectancy gap in (horrifying) context - Vox - 0 views

  • It is generally well-reported that there is a life expectancy gap between white and black Americans of about four years. But it can be hard to visualize exactly what this number means. In a recent conversation, David Williams, public health researcher at Harvard, described the racial gap to me in stark terms: One of the ways to think of the racial gap in health is to think of how many black people die prematurely every year who wouldn't die if there were no racial differences in health. The answer to that from a carefully done [2001] scientific study is 96,800 black people die prematurely every year. Divide it by 365 [days], that's 265 people dying prematurely every day. Imagine a jumbo jet — with 265 passengers and crew — crashing at Reagan Washington Airport today, and the same thing happening tomorrow and every day next week and every day next month. That's what we're talking about when we say there are racial disparities in health.
  • I asked Williams why there is such a tremendous gap in black and white life expectancy. He said there's no single issue to blame; it instead comes down to many factors, largely related to where people live.
  •  
    Again, this isn't just because of one single variable. It's a mix of issues, including how walkable a neighborhood is, how clean the air, water, and soil are, the availability of healthy foods, public health policies that push people away from bad habits or foods, and so on. Geographic location just reflects the place all those ideas come together - often in a way that affects certain groups more than others. And it shows why it's important to take a comprehensive view toward public health policy, tackling a variety of issues at once, instead of focusing solely on just one or two problems in a community.
Javier E

Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Research in the last couple of decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.
  • The player takes on the role of a police officer who is confronted with a series of images of white or black men variously holding guns or innocent objects such as wallets or cellphones. The aim is to shoot anyone with a gun while holstering your weapon in other cases.Ordinary players (often university undergraduates) routinely shoot more quickly at black men than at white men, and are more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
  • Correll has found no statistically significant difference between the play of blacks and that of whites in the shooting game.
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  • an uncomfortable starting point is to understand that racial stereotyping remains ubiquitous, and that the challenge is not a small number of twisted white supremacists but something infinitely more subtle and complex: People who believe in equality but who act in ways that perpetuate bias and inequality.
  • One finding is that we unconsciously associate “American” with “white.” Thus, in 2008, some California college students — many who were supporting Barack Obama for president — unconsciously treated Obama as more foreign than Tony Blair, the former British prime minister.
  • “There’s a whole culture that promotes this idea of aggressive young black men,” Correll notes. “In our minds, young black men are associated with danger.”
  • Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado at Boulder has used an online shooter video game to try to measure these unconscious attitudes (you can play the game yourself).
cvanderloo

Ending testing for New York City's gifted program may be another blow to Black and Lati... - 0 views

  • The city’s Department of Education announced in February that it would stop testing students for its gifted program, which places top students in schools with curriculum designed for high academic achievement. Instead, preschool teachers will refer students for consideration.
  • Research has shown that teacher referrals tend to lead to fewer Black and Hispanic students’ qualifying for gifted programs, though Black teachers refer Black students more equitably.
  • gifted education is a vital service to help students with exceptional academic ability realize their full potential.
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  • For years, advocates for students in NYC have argued that using high-stakes tests on 4-year-olds to determine their school placement for the entire K-12 experience is unfair. It disadvantages students who didn’t attend academic-style pre-K or early enrichment programs.
  • Any test administered at age 4 will quickly cease to provide useful information, as students develop at different rates. Some accelerate during the elementary or high school years, while others who initially looked precocious settle into average achievement.
  • 3. It limited which students fully realize their potential
  • But research shows that many students start the school year performing well above grade level and are left to become bored and not reach their full potential.
  • By failing students with advanced academic needs who come from underrepresented groups, New York City’s Department of Education risks losing the entire gifted program.
  • An overhaul is possible, but it has to start with evidence-based practices, not quick fixes.
anonymous

Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel's Heroine Wants Something Else. - The New York... - 0 views

  • Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel’s Heroine Wants Something Else
  • Kaitlyn Greenidge and her sisters achieved success in their respective fields
  • In her historical novel, “Libertie,” she focuses on a Black woman who doesn’t yearn to be the first or only one of anything.
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  • Kaitlyn Greenidge learned about the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York. “I filed it away and thought, if I ever got a chance to write a novel, I would want it to be about this,” she said.
  • Libertie, the rebellious heroine of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new novel, comes from an extraordinary family, but longs to be ordinary.
  • As a young Black woman growing up in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie is expected to follow in the footsteps of her trailblazing mother, a doctor who founded a women’s clinic.
  • “So much of Black history is focused on exceptional people,”
  • I wanted to explore is, what’s the emotional and psychological toll of being an exception, of being exceptional, and also, what about the people who just want to have a regular life and find freedom and achievement in being able to live in peace with their family — which is what Libertie wants?”
  • “If you come from a marginalized community, one of the ways you are marginalized is people telling you that you don’t have any history, or that your history is somehow diminished, or it’s very flat, or it’s not somehow as rich as the dominant history.”
  • “That idea of being the first and the only was a big piece of our experience,”
  • They are engaged in ongoing conversations about their writing, though they draw the line at reading and editing drafts of one another’s work.
  • Libertie
  • The novel has drawn praise from writers like Jacqueline Woodson, Mira Jacob and Garth Greenwell, who wrote in a blurb that Greenidge “adds an indelible new sound to American literature, and confirms her status as one of our most gifted young writers.”
  • raised by a single mother who struggled to support the family on her social worker’s salary,
  • “I’ve always been interested in the histories of things that are lesser known,”
  • “There’s a really powerful lyricism that feels new in this voice,”
  • Greenidge and her sisters developed a reverence for storytelling and history early on, when their parents and grandparents would tell stories about their ancestors and what life was like during the civil rights movement.
  • “That fracture was really formative for me,” she said. “It made me hyper aware of inequality and the doublespeak that goes on in America around the American dream and American exceptionalism, because that was proven to me not to be true.”
  • Greenidge was collecting stories from people whose ancestors had lived there, and tracked down a woman named Ellen Holly, who was the first Black actress to have a lead, recurring role on daytime TV, in “One Life to Live.”
  • Greenidge filed the family’s saga away in her mind, thinking she had the premise for a novel. When she got a writing fellowship, she was able to quit her side jobs and immerse herself in the research the novel required.
  • The resulting story feels both epic and intimate. As she reimagined the lives of the doctor and her daughter, Greenidge wove in other historical figures and events.
  • In one horrific scene, Libertie and her mother tend to Black families who fled Manhattan during the New York City draft riots.
  • Greenidge also drew on her own family history, and her experience of being a new mother.
  • Her daughter, Mavis, was born days after she finished a second draft of the book, and is now 18 months old. She finished revisions while living in a multigenerational household with her own mother and sisters.
  • “Mother-daughter relationships are like the central relationships in my life,”
  • “I cannot think of a greater freedom than raising you,”
anonymous

Minneapolis Police Investigate Punching of a Black Teenager by an Officer - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Minneapolis Police Investigate Punching of a Black Teenager by an Officer
  • The events were recorded on video by an eyewitness and came as residents had been protesting another teenager’s arrest in connection with what police said was a “violent felony carjacking.”
  • The Minneapolis Police Department has opened an internal affairs investigation after a Black teenager was punched by an officer who appeared to be white, the mayor and the police chief said on Thursday.
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  • an eyewitness had drawn widespread attention and touched off protests by Black community members, who called for the officer to be fired.
  • The protests were set against the backdrop of the trial of Derek Chauvin, one of four former Minneapolis police officers who have been charged in the killing of George Floyd last May.
  • “De-escalating is paramount in the work that our officers do,”
  • daria Arradondo, the city’s police chief, said during a news
  • a Arradondo, the city’s police chief, said during a new
  • “violent felony carjacking”
  • Minneapolis police officers had been helping their suburban counterparts, who had stopped a suspect in the carjacking, when a group of residents approached and protested that the officers had the wrong person in custody, the eyewitness video showed
  • The suspect, another Black teenager, said he had been scared when Robbinsdale police officers led him toward the back seat of a patrol car.
  • Black teenager at the scene during a skirmish, the video showed. The person who recorded the video had been walking away from scene when the exchange happened, so it was not immediately clear what had led the officer to throw the punch.
  • he didn’t know whether the young man had played a role in the carjacking.
  • The police did not provide further details about whether the teenager had been charged or the nature of his injuries.
  • Civil rights groups criticized the use of force by the officer.
  • “The M.P.D. is out of control,”
  • “They don’t care if they are being filmed or if their body cameras are on. They know they can act with impunity.”
  • nneapolis said that he could not comment on the specifics of the case without potentially compromising the internal affairs investigation.
  • neapolis said that he could not comment on the specifics of the
  • that he could not comment on the specifics of the case without potentially compromising the internal a
ilanaprincilus06

NFL to stop controversial use of 'race-norming' in brain trauma settlements | NFL | The... - 0 views

  • The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of “race-norming” which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function in the $1bn settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias.
  • The practice made it harder for Black retirees to show a deficit and qualify for an award.
  • Wednesday’s announcement comes after a pair of Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, medical experts raised concerns and a group of NFL families last month dropped 50,000 petitions at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia where the lawsuit had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the settlement.
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  • According to the NFL, a panel of neuropsychologists that was formed recently to propose a new testing regime to the court includes two female and three Black doctors.
  • The NFL noted that the norms were developed in medicine “to stop bias in testing, not perpetrate it.”
  • The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assumes that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks.
  • The awards so far have averaged $516,000 for the 379 players with early-stage dementia and $715,000 for the 207 players with moderate dementia.
  • he settlement ended thousands of lawsuits that accused the NFL of long hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and traumatic brain injury.
cvanderloo

Colleges confront their links to slavery and wrestle with how to atone for past sins - 0 views

  • . Back in 2006, Brown University published a report showing that the university – from its construction to its endowment – participated in and benefited from the slave trade and slavery.
  • The revelation sparked an effort to track down descendants of the people and to atone by offering preferential admission – but not scholarships – for them to study at Georgetown.
  • Many universities benefited from slavery, and there has been a growing discussion about what, if anything, universities owe to the descendants of the people they enslaved and what they can do to atone.
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  • Even after slavery, these schools continued to oppress Black people by not allowing them to enroll as students.
  • Even though the nation’s 100 or so HBCUs represent less than 3% of the nation’s 4,360 colleges and universities, they graduated 13% of Black undergraduate college students nationally in the 2017-2018 school year.
  • The disparities transcend higher education. White families, on average, tend to have 10 times the wealth of Black families.
  • Yet scholars and economists studying racial economic inequality, such as William A. Darity Jr., point to the need for federal action. This action could range from economic reparations and endowment-building at HBCUs to debt forgiveness for Black students.
tongoscar

Column: African Americans aren't fooled by Donald Trump's fake love. - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

  • Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a master of trickery. His latest fraud was to pretend during his State of the Union address Tuesday that he is a friend to African Americans. “We are advancing with unbridled optimism and lifting our citizens of every race, color, religion and creed very, very high,” Trump said.
  • They divert money from urban schools, leaving many promising students behind without sufficient financial resources to meet their educational needs. The voucher system picks and chooses which kids are worth saving and leaves the others scraping for leftover pieces too sparse to go around.
  • We were grateful that Trump, whatever his reason, bestowed upon him the honorary promotion to brigadier general in a private ceremony earlier that day. Some of us teared up at the sight of this distinguished black man adorned with badges of honor, standing next to his great-grandson, who wants to follow in his footsteps.
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  • Black people are proud of McGee for breaking barriers, but we also know that new barriers are erected every day. Some of the politicians who applauded him support the black voter suppression taking place in their districts in the form of purged voter rolls, picture ID requirements and truncated early voting schedules.
  • Trump can talk all he wants about the demise of black poverty, but we know that poverty is still ravaging our communities. The poverty rate for African Americans is twice that of whites, and his administration is steadily taking away food stamps and other support systems that help the most vulnerable get by.
  • The anti-immigrant, anti-black rhetoric Limbaugh spews to his listeners appeals to the racist core of white Americans who fear that minorities are swindling away the privilege bestowed on them at birth. Many of these people comprise Trump’s base.
  • If any African Americans were unsure about who Trump really is, Limbaugh pulled back the curtain and revealed a scared little man masquerading as their savior. Like nearly everything good Trump claims to have done, his love for African Americans is just an illusion.
Javier E

'Fore' at Studio Museum in Harlem - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In 2001 the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a group exhibition called “Freestyle,” the first in what would be a series intended to introduce freshly minted African-American talent.
  • She referred to the group of artists she’d chosen, most of them then in their 20s, as “post-black.”
  • For her it meant artists who were adamant about not being confined to the category of “black,” though, as she wrote, “their work was deeply interested in redefining complex notions of blackness. Post-black,” she added with a wry twist, “was the new black.”
Javier E

Rachel Dolezal's Unintended Gift to America - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It is most unfortunate that Ms. Dolezal did not begin her television interviews on Tuesday by acknowledging that she should not have claimed to be black. She might have been forgiven if she had stated clearly that, while she may identify herself as black, by American society’s standards, her racial designation is white.
  • Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.
  • Identities are never entirely our own, but does that mean that we should lose all control in determining who we are? Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • Even W. E. B. Du Bois had trouble formulating a theoretically accurate account of racial identity, so he put it simply: A black man is “a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” But his statement still leaves us with a puzzle: What would a black man be without Jim Crow to define him?
  • The historical evidence is overwhelming, then, that the color line has always been far more porous and fragile than one might assume. In some places, it was so brittle that it could buckle and break.
  • To say that race is socially constructed gives it an air of make-believe. Race is quite real to those who live with it. Ask the families of the black men and women who have lost their lives during tragic encounters with the police. The choices about “who” they were, were not their own.
  • There is no essentialized, fixed, “true identity” waiting just below the surface. Identities are contingent, elusive and, as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, “always in process.
  • at the very least, perhaps we can use Ms. Dolezal’s story, puzzling as it is, as an opportunity to have a candid, lively, long-delayed, public conversation about the knotty meanings of race and racial identity, and how it has confounded our nation’s best aspirations. Perhaps we may yet move beyond the imprisoning boxes we have made.
cvanderloo

US museums hold the remains of thousands of Black people - 1 views

  • Among the human remains in Harvard University’s museum collections are those of 15 people who were probably enslaved African American people.
  • This dehumanizing history of collecting African American bodies as scientific specimens is not a problem just at Harvard.
  • However, scholars and activists across the U.S. are now seeking to recognize and redress the deep history of violence against Black bodies. Museums and society are finally confronting how the desires of science have at times eclipsed the demands of human rights.
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  • By one estimate, the Smithsonian Institution, Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Howard University hold the remains of some 2,000 African Americans among them. The total only increases when considering museums with remains from other populations across the African diaspora.
  • systematic collection of African American remains, as well as those of people from other marginalized communities, began with the work of Samuel George Morton.
  • His collection eventually ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. Only last year did the university officially announce the collection had been removed from a shelved display within an archaeology classroom.
  • Institutions long embraced such collections primarily for the pseudoscientific work of justifying racial hierarchies.
  • The U.S. Senate passed the African American Burial Grounds Network Act in December 2020. This bill would establish a voluntary network to identify and protect often at-risk African American cemeteries.
  • This work is necessary because many of the remains of Black people, like those of Native Americans, were taken without the consent of family, used in ways that contravened spiritual traditions, and treated with less respect than most others in society.
  • Even more importantly, the absence of a coordinated, national effort will mean the delay of justice for thousands of African American ancestors whose bodies have been, and continue to be, desecrated
anonymous

Opinion | 'This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • ‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’
  • Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor brought the past into the present.
  • “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”
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  • “This is Jim Crow in new clothes
  • I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
  • The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.
  • as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
  • arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.
  • His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.
  • It represents progress — and yet it is also evocative of the past.
  • A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875
  • The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle
  • They saw the bill as vital in the fight against discrimination and race hierarchy.
  • Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,
  • “no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”
  • “viewed school desegregation as a necessary component of achieving a truly colorblind nation.”
  • Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to
  • “invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”
  • And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”
  • “It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.
  • I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.
  • The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.
  • By the end of the century, Jim Crow was in place throughout most of the former Confederacy.
  • It would be over 70 years before the South would send another Black American to Washington.
  • His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values
  • The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.
katherineharron

Central Park confrontation sends an ugly message (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • he story of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on an African American man who was bird watching in Central Park and who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, is about racism, yes. But it's also about how racism is more than just whites' hostility toward people of color. Racism is more than a feeling; it's a system in which white people can and do exploit their own social positions, assumptions about their innocence, and the presumption that they're telling the truth.
  • That a black man has to rely on videotaped wrongdoing to be believed -- to protect himself from an agitated stranger advancing up on him, and to ultimately see something resembling justice
  • She refused to leash the dog, and, according to Christian Cooper's account on Facebook (where he posted a video of part of their encounter), he told her "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
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  • Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.
  • Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.
  • "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."
  • "I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"
  • Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.
  • She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.
  • Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.
  • We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.
  • To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.
  • Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."
  • Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.
  • let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.
Javier E

Why it's as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.
  • they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention
  • An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
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  • start with epistemic bubbles
  • That omission might be purposeful
  • But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests
  • An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.
  • an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy.
  • In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.
  • The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
  • Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly
  • They have been in the limelight lately, most famously in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017).
  • The general gist: we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. Our Facebook feed consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, the majority of whom share our own political and cultural views
  • various algorithms behind the scenes, such as those inside Google search, invisibly personalise our searches, making it more likely that we’ll see only what we want to see. These processes all impose filters on information.
  • Such filters aren’t necessarily bad. The world is overstuffed with information, and one can’t sort through it all by oneself: filters need to be outsourced.
  • That’s why we all depend on extended social networks to deliver us knowledge
  • any such informational network needs the right sort of broadness and variety to work
  • Each individual person in my network might be superbly reliable about her particular informational patch but, as an aggregate structure, my network lacks what Sanford Goldberg in his book Relying on Others (2010) calls ‘coverage-reliability’. It doesn’t deliver to me a sufficiently broad and representative coverage of all the relevant information.
  • Epistemic bubbles also threaten us with a second danger: excessive self-confidence.
  • An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission
  • Suppose that I believe that the Paleo diet is the greatest diet of all time. I assemble a Facebook group called ‘Great Health Facts!’ and fill it only with people who already believe that Paleo is the best diet. The fact that everybody in that group agrees with me about Paleo shouldn’t increase my confidence level one bit. They’re not mere copies – they actually might have reached their conclusions independently – but their agreement can be entirely explained by my method of selection.
  • Luckily, though, epistemic bubbles are easily shattered. We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed.
  • echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.
  • amieson and Cappella’s book is the first empirical study into how echo chambers function
  • echo chambers work by systematically alienating their members from all outside epistemic sources.
  • Their research centres on Rush Limbaugh, a wildly successful conservative firebrand in the United States, along with Fox News and related media
  • His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view.
  • outsiders are not simply mistaken – they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers. The resulting worldview is one of deeply opposed force, an all-or-nothing war between good and evil
  • The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination
  • cult indoctrination involves new cult members being brought to distrust all non-cult members. This provides a social buffer against any attempts to extract the indoctrinated person from the cult.
  • The echo chamber doesn’t need any bad connectivity to function. Limbaugh’s followers have full access to outside sources of information
  • As Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015), modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every member of that chain
  • Their worldview can survive exposure to those outside voices because their belief system has prepared them for such intellectual onslaught.
  • exposure to contrary views could actually reinforce their views. Limbaugh might offer his followers a conspiracy theory: anybody who criticises him is doing it at the behest of a secret cabal of evil elites, which has already seized control of the mainstream media.
  • Perversely, exposure to outsiders with contrary views can thus increase echo-chamber members’ confidence in their insider sources, and hence their attachment to their worldview.
  • ‘evidential pre-emption’. What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief.
  • One might be tempted to think that the solution is just more intellectual autonomy. Echo chambers arise because we trust others too much, so the solution is to start thinking for ourselves.
  • that kind of radical intellectual autonomy is a pipe dream. If the philosophical study of knowledge has taught us anything in the past half-century, it is that we are irredeemably dependent on each other in almost every domain of knowledge
  • Limbaugh’s followers regularly read – but do not accept – mainstream and liberal news sources. They are isolated, not by selective exposure, but by changes in who they accept as authorities, experts and trusted sources.
  • we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable. Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on that vulnerability, taking advantage of our epistemic condition and social dependency.
  • I am quite confident that there are plenty of echo chambers on the political Left. More importantly, nothing about echo chambers restricts them to the arena of politics
  • The world of anti-vaccination is clearly an echo chamber, and it is one that crosses political lines. I’ve also encountered echo chambers on topics as broad as diet (Paleo!), exercise technique (CrossFit!), breastfeeding, some academic intellectual traditions, and many, many more
  • Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.
  • much of the recent analysis has lumped epistemic bubbles together with echo chambers into a single, unified phenomenon. But it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the two.
  • Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily
  • Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things. Their belief systems provide structural integrity, resilience and active responses to outside attacks
  • the two phenomena can also exist independently. And of the events we’re most worried about, it’s the echo-chamber effects that are really causing most of the trouble.
  • new data does, in fact, seem to show that people on Facebook actually do see posts from the other side, or that people often visit websites with opposite political affiliation.
  • their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust.
  • Many people have claimed that we have entered an era of ‘post-truth’.
  • Not only do some political figures seem to speak with a blatant disregard for the facts, but their supporters seem utterly unswayed by evidence. It seems, to some, that truth no longer matters.
  • This is an explanation in terms of total irrationality. To accept it, you must believe that a great number of people have lost all interest in evidence or investigation, and have fallen away from the ways of reason.
  • echo chambers offers a less damning and far more modest explanation. The apparent ‘post-truth’ attitude can be explained as the result of the manipulations of trust wrought by echo chambers.
  • We don’t have to attribute a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the post-truth attitude. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities.
  • An echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth; it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.
  • in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world
  • none of this weighs against the existence of echo chambers. We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.
  • Notice how different what’s going on here is from, say, Orwellian doublespeak, a deliberately ambiguous, euphemism-filled language designed to hide the intent of the speaker.
  • echo chambers don’t trade in vague, ambiguous pseudo-speech. We should expect that echo chambers would deliver crisp, clear, unambiguous claims about who is trustworthy and who is not
  • clearly articulated conspiracy theories, and crisply worded accusations of an outside world rife with untrustworthiness and corruption.
  • Once an echo chamber starts to grip a person, its mechanisms will reinforce themselves.
  • In an epistemically healthy life, the variety of our informational sources will put an upper limit to how much we’re willing to trust any single person. Everybody’s fallible; a healthy informational network tends to discover people’s mistakes and point them out. This puts an upper ceiling on how much you can trust even your most beloved leader
  • nside an echo chamber, that upper ceiling disappears.
  • Being caught in an echo chamber is not always the result of laziness or bad faith. Imagine, for instance, that somebody has been raised and educated entirely inside an echo chamber
  • when the child finally comes into contact with the larger world – say, as a teenager – the echo chamber’s worldview is firmly in place. That teenager will distrust all sources outside her echo chamber, and she will have gotten there by following normal procedures for trust and learning.
  • It certainly seems like our teenager is behaving reasonably. She could be going about her intellectual life in perfectly good faith. She might be intellectually voracious, seeking out new sources, investigating them, and evaluating them using what she already knows.
  • The worry is that she’s intellectually trapped. Her earnest attempts at intellectual investigation are led astray by her upbringing and the social structure in which she is embedded.
  • Echo chambers might function like addiction, under certain accounts. It might be irrational to become addicted, but all it takes is a momentary lapse – once you’re addicted, your internal landscape is sufficiently rearranged such that it’s rational to continue with your addiction
  • Similarly, all it takes to enter an echo chamber is a momentary lapse of intellectual vigilance. Once you’re in, the echo chamber’s belief systems function as a trap, making future acts of intellectual vigilance only reinforce the echo chamber’s worldview.
  • There is at least one possible escape route, however. Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. An echo chamber can bring our teenager to discredit outside beliefs precisely because she encountered the echo chamber’s claims first. Imagine a counterpart to our teenager who was raised outside of the echo chamber and exposed to a wide range of beliefs. Our free-range counterpart would, when she encounters that same echo chamber, likely see its many flaws
  • Those caught in an echo chamber are giving far too much weight to the evidence they encounter first, just because it’s first. Rationally, they should reconsider their beliefs without that arbitrary preference. But how does one enforce such informational a-historicity?
  • The escape route is a modified version of René Descartes’s infamous method.
  • Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). He had come to realise that many of the beliefs he had acquired in his early life were false. But early beliefs lead to all sorts of other beliefs, and any early falsehoods he’d accepted had surely infected the rest of his belief system.
  • The only solution, thought Descartes, was to throw all his beliefs away and start over again from scratch.
  • He could start over, trusting nothing and no one except those things that he could be entirely certain of, and stamping out those sneaky falsehoods once and for all. Let’s call this the Cartesian epistemic reboot.
  • Notice how close Descartes’s problem is to our hapless teenager’s, and how useful the solution might be. Our teenager, like Descartes, has problematic beliefs acquired in early childhood. These beliefs have infected outwards, infesting that teenager’s whole belief system. Our teenager, too, needs to throw everything away, and start over again.
  • Let’s call the modernised version of Descartes’s methodology the social-epistemic reboot.
  • when she starts from scratch, we won’t demand that she trust only what she’s absolutely certain of, nor will we demand that she go it alone
  • For the social reboot, she can proceed, after throwing everything away, in an utterly mundane way – trusting her senses, trusting others. But she must begin afresh socially – she must reconsider all possible sources of information with a presumptively equanimous eye. She must take the posture of a cognitive newborn, open and equally trusting to all outside sources
  • we’re not asking people to change their basic methods for learning about the world. They are permitted to trust, and trust freely. But after the social reboot, that trust will not be narrowly confined and deeply conditioned by the particular people they happened to be raised by.
  • Such a profound deep-cleanse of one’s whole belief system seems to be what’s actually required to escape. Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers
  • Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust.
  • It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.
  • we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.
  • Stories of actual escapes from echo chambers often turn on particular encounters – moments when the echo-chambered individual starts to trust somebody on the outside.
  • Black’s is case in point. By high school, he was already something of a star on neo-Nazi media, with his own radio talk-show. He went on to college, openly neo-Nazi, and was shunned by almost every other student in his community college. But then Matthew Stevenson, a Jewish fellow undergraduate, started inviting Black to Stevenson’s Shabbat dinners. In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval – a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled
  • Similarly, accounts of people leaving echo-chambered homophobia rarely involve them encountering some institutionally reported fact. Rather, they tend to revolve around personal encounters – a child, a family member, a close friend coming out.
  • hese encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust.
  • We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field – we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept
  • goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.
  • f one can demonstrate goodwill to an echo-chambered member – as Stevenson did with Black – then perhaps one can start to pierce that echo chamber.
  • the path I’m describing is a winding, narrow and fragile one. There is no guarantee that such trust can be established, and no clear path to its being established systematically.
  • what we’ve found here isn’t an escape route at all. It depends on the intervention of another. This path is not even one an echo-chamber member can trigger on her own; it is only a whisper-thin hope for rescue from the outside.
Javier E

Beware Stubby Glasses - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • we spend trillions of dollars putting policies and practices into place, but most of these efforts are based on the crudest possible psychological guesswork.
  • Eldar Shafir of Princeton has edited a weighty new book, “The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy,” which is a master compendium of what we know.
  • many of our anti-discrimination policies focus on finding the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced. In fact, the serious discrimination is implicit, subtle and nearly universal.
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  • Both blacks and whites subtly try to get a white partner when asked to team up to do an intellectually difficult task. In computer shooting simulations, both black and white participants were more likely to think black figures were armed. In emergency rooms, whites are pervasively given stronger painkillers than blacks or Hispanics.
  • Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism.
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