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jongardner04

White And Gold Or Blue And Black? The Great Dress Debate! Kids News Article - 0 views

www.dogonews.com/...d-black-the-great-dress-debate

sense perception

shared by jongardner04 on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • jongardner04 on 09 Mar 15
     
    Controversy over whether a dress is blue and black or gold and white
johnsonma23

What 'White Privilege' Really Means - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...t-white-privilege-really-means

privilege bias education language

shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices.
  • What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.
  • Middle-class and poor blacks in the United States do less well than whites with the same income on many measures of human well-being: educational attainment, family wealth, employment, health, longevity, infant mortality.
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  • people in such circumstances would vote for political representatives on all levels of government who would be their advocates.
  • It’s too soon to tell, but “Don’t Shoot” could become a real political movement — or it could peter out as the morally outraged self-expression of the moment, like Occupy Wall Street.
  • But the value of money pales in contrast to the tragedy this country is now forced to deal with. A tragedy is the result of a mistake, of an error in judgment that is based on habit and character, which brings ruin
  • People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate. The death of Michael Brown, like the death of Trayvon Martin before him and the death of Oscar Grant before him, may be but the tip of an iceberg.
  • Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our societ
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guar... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias

guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
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  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
clairemann

Why Some People Love Black Friday-and Others Hate It | Time - 1 views

time.com/...black-friday-psychology

psychology research brain science

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • If the thought of taking part in the annual ritual of Black Friday gives you cold chills rather than a rush of excitement, you’re not alone.
  • It’s not just a lack of appreciation for bargains that drives this disconnect. Psychology research indicates that several factors determine which side of the shop-‘til-you-drop divide you land on. Some people just aren’t wired to enjoy the more social aspects of shopping.
  • Task-oriented shoppers typically focus on finding the things they need as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort. Socially oriented shoppers, on the other hand, enjoy the presence of others while they shop.
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  • The same research suggests that social shoppers are actually energized by the presence of other consumers. These folks enjoy the experience more when there are others nearby, even if they don’t directly interact.
  • Psychology researchers talk about this preference in what they call field theory. If you’ve ever been bothered by a “close-talker” who leans in too close or touches your arm as they tell you a story, then you are likely someone who requires a little more personal space than that storyteller does.
  • Taken together, these two theories explain a lot about the way you feel about Black Friday-style shopping.
cvanderloo

Black students have far less trust in their colleges than other students do - 0 views

theconversation.com/-than-other-students-do-156174

racism college university USA knowledge education psychology science research

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Black undergraduates consistently said they trusted the people who run the colleges they attend – and society overall – substantially less than their white peers did. We have termed this difference the racial trust gap, and it was not a trivial difference.
  • We came to these conclusions based on our analyses of data collected from 8,351 college students enrolled at 29 U.S. colleges and universities across the country this spring.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Mar 21
       
      shows importance of sample size
  • we can surmise that the lasting effects of historical racism and current issues around race may play a contributing role in the trust dispositions of Black college students.
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  • We’ve yet to fully understand how trust might affect whether or not students finish school.
  • First, how does trust influence important college outcomes like degree completion and learning? Second, what strategies can colleges and universities use to improve trust among their constituents, particularly college students? Third, is there a productive role that higher education institutions can play in encouraging long-term societal trust among students?
jmfinizio

Opinion: The jarring, revealing video of Black men cleaning up the Capitol - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

capitol cnn opinion

shared by jmfinizio on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The image is jarring because it's a scene so commonplace, so normal.
  • it's difficult or darn near impossible not to see those decades-deep racial connections
  • An illustration of their importance to the health of this country
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  • the racial and income and power inequalities evident in that video shouldn't exist.
  • Black people have always been forced into a kind of Sophie's choice, to love a place that has for too long hated us while knowing that's what's best for us all, nevertheless.
  • Black people cleaning up after a White mob trying to undermine democracy is a powerful image
  • They didn't get caught up in returning hatred with hatred, anger with bitterness, confrontation with balled fists.
colemorris

Wilmington 1898: When white supremacists overthrew a US government - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-55648011

government overthrow

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A violent mob, whipped into a frenzy by politicians, tearing apart a town to overthrow the elected government.
  • A violent mob, whipped into a frenzy by politicians, tearing apart a town to overthrow the elected government.
  • They destroyed black-owned businesses, murdered black residents, and forced the elected local government - a coalition of white and black politicians - to resign en masse.
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  • "Think of the Democratic party of 1898 as the party of white supremacy,"
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      its so weird how this changed over time
  • White militias - including a group known as the Red Shirts, so named for their uniforms - rode around on horseback attacking black people and intimidating would-be voters
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      dies this possibly tie into the british uniforms or just a coincidence.
  • "Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses kill, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns."
  • The number of registered African American voters reportedly dropped from 125,000 in 1896 to about 6,000 in 1902.
huffem4

Academics Are Really Worried About Cancel Culture - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615724

school cancel culture

shared by huffem4 on 02 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials.
  • Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.
  • Another defense of sorts has been to claim that even this cancel-culture lite is not dangerous, because it has no real effect. When, for instance, 153 intellectuals signed an open letter in Harper’s arguing for the value of free speech (I was one of them), we were told that we were comfortable bigwigs chafing at mere criticism, as if all that has been happening is certain people being taken to task, as opposed to being shamed and stripped of honors.
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  • more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.
  • various people insisted that I was, essentially, lying; they simply do not believe that anyone remotely reasonable has anything to worry about.
  • in July I tweeted that I (as well as my Bloggingheads sparring partner Glenn Loury) have been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook.
  • This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice
  • A statistics professor says: I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I'm now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.
  • The new mood has even reached medieval studies; an assistant professor reports having recently just survived an attack by a cadre of scholars who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights,” regularly “mounting PR campaigns to get academics and grad students fired, removed from programs, expelled from scholarly groups, or simply to cease speaking.”
  • Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.”
  • The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as “supremacist,” although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group’s work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology.
  • Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.
  • let’s face it: Half a dozen reports of teachers grading Black students more harshly than white students would be accepted by many as demonstrating a stain on our entire national fabric. These 150 missives stand as an articulate demonstration of something general—and deeply disturbing—as well.
  • A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived.
  • One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.
  • The result is academics living out loud only in whispers
  • A creative-writing instructor:
  • The majority of my fellow instructors and staff constantly self-censor themselves in fear of being fired for expressing the “wrong opinions.” It’s gotten to the point where many are too terrified to even like or retweet a tweet, lest it lead to some kind of disciplinary measure … They are supporters of free speech, scientific data, and healthy debate, but they are too fearful today to publicly declare such support. However, they’ll tell it to a sympathetic ear in the back corner booth of a quiet bar after two or three pints. These ideas have been reduced to lurking in the shadows now.
  • Some will process this as a kind of whining, supposing that all we should really be concerned about is whether people are outright dismissed. However, elsewhere a hostile work environment is considered a breach of civil rights, and as one correspondent wrote
  • “It isn’t just fear of firing that motivates professors and grad students to be quiet. It is a desire to have friends, to be part of a community. This is a fundamental part of human psychology. Indeed, experiments examining the effects of ostracism highlight what a powerful existential threat it is to be ignored, excluded, or rejected. This has been documented at the neurological level. Ostracism is a form of social death. It is a very potent threat.”
  • Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all
  • Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic
  • It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”
  • So no one should feign surprise or disbelief that academics write to me with great frequency to share their anxieties. In a three-week period early this summer, I counted some 150 of these messages. And what they reveal is a very rational culture of fear among those who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.
  • The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind.
  • One professor notes, “Even with tenure and authority, I worry that students could file spurious Title IX complaints … or that students could boycott me or remove me as Chair.”
  • From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.
  • degree of sheer worry among the people
    • huffem4
      huffem4 on 01 Nov 20
       
      everyone has to watch what you say in fear of being "cancelled." Instead of teaching or helping the person to learn from their mistakes, their careers and futures are ruined.
runlai_jiang

Impossible Colors and How to See Them - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/le-colors-introduction-4152091

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Impossible Colors and How to See Them
  • How Impossible Colors Work Basically, the human eye has three types of cone cells that register color that work in an antagonistic fashion:Blue versus yellowRed versus greenLight versus darkThere is overlap between the wavelengths of light covered by the cone cells, so you see more than just blue, yellow, red, and green. White, for example, is not a wavelength of light, yet the human eye perceives it as a mixture of different spectral colors. Because of the opponent process, you can't see both blue and yellow at the same time, nor red and green. These combinations are so-called impossible colors.
  • Chimerical Colors Hyperbolic colors may be seen by staring at a color and then viewing the afterimage on the complementary color opposite it on the color wheel. Dave King / Getty Images
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  • While you can't ordinarily see both red and green or both blue and yellow, visual scientist Hewitt Crane and his colleague Thomas Piantanida published a paper in Science claiming such perception was possible. In their 1983 paper "On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue" they claimed volunteers viewing adjacent red and green stripes could see reddish green, while viewers of adjacent yellow and blue stripes could see yellowish blue. The researchers used an eye tracker to hold the
  • The impossible colors reddish green and yellowish blue are imaginary colors that do not occur in the light spectrum. Another type of imaginary color is a chimerical color. A chimerical color is seen by looking at a color until the cone cells are fatigued and then looking at a different color. This produces an afterimage perceived by the brain, not the eyes.Examples of chimerical colors include:Self-luminous colors: Self-luminous colors appear to glow even though no light is emitted. An
  • Stygian colors: Stygian colors are dark and supersaturated. For example, "stygian blue" may be seen by staring at bright yellow and then looking at black. The normal afterimage is dark blue. When viewed against black, the resulting blue is as dark as black, yet colored. Stygian colors appear on black because certain neurons only fire signals in the dark.Hyperbolic colors:
  • Impossible colors like reddish green or yellowish blue are trickier to see. To try to see these colors, put a yellow object and blue object right next to each other and cross your eyes so that the two objects overlap. The same procedure works for green and red. The overlapping region may appear to be a mix of the two colors (i.e., green for blue and yellow, brown for red and green), a field of dots of the component colors, or an unfamiliar color that is both red/green or yellow/blue at once!
runlai_jiang

You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ces-2018-reader-questions.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
katherineharron

Analysis: It's time to give some bigots a break - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • What if this ritual of going after people like the weatherman actually reinforces racism and other "isms" instead of combating them?
  • What if this hyper-focus on an individual's wrong distracts us from directing our outrage at the most destructive forms of intolerance -- the kind that's baked so much into our everyday lives that we hardly notice them?
  • "We make these kind of superficial scapegoats that we can use to make ourselves feel better about racism, but we don't address policies, practices or structures," she says. "To the white people who are clutching their pearls, I really have to ask: How integrated is your life? Yeah, you voted for Obama twice, but do you have any black friends?"
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  • "If you're Latino, you'll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you're an elderly woman, you'll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you're a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you're less intelligent than if you were slim."
  • "Damn," I thought. "I just racially profiled a black man -- and I'm black!"
  • The experience didn't just humble me, it scared me. If I -- someone who is black and has read about race and bias for years -- could act like this, what was possible for others who never thought much about these issues?
  • Perhaps there's another way. Our language and behavior should evolve. We shouldn't talk about racism, for example, as an either/or proposition: Use a slur and you're the Grand Imperial Wizard of the KKK; if you've never used one you're free of intolerance.
  • Here's a little secret that I think many minorities can identify with. Sure, we get angry when people get caught saying or doing the wrong thing. But we get angrier when others claim they could never be like those people.
  • One of my best friends is a fellow bigot -- a white minister I've known for years. He freely admits he still struggles with the racism he absorbed growing up in the segregated South.
  • We should never retreat from calling out the unapologetic cruelty that we see flashed across social media.
tongoscar

Why MLK Is America's Last Founding Father - 0 views

www.dailysignal.com/...-americas-last-founding-father

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The United States at large had a race problem that traced back to when the first African slaves were first imported to Virginia in 1619.
  • King’s efforts to improve conditions for blacks in the American South first attracted national attention in December 1955 when King’s Montgomery Improvement Association organized a boycott of Montgomery, Alabama’s segregated busing system to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks. She had refused to join three other blacks in giving up her seat for one white man. 
  • Hating and resenting one’s enemies was unbecoming of the organization’s members, who were activists “guided by Christian love” in their efforts to attain justice from a system of color-conscious laws. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • King reconciled militancy and moderation by 1963 in his “Letter From a Jail in Birmingham.”
  • As the 1950s came to an end, New York Times correspondent Michael Clark was covering raucous gatherings of black nationalists in Harlem, New York. He reported one encounter at an event organized in November 1959 by James Lawson, president of the black nationalist organization called the United African Nationalist. 
  • King understood the temptation to fight identity politics with identity politics, but refused. He preached that any form of race nationalism defied the “edicts of the Almighty God himself.” 
tongoscar

Chicago youth unemployment hits African Americans hardest, driving population declines ... - 0 views

news.medill.northwestern.edu/...st-driving-population-declines

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • More African Americans are out of school and out of work than among any other racial group in Chicago, according to a new report released recently by the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
  • Between 2010 and 2017 alone, Illinois’ lost 99,682 residents — in absolute numbers and that’s more than any other U.S. state, according to an earlier Great Cities Institute report from July.
  • In 1980, when Chicago’s black population reached its peak, there were 29 majority black neighborhoods in town. This has dropped down to 26.
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  • A decline in the manufacturing and related industrial jobs since the 1980s, coupled with inadequate affordable housing and quality schools are driving Chicagoans out, Cordova said.
  • In the age group of 16-19 years, about 11.5% of African Americans are neither in school nor working compared to about 5.3% of whites and 7.9% of Latinos, according to the report. The numbers are  based on the latest census data.
  • If the trend continues, demographers predict Houston could overtake Chicago’s place as the third largest city in the country and Chicago, once the second largest U.S. city behind New York, would drop to fourth place.
  • “Chicago is the only global city in America whose population is declining, and do you know why? Because African American families are leaving this city by the thousands,” said Chicago planning department chief Maurice Cox at the recent kickoff event in Austin for the INVEST South/West initiative. “This is a troubling trend.”
  • “I would argue for as much population and thousands that have left there are hundreds of thousands who have stayed and those are the folks we are going to build this strategy for,” Cox said.
  • “Many businesses on the North Side have been here for decades. Naturally, they have built relationships with other neighbors and business owners so when they are hiring, they lean towards who they are familiar with,” Edwards said.
  • “If you don’t have a black face in the market, the chances of black people getting a job in that neighborhood are cut down,” he said.
katherineharron

Ben & Jerry's statement on white supremacy is so extraordinary. Here's why - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The ice cream maker has called on Americans to "dismantle white supremacy" and "grapple with the sins of our past" as nationwide protests against racial injustice stretch into their eighth day.
  • Ben & Jerry's describes the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer as the result of "inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy."
  • "What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning," said the brand, which is owned by Unilever (UL).
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the statement from Ben & Jerry's is unusually comprehensive and direct, addressing the historical roots of discrimination in the United States and calling out systemic racism, while advocating specific policies to prevent further police abuses and redress racial inequality.
  • Ben & Jerry's, which also publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, called on President Donald Trump to disavow white supremacists and nationalist groups that "overtly support him."
  • The ice cream maker also called for the US Department of Justice to reinvigorate its Civil Rights Division, and for Congress to pass H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to study the effects of discrimination since African slaves first arrived in North America in 1619 and recommend remedies.
  • The company's sale to British-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever (UL) in 2000 has not prevented it from speaking out on issues such as racial injustice, climate change and refugee rights. As part of the deal, Ben & Jerry's kept an independent board of directors. "We're a wholly owned subsidiary [of Unilever], but we still act according to Ben & Jerry's mission, vision and values," a spokesperson told CNN Business.
  • "Unless and until white America is willing to collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past and the impact it has on the present, and commit to creating a future steeped in justice, the list of names that George Floyd has been added to will never end. We have to use this moment to accelerate our nation's long journey towards justice and a more perfect union," the statement concluded.
Javier E

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
Javier E

Slate Suspends Podcast Host After Debate Over Racial Slur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...late-mike-pesca-suspended.html

censorship racist term discussion language overreaction

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur in some contexts.
  • he was suspended indefinitely on Monday after defending the use of the slur in certain contexts. He made his argument during a conversation last week with colleagues on the interoffice messaging platform Slack.
  • Slate staff members were discussing the resignation of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a reporter who said this month that he was resigning from The New York Times after he had used the slur during a discussion of racism while working as a guide on a student trip in 2019.
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  • Mr. Pesca, who is white, said he felt there were contexts in which the slur could be used, according to screen shots of the Slack conversation that were shared with The Times
  • In November 2019, Slate introduced a policy that required podcast hosts and producers to discuss the use of racist terms in a pending episode, in or out of quoted material, before recording it.
  • Mr. Pesca explored the argument over the use of the slur in a 2019 podcast about a Black security guard who was fired for using it. In one recording of the episode, Mr. Pesca said, he used the term while quoting the man, but asked his producer to make a version without the term. After consulting with his producers and his supervisor, who objected to his quotation of the slur, they decided to go with the version without it, he said
  • “The version of the story with the offensive word never aired, and this is how I think the editorial process should go,” Mr. Pesca said in the interview.
  • No action was taken against him after a human resources investigation into his quotation of the slur, Mr. Pesca said
  • He said he had apologized to the producers involved.
  • Mr. Pesca said Mr. Check, the chief executive, and Jared Hohlt, Slate’s editor in chief, had brought up the previous instance of his quoting the slur when they spoke with him after the Slack conversation
  • Mr. Pesca, whose interview style at times seemed to embody Slate's contrarian brand, said he was told on Friday that he would be suspended for a week without pay. On Monday he was informed that the suspension was indefinite,
  • Mr. Pesca, who has worked at Slate for seven years, said he was “heartsick” over hurting his colleagues but added, “I hate the idea of things that are beyond debate and things that cannot be said.”
  • “I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading,”
  • Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate who hosted the third season of the podcast “Slow Burn,” disagreed. “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,”
Javier E

The right has its own version of political correctness. It's just as stifling. - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rrectness-its-just-as-stifling

patriotic correctness PC conservative language

shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
  • But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
  • Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
  • Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
  • Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.
  • Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.
  • Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
  • The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.
  • There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”
  • Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
  • Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.
  • The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.
Adam Clark

Why this Black Square is Art! Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism - YouTube - 2 views

www.youtube.com/watch

square art the Arts video

shared by Adam Clark on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 20 May 14
     
    "It's just a black square, right? What's the big deal, I could've made that in kindergarden... " Great example of an articulate analysis of this piece.
Javier E

Professors Are Prejudiced, Too - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...essors-are-prejudiced-too.html

prejudice university professor racial gender education

shared by Javier E on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang
  • Surprisingly, several supposed advantages that some people believe women and minorities enjoy did not materialize
  • response rates did indeed depend on students’ race and gender identity.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities
  • We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities
  • our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.
  • We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category.
  • Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample
  • Did reaching out to someone of the same gender or race — such as a black student emailing a black professor — reduce bias? No. We saw the same levels of bias in both same-race and same-gender faculty-student pairs that we saw in pairs not sharing a race or gender (the one exception was Chinese students writing to Chinese professors).
  • Did it help to be in a discipline with a greater representation of women and minorities? Again, no. Faculty members in those more diverse disciplines, like criminal justice, were no less likely to discriminate than those in less diverse disciplines,
  • Did it help that these were students in the pre-applicant stage, when some believe underrepresented groups enjoy advantageous access to selective opportunities? Again, no
  • each of the supposed hidden advantages of being a woman or minority proved to be no more than a phantom.
Javier E

Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kristof-our-biased-brains.html

racial bias genetic racism evolution psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face
  • Racial bias also begins astonishingly early: Even infants often show a preference for their own racial group. In one study, 3-month-old white infants were shown photos of faces of white adults and black adults; they preferred the faces of whites. For 3-month-old black infants living in Africa, it was the reverse.
  • in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our “in group” or not — because that could be lifesaving. A child who didn’t prefer his or her own group might have been at risk of being clubbed to death.
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  • I encourage you to test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu. It’s sobering to discover that whatever you believe intellectually, you’re biased about race, gender, age or disability.
  • unconscious racial bias turns up in children as soon as they have the verbal skills to be tested for it, at about age 4. The degree of unconscious bias then seems pretty constant: In tests, this unconscious bias turns out to be roughly the same for a 4- or 6-year-old as for a senior citizen who grew up in more racially oppressive times.
  • Many of these experiments on in-group bias have been conducted around the world, and almost every ethnic group shows a bias favoring its own. One exception: African-Americans.
  • in contrast to other groups, African-Americans do not have an unconscious bias toward their own. From young children to adults, they are essentially neutral and favor neither whites nor blacks.
  • even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny. We can resist the legacy that evolution has bequeathed us.
  • “We wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors hadn’t developed bodies that store sugar and fat,” Banaji says. “What made them survive is what kills us.” Yet we fight the battle of the bulge and sometimes win — and, likewise, we can resist a predisposition for bias against other groups.
  • Deep friendships, especially romantic relationships with someone of another race, also seem to mute bias
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