fromirontoiron

[fromirontoiron]

What the researchers found was that drivers yielded to the pedestrian waiting at the curb to cross about 52 percent of the time in the high-income neighborhood and 71 percent of the time in the low-income neighborhood.

After factoring in race, the researchers found little statistical significance in whether drivers yielded for black or white pedestrians waiting at the curb in either neighborhood – although drivers in the high- income area were less likely to yield for the white pedestrian. (And a higher percentage of drivers in the low-income neighborhood stopped for the white pedestrian.)

But Coughenour said she was much more troubled by what happened when the pedestrians stepped off the curb and entered the crosswalk — both because of the more dangerous circumstances and because the statistical significance was higher: The average number of drivers who continued moving when the black pedestrian was already in the crosswalk was at least seven times higher than for the white pedestrian in the high-income neighborhood, she said.

[fromirontoiron]

Immigrant stories

In between sobs, Park Yeonmi gave her account of life in North Korea. Public executions, arbitrary arrests, torture and suffocating censorship were just some of the harsh realities faced by people in “the darkest place in the world,” the 21-year-old defector told an international audience at the Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland earlier this month.

While North Korean defectors have spoken publicly about life under the regime before, the attractive university student has arguably captured the attention of international media like no other in recent memory. Her emotional speech in Dublin received coverage in outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera and the Daily Mail.

But alongside outpourings of sympathy and praise, Park has also attracted a quieter but no less persistent stream of criticism from skeptics who reject her characterization of North Korea.

For a cross-examination of her account: http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/north-korea-defectors-and-their-skeptics/

[fromirontoiron]

As the co-creators of the test have written, “given the relatively small proportion of people who are overtly prejudiced and how clearly it is established that automatic race preference [as measured by the IAT] predicts discrimination, it is reasonable to conclude not only that implicit bias is a cause of Black disadvantage but also that it plausibly plays a greater role than does explicit bias in explaining the discrimination that contributes to Black disadvantage.”

Those co-creators are Mahzarin Banaji, currently the chair of Harvard University’s psychology department, and Anthony Greenwald, a highly regarded social psychology researcher at the University of Washington. The duo introduced the test to the world at a 1998 press conference in Seattle — the accompanying press release noted that they had collected data suggesting that 90–95 percent of Americans harbored the “roots of unconscious prejudice.” The public immediately took notice: Since then, the IAT has been mostly treated as a revolutionary, revelatory piece of technology, garnering overwhelmingly positive media coverage.

Maybe the biggest driver of the IAT’s popularity and visibility, though, is the fact that anyone can take the test on the Project Implicit website, which launched shortly after the test was unveiled and which is hosted by Harvard University. The test’s architects reported that, by October 2015, more than 17 million individual test sessions had been completed on the website. As will become clear, learning one’s IAT results is, for many people, a very big deal that changes how they view themselves and their place in the world.

Given all this excitement, it might feel safe to assume that the IAT really does measure people’s propensity to commit real-world acts of implicit bias against marginalized groups, and that it does so in a dependable, clearly understood way. After all, the test is hosted by Harvard, endorsed and frequently written about by some of the top social psychologists and science journalists in the country, and is currently seen by many as the most sophisticated way to talk about the complicated, fraught subject of race in America.

Unfortunately, none of that is true. A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such.

The history of the test suggests it was released to the public and excitedly publicized long before it had been fully validated in the rigorous, careful way normally demanded by the field of psychology. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Harvard shouldn’t be administering the test in its current form, in light of its shortcomings and its potential to mislead people about their own biases. There’s also a case to be made that the IAT went viral not for solid scientific reasons, but simply because it tells us such a simple, pat story about how racism works and can be fixed: that deep down, we’re all a little — or a lot — racist, and that if we measure and study this individual-level racism enough, progress toward equality will ensue.

[fromirontoiron]

Luzviminda Uzuri “Lulu” Carpenter tried to make a U-turn in Everett, got stuck on a highway median, and worried that she and her friend were “going to die that day” when an angry responding officer flashed her gun.

Calls to reform the Seattle police department grew out of the aftermath of the police shooting death in 2010 of John T. Williams, a homeless First Nations woodcarver. Williams’s death and other violent police incidents involving people of color caught the attention of officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The Justice Department released a 2011 report that found SPD officers exhibited a pattern of excessive force against people with mental illness and people of color. DOJ officials also mandated the formation of a community police commission to help the department move toward bias-free policing.

Luzviminda “Lulu” Carpenter” identifies herself as “a femme queer womyn of color of filipin@ & black mixed ancestry.” She is the lead on Seattle non-profit LGBTQ Allyship’s police accountability community feedback project.

[fromirontoiron]

As I walked past them in a restaurant, a couple, on what must have been a first or second date, flagged me down from their table. From their broad, eager smiles, I already knew what they wanted.

“We have a bet,” the woman explained. “He thinks you’re from South America,” she said, gesturing to her date. Her money was on Pakistan.

I am a dulce de leche-colored woman, browner still in the summer. Tallish, with large eyes the color of Coca-Cola. My hair winds into curls at the hint of rain clouds. My lips are brown. “Like the president’s,” someone noted once, trying somehow to square Barack Obama’s multiculti look with my own.

My ancestors hail from the southern part of India, on the Bay of Bengal, which I mention only because the sea once had a way of washing up all varieties of conquerors and marauders on our shores. Lineage is messy.

But in 2017 America, my particular jambalaya of “features” frequently has me mistaken for Ethiopian. Trinidadian. Colombian. African American. It depends on which city I’m in, what I am wearing and, more often than not, who is doing the asking.

Now here was this couple, both white, asking the question I increasingly stumble over.

What am I?

Just another dark-featured, dark-haired woman in a vast sea of immigrants’ kids, I want to tell them.

Or more simply, I am brown. Because the more brown America gets, the more mutable ethnicity — mine, others — is becoming.

Read more here: I am Indian American, and it’s 2017. But I still get asked “What are you?“

[fromirontoiron]

Excerpts: Formerly seen as individuals expressing individual preferences in life and politics, white Americans in 2016 became Americans with race: white race.

In addition to a white racial identity, the billionaire-laden Trump administration comes with a paradoxical class identity: working class as white. Time and time again, recent commentary has labeled his supporters not only “white,” but also “working class.” According to a line of thinking that has become popular among some Democrats as well as many journalists, Democrats “lost” the presidential election because they disregarded the legitimate, class-based needs of the white working class — as though class-based needs precluded any place for racial resentments, as though economic grievances obscured the Republican Party’s history of Southern strategy, birtherism, “you lie!” and anti-immigrant posturing.

Millions of working-class voters who favor Democrats are white, but in the discourse, it would seem that Democrats lack economic and class interests of their own. Democrats are seen either as elite liberals who disdain working-class whites or as members of racial-ethnic minorities whose main concern is political correctness.

Describing the electorate this way means assigning class only to Trump voters and identity only to people who are not white.... Thus, talking about the concerns of working men and women means talking about Trump voters and jobs, while talking about people with “identity” means talking about issues of political correctness. It’s as though working-class Americans who are not white cannot have a class identity or economic interests related to class, for they have only racial identity or, even more narrowly, a racial identity connected to political correctness. The distinction here counts, because political correctness is a cultural issue, while jobs are an issue of economic policy.

[fromirontoiron]

Here’s an idea : If race is so important in the USA, it’s because statistics are much more frequently made by race and not by income and area.

It mixes together people who have nothing in common because of their skin color, for example poor black communities and very rich black families, and separates racely-diverse groups who face the same problems, like people living in crime-ridden cities, who can be of any skin color.

[fromirontoiron]

In which John Green teaches you about Imperialism. In the late 19th century, the great powers of Europe were running around the world obtaining colonial possessions, especially in Africa and Asia. The United States, which as a young country was especially suceptible to peer pressure, followed along and snapped up some colonies of its own. The US saw that Spain's hold on its empire was weak, and like some kind of expansionist predator, it jumped into the Cuban War for Independence and turned it into the Spanish-Cuban-Phillipino-American War, which usually just gets called the Spanish-American War. John will tell you how America turned this war into colonial possessions like Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and almost even got to keep Cuba. The US was busy in the Pacific as well, wresting control of Hawaii from the Hawaiians. All this and more in a globe-trotting, oppressing episode of Crash Course US History. Watch to find out about Mark Twain’s role in American Imperialism!

[fromirontoiron]

40:11: (This link contains racially sensitive material.) Thirteen-year-old poet Sophia Huynh talks with Tasnim Shamma about how she uses slam poetry to talk about Asian-American stereotypes;

1:02:53: Molly Samuel reports on efforts to memorialize a place in Atlanta where people were treated as slaves decades after the Civil War;

1:07:22: Author Douglas Blackman speaks with Steve Goss in a 2012 interview about his book, "Slavery by Another Name."

[fromirontoiron]

When 12-year-old Sophia Huynh was assigned to write a poem about a social issue for her seventh grade class, she wrote “A-Z American Born Chinese,” an insightful take on race, ethnicity, and the condition of growing up Asian American. Discussing the stereotypes that she faces in school, Sophia illustrates the struggle of negotiating the expectations placed on her by others.

[fromirontoiron]

Cultural Imperialism: Imposing one's values on another country or culture through bribery, blackmail, coercion or deceit.

[fromirontoiron]

I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality.

In the book Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test. Project Implicit is graciously hosting electronic versions of Blindspot’s IATs. Test your own biases!

[fromirontoiron]

He’s a political science professor at South Korea's Pusan National University giving a live interview to the BBC. The woman who comes running in after what is assumed to be his children appears youthful, more casually dressed, and terribly embarrassed. The world laughed and called her “the nanny.” They assumed he hired a Korean nanny before they assumed he married a Korean woman who mothered the two photobombing children.