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Why racial achievement gaps were so pronounced in affluent school districts is a puzzling question raised by the data.

We’ve long known of the persistent and troublesome academic gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers in public schools.

Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares

The problem is far worse when used to generalize about groups, such as gender and especially race. When combined with the cultural belief that only the "brainy" are worthy of science training, it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: only certain white men are inherently "smart enough", as decided primarily by other white men. You'll hear (and I'll bet cash money that someone will argue in the comments) that African-American underrepresentation in science is because they're not "smart" or "motivated" enough, not that black-majority school districts are often underfunded, lacking teachers, supplies, and other necessities for STEM prep — not to mention daily challenges to their authority and intelligence for those who do earn STEM degrees.

This is even more common among black teens. One-quarter of black teens say they are at least sometimes unable to complete their homework due to a lack of digital access, including 13% who say this happens to them often. Just 4% of white teens and 6% of Hispanic teens say this often happens to them. (There were not enough Asian respondents in this survey sample to be broken out into a separate analysis.)

Once products and, more important, people are coded as having certain preferences and tendencies, the feedback loops of algorithmic systems will work to reinforce these often flawed and discriminatory assumptions. The presupposed problem of difference will become even more entrenched, the chasms between people will widen.

At the same time racism and othering are rendered at the level of code, so certain users can feel innocent and not complicit in it.

In other words. race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the “threat” and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. The competitive advantage – economic, military, even artistic – of every advance in automation is so compelling that forbidding such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

It’s this combination, the fetish for strength and the idealization of racially coded innocence, that has historically led authoritarian movements to subvert the rule of law in the name of order.

Whites profit off of an American political and economic system that showers advantages on racial “winners” and oppresses racial “losers.” Yet, DiAngelo writes, white people cling to the notion of racial innocence, a form of weaponized denial that positions black people as the “havers” of race and the guardians of racial knowledge. Whiteness, on the other hand, scans as invisible, default, a form of racelessness. “Color blindness,” the argument that race shouldn’t matter, prevents us from grappling with how it does.

DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself (and like me), whom she sees as refusing to acknowledge their own participation in racist systems. “I believe,” she writes, “that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.” Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: “To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.”

And the expectation of “white solidarity”—white people will forbear from correcting each other’s racial missteps, to preserve the peace—makes genuine allyship elusive. White fragility holds racism in place.

DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people’s paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress—such as, for instance, when someone suggests that “flesh-toned” may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it—racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the “racial stamina” to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to “racial triggers”—the show “Dear White People,” the term “wypipo”—with “emotions such as anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, “and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”

In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were taught to treat everyone the same,” that they are “color-blind,” that they “don’t care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted.” They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more “salient” issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

Sure, education is linked to the workplace. Students grow up to be workers, and the federal government has a role in ensuring states are providing a quality education, especially in districts with many black and brown children. However, to collapse education and labor into a single agency is to also reduce education’s role in developing full human beings. Students are more than widget makers for the economy. And black students, whose ancestors’ bodies were once reduced to instruments of labor in slavery, have the most to lose from a shortsighted, politically-driven merger of the U.S. education and labor departments.

The socially constructed part of race is not that it is unreal, but that it is invisible in its construction, and that it is being done by people all the time, in action and in understanding. We all are pushing the levers every day.

Then, as now, the most reliable path to a progressive politics that produces true justice and human rights is that which begins with building the political power of workers. It is this proposition that has often made elite opponents of white supremacy — both black and white — deeply uncomfortable.

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

the effect of the color caste system on the North American Negro has been both good and bad, its effect on white America has been disastrous.

But what the data shows is we know if we're looking at test scores, if we're measuring the achievement gap, which is the test score gap between black and white students, that gap was the narrowest at the peak of integration in the school integration, which was 1988. As soon as we start to see the segregation increasing again, that achievement gap increases. And we've actually never gotten back to that low point that we were at when schools were their most integrated.

What I didn’t realize was how bad it would look when seen out of context

One was a deep frustration among black artists that a theme so central to their history should be explored, in a major museum, by a white female artist. The other was that artists, very often, do not consciously choose their subjects

or a white woman to paint Emmett Till’s mutilated face communicates not only a tone-deafness toward the history of his murder, but an ignorance of the history of white women’s speech in that murder—the way it cancelled out Till’s own expression, with lethal effect

How white engineers built racist code – and why it's dangerous for black people

The considerations which have governed the specification of languages to be taught by the professor of Modern Languages were that the French is the language of general intercourse among nations, and as a depository of human Science is unsurpassed by any other language living or dead: that the Spanish is highly interesting to us, as the language spoken by so great a portion of the inhabitants of our Continents, with whom we shall possibly have great intercourse ere long; and is that also in which is written the greater part of the early history of America.

What, but education, has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbours? and what chains them to their present state of barbarism & wretchedness, but a besotted veneration for the supposed supe[r]lative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization.

Electronically signed by

Ferguson Documents: Officer Darren Wilson's Testimony

a sound spirit of legislation, which banishing all arbitrary & unnecessary restraint on individual action shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another.

To know his rights; to exercise with order & justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciaries of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence with candor & judgment.

It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted the important point of comparison between these places: and the board, after full enquiry & impartial & mature consideration, are of opinion that the central point of the white population of the state is nearer to the central college, than to either Lexington or Staunton by great & important differences, and all other circumstances of the place in general being favorable to it as a position for an University, they do report the central college in Albemarle to be a convenient & proper part of the State for the University of Virginia.

Also the whole of his Slaves amounting to 57 in number.

healthiness & fertility. It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted

It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted the important point of comparison between these places

It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted the important point of comparison

and it’s centrality to the white population of the whole state

nothing, more than education, adorning the prosperity, the power and the happiness of a nation

Even after decades of affirmative action, black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago

The greatest racehorse of the 18th century was allegedly born during the 1764 solar eclipse, which tracked from Iberia to Scandinavia, at noon on April Fool’s Day. He was named, appropriately, Eclipse, and had a brief racing career of just 17 months. At that point he had to be retired, not for any physical reason, but because he won so consistently that no one bet on any other horse.

White America has only attended to the body of the earth in order to exploit it, never to succor it or to be nurtured in it. Instead of surreptitiously rip-ping off the vital energy of people of color and putting it to commercial use, whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way

Beacon Hill

to make common cause among ensla'ved black people, free but oppressed black people. and oppressed white working-class people.

By his very presence at the podium, Douglass increased the possibilities for rhetoric,

Die Brücke Institute

It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis.

Underpinning these discussions was the belief that the materiality of the body, one’s physical features were a catalogue of signs to be interpreted not only for the sake one’s own body, as was the case for bedside medicine, but rather and mainly for the body politic.

“really disrupt and complexify ... what they believe they know about race [and] students or families who live in poverty.”

The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.”

While the ambitious Olympic construction project was underway in 1934-35, huge controversy erupted over the exclusion of Jewish athletes from Germany's Olympic team.

most importantly, the co-worker is not white.

the Census Bureau has repeatedly altered how it asks the race question, and on the 2010 form, it added a sentence spelling out that “Hispanic origins are not races.”

census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits.

“Race to me gets very confusing because we have so many people from so many races that make up our genealogical tree

Erica Lubliner, who has fair skin and green eyes — legacies of her Jewish father and her Mexican mother — said she was so “conflicted” about the race question on the census form that she left it blank

Erica Lubliner, who has fair skin and green eyes — legacies of her Jewish father and her Mexican mother — said she was so “conflicted” about the race question on the census form that she left it blank.

they are too racially mixed to settle on one of the government-sanctioned

At a time when many multiracial Americans are proudly asserting their mixed-race identity, many Latinos, an overwhelmingly blended population with Indian, European, African and other roots, are sidestepping or ignoring questions of race.

they are wrestling with how to get more Latinos to pick a race. In 2010, they tested different wording in questions and last year they held focus groups, with a report on the research scheduled to be released by this summer.

because, as the census guide notes, “people of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin may be of any race,” and more than a third of Latinos check “other.”

race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits.

Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories — indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

The author affirms that “Zombies—lacking interior, lacking mind—cannot look; they are, for this reason, completely realized colonial objects. Zombies cannot be recognized, accommodated, or negotiated with; once identified, they must immediately be killed.” He contends that the coding of the zombie figure in the biopolitical terms of epidemic is evidence that “The biopolitical state . . . needs to create this sort of racial imaginary in order to retain its power to kill.”

Gunnar Myrdal

”The underlying philosophy of the Black Power movement,“ writes Fryer, ”was to encourage Blacks to accentuate and affirm black culture and fight the claims of black inferiority.” The adoption of “black” names is consistent with other cultural changes—like “natural hair"—prompted by the movement. African Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from whites, and naming was an easy means to the end.

Luca thinks this racial discrepancy is driven largely by unconscious bias—the hidden associations we have that affect our behavior without us realizing it.

Luca and his colleagues found requests with African American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts. They found discrimination across the board: among cheap listings and expensive listings, in diverse neighborhoods and homogenous neighborhoods, and with novice hosts as well as experienced hosts. They also found that black hosts were also less likely to accept requests from guests with African American-sounding names than with white-sounding ones.

There are real reasons, both historical and contemporary, that can make stepping outside in your free time while black or brown a politically charged move.

Mexico’s 2015 population survey, released Dec. 8, counted 1.38 million people of African heritage, representing 1.2% of the country’s population (link in Spanish.) Most live in three coastal states, including Guerrero, where they account for nearly 7% of the population, and overall they are poorer and less educated than the national average, Mexico’s census bureau (INEGI by its acronym in Spanish) has found.

Latin America's past of slavery and colonization is linked to anti-black racism, which some countries have tried to fight with anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies. Denying the existence of the black population by not counting them in the national census is one major way structural racism plays out in Latin American countries although anti-blackness is a pervasive issue in other issues, as well.

he decimationof public housing in Chicago became ameans of ‘rounding up’ black life into neigh-borhoods themselves increasingly depletedby scam mortgages.

Crown.

Crown.

IV. English Colonization

continent.

or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white,

most gorgeous dream

JUL 4, 2015

You see, along with all the wonderful things our Good White Parents taught us, they also taught us that it was important to be nice and polite and non-confrontational when dealing with the white racists we know. We learned to just ignore grandpa. We were reprimanded when we challenged Aunt Evelyn. We were coached before going into parties that people might be racist, but that was just their “point of view”. We were taught again and again that it was more important to keep the peace with family and friends than it was to stand up to racial injustice. This made sense to us because we understood that arguing with family or friends would likely cause us more immediate discomfort in the short term than racial injustice would.

But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police.

In an article about racial violence, this erasure of whiteness is absurd. The race of the victims is relevant, but somehow the race of the killers is incidental. If we’re willing to admit that race is a reason blacks were lynched, why are we unwilling to admit that race is a reason whites lynched them?

"Racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusionary behavior are in and of themselves nuanced and multilayered," says Freada Kapor Klein, a prominent advocate for tech diversity and founder of the not-for-profit Level Playing Field Institute.

"We don't have intentional bigots, but we have very smart, well-meaning, creative people who are systematically engaging in biased behavior." It is racist, for example, to approach a recruiting firm with the mandate to fill an engineering position only with someone from one particular Ivy League school, where blacks comprise a single-digit percentage of the student population. It is racist to rely on employee referrals for hires, when the typical social network of a white American is 1% black. And it is racist to impose standards of "culture fit"—the absurd notion that employees must behave (and sometimes appear) in a way that makes others feel comfortable—on job candidates. These are typical, and convenient, hiring practices of startup founders. Under enormous pressure to grow their companies fast, they feel entitled to dismiss niceties such as an HR department that might seek out minority candidates. But their very inaction is a manifestation of extreme bias, even if it's subconscious.

For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood.