308 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2020
  2. Jul 2020
  3. Jun 2020
  4. May 2020
  5. Apr 2020
  6. Jan 2020
    1. The thing with the HRIA was that as a condition of receiving funding, all the work, including work in progress, had to be submitted to a searchable database so that everyone else receiving funding could see the work and use it to advance their own work—because above anything else, we had a mandate to get advances and therapies to the patients as quickly as possible. The HRIA still allowed for patent filings, but everything, everything, was cross-licensed for the length of the patent, for a statutory fee that went into effect only after a product went to market.

      As Sci-Fi does, the myriad variables are expertly set by the author. The way this world is constructed, tho, feels so very familiar & in a way that seems beyond the norm for comparably radical imaginings.

  7. Dec 2019
    1. Her hair was the brightest living gold, and, despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness, that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features. 22The peasant woman, perceiving that my mother fixed eyes of wonder and admiration on this lovely girl, eagerly communicated her history. She was not her child, but the daughter of a Milanese nobleman. Her mother was a German, and had died on giving her birth. The infant had been placed with these good people to nurse: they were better off then

      In 1831, the foundling Elizabeth's nobility appears to be recognizable in her physiognomy. Her features are described in terms that might be read as typical markers of whiteness: “thin of frame, fair of skin, and possessed of golden hair and blue eyes.”

      During the early 19th century the field of “race science” was already established and growing. For instance, Linnaeus’ Systema naturae (1758) infamously contains a hierarchy of homo sapiens based on skin color.

      In discussions of these contextual sources in the “race science,” scholars have often focused on the Creature as a symbol of the racialized other. This alteration to Elizabeth’s description in 1831 lends further credence to these readings by positioning Elizabeth, the spiritually and racially pure female, as has his ultimate victim.

      See, for instance: Mellor, Anne K. “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril” in Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 481-489.

    1. race usually refers to people of color

      Race often DOES refer to people of color. Maybe that is part of the problem? That we define race by color? A couple of years ago, I taught high school American History using race and class as the lenses through which we viewed our history. We began the year with a discussion on race and its definition. After a LOT of discussion and analysis, the students concluded that "race" is not real, but rather a social construct. As is also discussed in these NYT articles: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-is-racial-identity/race-and-racial-identity-are-social-constructs. I wonder whether we should broaden the discussion to the wider issues of diversity, equity and inclusion?

  8. Oct 2019
  9. Feb 2019
    1. The opposition of suburban whites to the welfare state (“entitlements”), beginning with the 1970s tax revolts (Burton rails at having to pay high school taxes and then see his son be forced to go to school in the inner city, and against “welfare freeloaders”), only intensified as the “hard-working” (white) “common man” in his orderly suburban family saw the New Deal dream evaporate. Burton declared in 1974: “I wanted to be somebody”, and in the economic environment symbolized by the oil price shock of that year, his identity became more and more at odds with the desire of the excluded in US society to also “be somebody”. By 1976, Burton had abandoned the Democratic party and the New Deal ethos, seeing in Ronald Reagan someone who could “deliver the nation out of its malaise”, with a reprise of Wallace’s “freshness, independence, backbone and scrappy spirit”. This is not a new story. It is rather a reflection of US history as a whole, where a frontier-spirit, classless liberalism is organically bound up with anti-democratic exclusion and an ethic of private responsibility. It is but one facet of American racialized, gendered neoliberalism.
    1. the intellectual effectiveness exercised today by a given human

      It is sobering to think that no amount of augmentation was going to allow Engelbart in 1962 to even imagine that there might be a problem, however persistent, in referring to a "given human being" as if it could be anyone, when in fact it was such a small and privileged segment of humanity that could participate in the dozens of disciplines to which he refers as a means of intellect augmentation. Perhaps we need to supplement this solving of problems through the application of augmented intellect with a stepping back to consider the shortcomings in our conception of both the problem and the means to resolving it.

  10. Jan 2019
    1. As white women and women and men of color have increasingly participated in public forums, they have begun to theorize lhc differ-ences race and gender make in language use.

      I'm so glad it's come to this head, since I've been making note of these types of differences throughout the piece.

    1. We regularly, in the interests of Plato-worship, disembody language and reason, with the narrow-mindedness Mark Johnson points out in an important recent book, The Body in the Mindl3 Our persistent evasion of the "Q" question makes for a great deal of self-centered, self-serving preaching and a great deal of self-satisfied practice. We do sometimes follow that master of contemptuous, self-satisfied self-absorp-tion, the Platonic Socrates, closely indeed.

      This reminds me of Albert Camus' thoughts on absurdity, and what James Cone says in his book Black Theology and Black Power: "All aspects of this society have participated in the act of enslaving blacks, extinguishing Indians, and annihilating all who question white society's right to decide who is human....Absurdity arises as the black man seeks to understand his place in the white world. The black man does not view himself as absurd; he views himself as human. But as he meets the white world and its values, he is confronted with an almighty No and is defined as a thing. This produces the absurdity."

  11. Nov 2018
    1. Why racial achievement gaps were so pronounced in affluent school districts is a puzzling question raised by the data.

      Portland, OR: Parents' socioeconomic status broken down by race vs. educational attainment (reading & math).

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

      Portland, OR: Parents' socioeconomic status vs. educational attainment (reading & math).

    3. Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares

      Statistical comparison of educational measures in relation to income and race.

    1. 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.
  12. Oct 2018
    1. 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.)
    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
  13. Sep 2018
    1. 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.

      In this paragraph the author creates an intentional analogy between technological Singularity and nuclear bomb technology. After the catastrophe of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the governments tried to limit the production of nuclear bombs and signed many treaties to ban countries from achieving the needed technology to create such bombs. That proved to be a big failure since many countries such as Pakistan and India were able to create atomic bombs. The same situation applies to the Technological Singularity, as the author has mentioned many countries will not understand the threat and there will be a race towards achieving such technologies.

  14. Jul 2018
    1. 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.
    1. 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.
    2. 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.”
    3. 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.
    4. 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.”
    5. 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?
    1. 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.
  15. Apr 2018
    1. 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.

      Karen Fields is saying that the socially constructed part of race does exist, but it happens behind the scenes, invisibly. She says that all the time people in society are pushing it forward. Fields is arguing that everyone is a part of the socially constructed part of race, and we are contributing to it whether we know it or not. She adds that racism is easier on those who benefit from exclusion when they feel like they are innocent.

  16. Mar 2018
    1. 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.

      Antiracism and procapitalism

    1. 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 Lewontin blood protein argument against race as a biological phenomenon.

    1. 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.

      This is an interesting inversion of the usual narrative about segregation (which would say that segregation hurt black Americans, and would rarely discuss its impacts on white Americans). It feels both like it grants agency-- in that black Americans are not being presented as a continually downtrodden group-- and that it is an attempt to legitimize the struggle against segregation, because if segregation is disastrous for white America then it is truly bad for America.

  17. Feb 2018
    1. 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.

      affect of desgregation

  18. Dec 2017
    1. What I didn’t realize was how bad it would look when seen out of context

      this happened bc of racial discourse

    2. 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

      racial differences... create mixed ideas of what is okay

    3. 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

      connection between ETs murder being bc of the actions of a white women- categorize female whites- ppl thing she is at fault

    1. 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.

      I find it very interesting that Jefferson recognized the importance of the Spanish language. Today, many people do not see the importance of speaking Spanish and some even have a negative connotation towards Spanish speakers here in the United States. This does not make sense to me since a large base of this country which is also the back bone is made up oh spanish speaking latinos and latinas. People tend to overlook this, however they do not understand that the best way to communicate with this population is by catering to their language. Even when there are resources available for underserved communities, spanish speakers are often left uninformed or have to rely on their younger children to translate for them. Besides being a business advantage, learning the language is also important to better serve a huge part of the American population, especially since there is no official language of the United States.

    2. 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.

      In this phrase, Jefferson talks about the importance of education and advancement by using the native Americans as an example. He describes them as barbaric and is basically making fun of their ideology to worship their ancestors and their traditional ways. This is not the first time Jefferson expressed his views of Native Americans in such a negative light. For my Art Inside/Out Engagement course, I am doing a project on the Declaration of Independence. The quote that my group decided to use was “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The discrimination against Native Americans is engraved in the Declaration of Independence of the United States and in the Rockfish Gap Report of the University of Virginia.

  19. Nov 2017
    1. 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.

      I think all would agree that this kind of legislature, being implemented with the aim of promoting freedom and the equal rights of one another, is for the best, yet this idea holds a fair amount of hypocrisy in the time of this documents writing. As they set the foundations of UVA in the ideology of freedom and equality they simultaneously have slaves constructing the grounds. I also picked this quote because I thought it related to my current engagement class, Telling the Truth, where we analyze the interplay between the beauty of a medium of information and the truth. Metaphors comparing this legislature to "a sound spirit" evokes a wholesome mood, yet this beautiful writing in a way hides the deep flaws and hypocritical nature of this statement which claims to establish equality. -Drew Parks

    2. 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.

      The idea of educating students on their own rights is interesting when considering the unequal rights of individuals of different race, class, and gender. While students may come to know their own democratic rights as upper class white males of the time, they might fail to gain exposure to the lack of rights of others around them. This most likely perpetuated a system of inequality in which the most educated elite who likely assumed powerful roles were allowed to continue institutional discrimination. However, it is very possible that if there were progressive professors in the University at the time that may have been honorable enough to teach students about the universal rights of all humans.

    3. 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.

      I think that the fact that the founders of the University elected to put the University of Virginia in the county that had the biggest white population speaks volumes about the men who started our great University and the beliefs that the Founders had. This passage reveals that the Founders wanted a place with a big white population in order to attract rich plantation owner's sons, because those are the kinds of people they wanted attending their University. However now in 2017, that isn't the case, no longer does UVA just attract the rich, white people as the Founders wanted it too when they first started the institution. UVA now is home to a student body rich in diversity and culture and I think that speaks volumes about how far this institution has come. But I would also like to point out, there is still progress that this institution needs to make and steps that must be taken in order to truly make our school the most equal place it can be. -Emily McClung

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

      I had previous knowledge that the University has a unique history with slavery, yet I found it interesting how the author chose to list the slaves mentioned here as property alongside the other land acquisitions. The 57 slaves noted in this line were dehumanized and treated as property to be bought and sold. The evidence of slavery literally being in the founding document of this University demonstrates how although the school has a racist past, we can move forward today by recognizing, addressing, and recontextualizing the past dehumanization of individuals. -Komal Kamdar

  20. Oct 2017
    1. healthiness & fertility. It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted

      According to this line, the only important characteristics of a piece of land are "healthiness & fertility" and "degree of centrality to the white population." This portion of the text provides important insight into the ethical lens of Jefferson and his peers: something is only worth consideration if it bolsters health, agriculture or white males. The authors presented their guidelines for land consideration as clear-cut, failing to mention the fact that Jefferson was especially inclined towards Charlottesville because of its proximity to Monticello. While the text operates under the assumption that health, fertility, and convenience for white people were the only important considerations (which is a skewed set of principles in the first place), Jefferson's personal bias was a major, albeit hidden, factor as well.

    2. 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

      I find this statement in the document appalling. The founders portray blatant racism within the first paragraph as they decide upon the foundation for the University. I find it baffling that a university designed for the bettering of an entire state would exclude its benefits from such a large segment of the population for which it was designed. Furthermore, it is concerning that issues regarding the exclusion of certain groups of the population remain an issue today amidst the twenty-first century. However, it is encouraging that the University and the larger population of the United States have made great progress towards removing these racist beliefs.

      -Jenna Taylor

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

      I find the selected excerpt very profound and relevant to modern society, as it creates an aura of inequality and racism surrounding the University of Virginia, which has, as a result, been protested against within the recent months. The reality that one of the aspects considered for the location of the University was based on its, "degree of centrality to the white population," conveys the belief of white as a superior race. Furthermore, this directly correlates with the events that have transcribed within the local Charlottesville community over the past few months; not only have neo-nazis publicly illustrated their personal forms of hate and racial inequality on grounds, but students have also pushed for equality at the University by protesting its public display of such historical bias, which has led to the removal of plaques commemorating confederate soldiers from a place of public display, to a place of historical remembrance.

  21. Sep 2017
    1. and it’s centrality to the white population of the whole state
    2. nothing, more than education, adorning the prosperity, the power and the happiness of a nation

      Regarding the lens in which we view the world in my engagement class entitled Race, Racism, Colony, and Nation, this reference to the "prosperity...power, and the happiness of a nation," can be connected to the differences between the experience of the colony and the nation within America. The colony, in this case, referring to the slaves and other marginalized communities unable to enjoy these rights that Jefferson believes are adorned by education. The nation, referring to the community of white people that is clearly who this document (and at this time, the university) was made by and for.

  22. Aug 2017
    1. 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

      I wish this article had also looked at how much a given underrepresented group's graduation rate has changed as well (for the same group of schools). Even if a group's enrollment in top colleges has gone down, the data could show that a given group's graduation rate from those same colleges has increased over the same time period. Info on changes in enrollment and graduation rate would be so much more informative than studying each statistic alone.

    1. 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.

      There should be a movie about him!

  23. Apr 2017
    1. 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

      What a burn to white America. She is stating here that the white American only ever aims to exploit and never to support. They should instead thrive to learn and live with people of color

  24. Feb 2017
    1. to make common cause among ensla'ved black people, free but oppressed black people. and oppressed white working-class people.

      There is much to argument (implied here) that racism was an attempt to disenfranchise both blacks and working class whites. That is, racism was a tool by wealthy landowners to prevent whites and blacks from making common cause against them. To do this, racial tensions were inflamed or created in the first place.

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

      This is a fantastic revelation: his physical presence changes rhetoric.

    1. Die Brücke Institute

      An important historical note here: most of the Die Brücke artists and their later avant-garde peers who fell under the various "-isms" such as Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, etc. were eventually persecuted by the Nazis, who believed the kind of art work seen above (Emil Nolde, Masks, 1911) to be "degenerate," which I think fits well into the dialogue about the "normalcy" of the body in creating socio-political standards. Artists such as Braque, Beckmann, Chagall, Dix, Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse, Munch, and Picasso were all considered degenerate by the racially-obsessed Nazis because of the way they depicted the composition of the human body. Hitler looked to classical models, specifically Greek and Roman traditions, as examples toward which the German Volk should strive, because their ideal exterior forms embodied the inner Nazi idea of racial superiority, or normalcy. Modernists celebrated subjective and unique perspectives of reality (including, and especially the body), which, unfortunately for them, did not fit into the promotion of a singularly molded and racially uniform German state.

  25. Jan 2017
    1. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis.

      We will come to later take up this racialization of the Enlightenment.

    2. 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.

      So many sources to share here, but here is one in particular that I think is especially relevant today, particularly as we think about enforcement of norms based on appearance and how it...defines (?)...national identity: "Disabled Upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island" by Jay Dolmage. Hopefully this link takes you to the PDF.

      Important quote: "Ellis Island was designed to process the immigrant body—through an industrialized choreography, through a regime of vision, and through layers of anti-immigration discourse. Ellis Island became the key laboratory and operating theater for American eugenics, the scientific racism that can be seen to define a unique era of Western history, the effects of which can still be felt today. I will argue that Ellis Island, as a rhetorical space, can be seen as a nexus—and a special point of origin—for eugenics and the rhetorical construction of disability and race in the early twentieth century" (27).

      Also, here's a video of this paper presented as a lecture.

    1. “really disrupt and complexify ... what they believe they know about race [and] students or families who live in poverty.”
  26. Dec 2016
    1. 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.”

      why aren't we seeing more about this in the news?? How is this not ILLEGAL???

  27. Nov 2016
    1. 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.

      Jewish were not allowed to compete on the German team in the Olympics, and there was a big disagreement about that across the world.

  28. Oct 2016
  29. Sep 2016
    1. 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 Bureau repeatedly altered

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

      Census categorize people by race

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

      wide variety of race

    4. 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

      judged on looks and and ethnicity and RACE

    5. 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.

      I agree with this because what she looked like might have actually been different than her race. She isn't necessarily 1 race either.

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

      Many different types of people are not included

    7. 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.

      Since people keep assuming and getting things wrong, some latinos try to ignore the question of race in order to stop the disagreements.

    8. 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.

      Why do they want to force latinos to pick one race?? There are so many different microcultures and sub groups that latinos are included in, the Census would have to add so many more options.

    9. 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.”

      They feel like their race isn't included and they aren't being respected.

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

      Definition of race

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

      Some Latino people think that the country's race categories are not an accurate depiction of what they identify with. This could be seen as extremely racist.

    1. 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.”

      I've been a big fan of the zombie/living dead sub-genre since I was pretty young, and the interest has grown even more in the last 12+ years. Overtime, I have wondered whether this sub-genre, our fascination with zombies/infected apocalyptic themes/elements, has deeper meaning for us that can point back to the innate nature of othering or ingroup/outgroup. There are stories of genocide and wars in literature throughout time and across every culture. Humankind has an extensive history that involves the oppression and marginalization of many different civilizations and people. We have an intimate relationship with war and conflict. In the past, it may have not been so usual to see apocalyptic literature with themes that target a certain race or groups of people, even a race that was deemed inferior or less than fully human, due to the prevailing ideologies and worldviews during those times. But the same attitude and worldview is unacceptable today, at least to many. Survivors of the apocalypse can't go all feral and Purge on another group of people, at least not on such a wide scale. However, zombies/infected seem to take that place. Zombies serve a similar function. Not only is there the classic world-ending event that has existed in religious literature for millennia, but survivors get to maintain human supremacy (rather than racial) over non-humans. It becomes unacceptable because these things are no longer conscious or recognized as a living, sentiment human.

  30. Aug 2016
    1. Gunnar Myrdal

      True Confessions: I've never read Myrdal even though his work was of great influence. These days, I read people who cite him. For example, Roberts and Klibanoff start Chapter 1 of their great 2006 book, The Race Beat, immediately talking about Myrdal in depth. Sampler is here at Amazon:

      The Race Beat

      When I need insight into Myrdal, I know where to go first, thanks to this book.

  31. Jul 2016
    1. ”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.
    1. Luca thinks this racial discrepancy is driven largely by unconscious bias—the hidden associations we have that affect our behavior without us realizing it.
    2. 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.
  32. Apr 2016
    1. 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.

      Mexico has started counting its Mexican population.

  33. Dec 2015
    1. 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.

      Mexico Takes Big Steps In Finally Recognizing Afro-Latinos

  34. Nov 2015
    1. he decimationof public housing in Chicago became ameans of ‘rounding up’ black life into neigh-borhoods themselves increasingly depletedby scam mortgages.

      How infrastructure relates to race. Brings Harvey's, The Right to the City to mind with public housing serving as a way to segregate neighborhoods.

  35. Aug 2015
    1. Crown.

      Study Questions:

      How did Powhatan initially receive the colonists? Why?

      How does tobacco change the colony?

      How does the notion of race begin to change in the colony?

    2. Crown.

      Study Questions:

      How did Powhatan initially receive the colonists? Why?

      How does tobacco change the colony?

      How does the notion of race begin to change in the colony?

    3. IV. English Colonization

      Before reading this text watch and annotate the following video lecture for this week. Make sure you can answer the study questions that will appear within the video:

      The Growth of British North America video lecture:

    1. continent.

      Study questions:

      How does internal tension in the Native American empires of the Americas aid Spanish attempts to create their empire?

      What racial system is established by the Spanish in the New World? Why is it established and how does it operate?

  36. Jul 2015
    1. or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white,

      This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

    2. most gorgeous dream

      I'm wondering if "the dream" -- at least as Coates sketches it out in the remainder of this paragraph -- has become a "war with the known world" for people without education and money. Is it about race or class. Robert Putnam makes a good case for the problem being about rising economic inequality in America, even as racial and sexual divisions have been lessening.

    3. JUL 4, 2015

      Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

      Image Description

  37. Jun 2015
    1. 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.
    1. 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.
    1. 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?
  38. Apr 2015
    1. "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.
    2. "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.

      This seems to sum up a lot about the hiring policies of many organizations and firms?

    1. 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.