Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Resources For Teaching About Why Blackface Is Racist. “This is just a very beginning list of teaching resources that might be useful for teaching about blackface. I know that several of us at our school will using this topic as the focus of some of our lessons, and thought it would be useful to share resources here and invite readers to contribute more.”
racism
Harassment, Transphobia, and Racism: A Look Inside Blind’s Anonymous Chatting Forum for Google Employees (Blind)
Gizmodo: Harassment, Transphobia, and Racism: A Look Inside Blind’s Anonymous Chatting Forum for Google Employees. “In early January, Google systems reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones announced she was leaving the company after 11 years, leaving behind, by her account, a half million dollars in stock, to work at the startup Honeycomb.io. An outspoken advocate for inclusion and diversity, Fong-Jones quit citing dissatisfaction with leadership around ethics of products and working conditions…. On the anonymous discussion app Blind, some of Fong-Jones’ coworkers celebrated her departure in the private channel for Google employees.”
NDWorks: Klau Center announces project to collect and archive narratives on race
NDWorks: Klau Center announces project to collect and archive narratives on race. “The Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, a part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, has announced a new initiative, With Voices True, to collect and record the voices of the Notre Dame community on the topic of race. The goal is to establish a permanent archive of narratives that can serve as a resource for reflection, research and engagement. The envisioned archive will include audio recordings, video interviews, written narratives, photography, and art.”
New York Times: Amazon Is Pushing Facial Technology That a Study Says Could Be Biased
New York Times: Amazon Is Pushing Facial Technology That a Study Says Could Be Biased. “In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft’s technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time.”
Expressing and Challenging Racist Discourse on Facebook: How Social Media Weaken the “Spiral of Silence” Theory (Academia .edu)
Found on Academia.edu: Expressing and Challenging Racist Discourse onFacebook: How Social Media Weaken the “Spiral of Silence” Theory. “This article examines the discursive practices of Facebook users who use the platform to express racist views. We analyzed 51,991 public comments posted to 119 news stories about race, racism, or ethnicity on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News Facebook page. We examined whether users who hold racist viewpoints (the vocal minority) are less likely to express views that go against the majority view for fear of social isolation. According to the ‘spiral of silence’ theory, the vocal minority would presumably fear this isolation effect. However, our analysis shows that on Facebook,a predominantly nonanonymous and moderated platform, the vocal minority are comfortable expressing unpopular views, questioning the explanatory power of this popular theory in the online context.” I had not heard of the Spiral of Silence theory, but Briannica helped me out.
New York Times: Russian Effort to Influence 2016 Election Targeted African-Americans
New York Times: Russian Effort to Influence 2016 Election Targeted African-Americans (This is a different report than the one that was covered in The Washington Post.) “The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of posts on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its Facebook operations, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
UNC: Grant Will Help Librarians Examine Jim Crow Laws Through Lens of Data
UNC: Grant Will Help Librarians Examine Jim Crow Laws Through Lens of Data. “Using optical character recognition and machine learning, the team will build a text corpus of North Carolina session laws from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and will then compile a listing of North Carolina’s Jim/Jane Crow laws. This effort builds upon work done by civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray in the 1950s.”
