24 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. the GI Bill provided a range of benefits to returning World War II veterans including low-cost mortgages job training and college tuition the implementation of these benefits was not Equitable across racial lines though the 00:04:36 legislation itself didn't explicitly differentiate benefits based on race in practice the distribution of its benefits was largely influenced by social and institutional racism the GI Bill worked in tandem with existing racially discriminating housing and 00:04:48 lending practices such as redlining and restrictive covenants which effectively excluded black veterans from enjoying the same opportunities for homeownership as their white counterparts redlining was a discriminatory practice where 00:05:00 lenders would designate neighborhoods with a high percentage of black people as high risk areas for mortgage lending these areas were often outlined in red on maps used by Banks and other lending institutions hence the term redlining 00:05:13 this led to a systemic denial of Home Loans or Insurance to People based on the racial or ethnic composition of their neighborhoods
      • for: history - suburbs, GI Bill, racial discrimination, structural racism, institutional racism, racial discrimination
      • paraphrase
        • The GI Bill institutionally and structurally discriminated against people of color and played a major role in how suburbs expansion was racially discriminatory against people of color
  2. Apr 2023
  3. Feb 2023
    1. “The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.
    1. Many authors noted that generations tended to fall into clichés, especially when the system was confronted with scenarios less likely to be found in the model's training data. For example, Nelly Garcia noted the difficulty in writing about a lesbian romance — the model kept suggesting that she insert a male character or that she have the female protagonists talk about friendship. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne attempted to deviate from standard fantasy tropes (e.g. heroes as cartographers and builders, not warriors), but Wordcraft insisted on pushing the story toward the well-worn trope of a warrior hero fighting back enemy invaders.

      Examples of artificial intelligence pushing toward pre-existing biases based on training data sets.

  4. Dec 2022
    1. The critical mistake that has been made in the past is that we have equatedthe question of who loses the game with the question of why the game produceslosers in the first place. They are, in fact, distinct and separate questions.

      Rather than focusing on education as the magic bullet for improving poverty, we should be focusing on the structural problems of the economy itself. It shouldn't be a zero sum game as that will always result in losers and thus poverty. The choices we make with that fallacy simply decide who will face poverty and will never fix the root issues.

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  5. Sep 2022
    1. David Brady and colleagues have shown this to be empirically the case across29 rich democracies. The authors focused on four major risks of poverty—loweducation, single motherhood, young adults heading a household, and unem-ployment. They found that although the prevalence of these risks in the UnitedStates is actually below the average in other countries, the rate of poverty inthe United States is the highest. The reason is that “the penalties for risks inthe United States are the highest of the 29 countries. An individual with allfour risks has an extremely heightened probability of being poor in the UnitedStates.”

      How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

      What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

      Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

  6. Mar 2022
  7. Feb 2022
    1. But the coverage, as our editorial page later noted in 2018, “deplored the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor, white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in — the Black victims.
    2. The next year, the paper wrote glowingly in its news pages of a segregation ordinance — “preventing negroes from moving” into majority-white neighborhoods and vice versa — signed into law in 1910. The measure was drafted, one article claimed, after white residents in the northwest section of the city decried “the encroachment of the negroes into white residential sections, lowering property values and driving white people from the neighborhoods in which, previous to the black invasion, they had liked to live.” As Antero Pietila, a former Sun reporter, noted in his 2010 book, “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,” that particular ordinance paved the way for residential segregation in America. Nothing else like it was on the books anywhere, and legislation modeled after it soon sprung up in other regions of the country.

      A segregation ordinance in 1910 in Maryland became a model for legislation in many areas of America which encouraged residential segregation across the country.

  8. Jan 2022
    1. Consider, as well, the extent to which the tools of abstraction are themselves tied up in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As the historian Jennifer L. Morgan notes in “Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic,” the fathers of modern demography, the 17th-century English writers and mathematicians William Petty and John Graunt, were “thinking through problems of population and mobility at precisely the moment when England had solidified its commitment to the slave trade.”Their questions were ones of statecraft: How could England increase its wealth? How could it handle its surplus population? And what would it do with “excessive populations that did not consume” in the formal market? Petty was concerned with Ireland — Britain’s first colony, of sorts — and the Irish. He thought that if they could be forcibly transferred to England, then they could, in Morgan’s words, become “something valuable because of their ability to augment the population and labor power of the English.”This conceptual breakthrough, Morgan told me in an interview, cannot be disentangled from the slave trade. The English, she said, “are learning to think about people as ‘abstractable.’

      This deserves to be delved into more deeply. This sounds like a bizarre stop on the creation of institutional racism.

      How do these sorts of abstraction hurt the move towards equality?

    1. If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.
  9. Dec 2021
    1. The unwritten rule of Cybernetics seems to be - Maintain the homeostasis until you break it for the better. #Cybernetics #Ashby

      This is a good rule of thumb for political science as well. Some of our issue in America right now is that we're seeing systemic racism and many want to change it, but we're not sure yet what to replace it with.

      The renaissance created scholasticism which created a new system, but too tightly wound religion into the humanist movement. Similarly Englightement Europe and America subsumed the indigenous critique, which opened up ideas about equality and freedom which hadn't existed, but they still kept the structures of hierarchy which have caused immeasurable issues. These movements are worth studying to see how the new systems were created, but with an eye toward more careful development so as not to make things even worse generations later.

  10. Oct 2021
    1. Analog zur Struktur des Zettelkastens baut Luhmanns Systemtheorie nicht auf Axiome und bietet keine Hierarchien von Begriffen oder Thesen. Zentrale Begriffe sind, ebenso wie die einzelnen Zettel, stark untereinander vernetzt und gewinnen erst im Kontext Bedeutung.

      machine translation:

      Analogous to the structure of the card box, Luhmann's system theory is not based on axioms and does not offer any hierarchies of terms or theses. Central terms, like the individual pieces of paper, are strongly interlinked and only gain meaning in the context.

      There's something interesting here about avoiding hierarchies and instead interlinking things and giving them meaning based on context.

      Could a reformulation of ideas like the scala naturae into these sorts of settings be a way to remove some of the social cruft from our culture from an anthropological point of view? This could help us remove structural racism and other issues we have with genetics and our political power structures.

      Could such a redesign force the idea of "power with" and prevent "power over"?

  11. Jul 2021
    1. A satirical take on John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book Black Like Me

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs </span> in Writing a Life | The Hedgehog Review (<time class='dt-published'>07/22/2021 12:15:27</time>)</cite></small>

    1. And while hunting for caches, he uses some tricks to avoid unwanted attention, like carrying a clipboard. “If you look like you’re working, people don’t tend to pay attention to you.”

      Sad that this is the case.

      Good tip for espionage though...

  12. Mar 2021
  13. Feb 2021
  14. Dec 2020
    1. People who think that racial differences are all biological might say that all these non-White groups have suffered so much excess death because of that bottom circle, because of greater biological susceptibility.  Recent studies have evaluated this hypothesis and found that it’s not true.  Instead the answer is simpler: Black and Latino/a people in particular are dying of COVID-19 at such staggering rates because they are more likely to be exposed to the virus in infectious settings, particularly workplaces.
  15. Sep 2020
  16. Jul 2020