#to racism in community design and building codes

[mommybard]

Whats it called if I just want to listen to people go off?

...Do...do people tend to NOT enjoy listening to people rant and rave about things that they think are important/care about/have a special interest in? Is that anything other than normal???

[creatingblackcharacters]

Hi there, I hope your day is going well! I have a question regarding the race of a character I'm hoping to use in a story I'm making, and would love to get your insights.

The story is a post-nuclear-fallout setting following two characters who are researching a cure for aggressive radiation poisoning and fighting the will of a malevolent and sentient slime-mold.  The characters dont have official names yet so I'll nickname them as Vessel and Scientist, and I'd like to focus on Vessel for this question specifically. 

Vessel is a Black woman who was originally working as a scientist on a team tasked with experimentation on slime mold growing in radiated zones, which became sentient during her time working on it. She was ordered to kill it and was unsuccessful, and as a result died on-site. Her death was downplayed to keep the lab running, and she wakes up post-mortem very much not in the same zip code or in the same time. (The reason her nickname is Vessel is because the slime mold she attempted to kill resurrects her and is using her to try and return to the lab it's from to rejoin the mother culture (the slime mold is like a combo of the aliens from the movies Life(2017) and Venom(2018))).

The story itself is dealing with some themes like the exploitation of marginalized groups by wealthy militaristic powers, the idolization of western sciences and the consequences of doing so, destruction of the land for profit, the struggle of individual vs collective (man vs man), and the challenge of building community. Based on these themes and the setting, I'm drawn more-so to portraying BIPOC as my protagonists, as opposed to white characters, because BIPOC have largely been the driving force of any dramatic and radical change in our present society, and I'd like to spotlight them in my work as protagonists and not just Important Side Characters. 

THE REASON I'm hesitant to commit to Vessel being Black has three branches,

1) the plot line i've designed would deal very heavily with depersonalization, the state-sanctioned poisoning and death of a Black woman, being used by a force beyond the characters will, and the internal/external struggle of essentially fighting yourself to maintain control of your Self/Body; 

2) I'm not a Black person, and the plot for this character would deal with a lot of very heavy stuff that Black people experience every day, 

3) and it feels very thematically/contextually similar to Haitian Zombi's, which I've been researching since seeing your responses discussing them compared to western zombies, which makes me hesitant to explore if it's getting into territory I shouldn't be interacting with, y'know? (The concept for this story was initially 'radiation zombies', so that's the background I'm pulling from as I'm making the story.)

I think she's a compelling character, intelligent, brave, resilient beyond belief (with a love interest in the Scientist as the story progresses), but if my concepts for her are crossing boundaries and perpetuating stereotypes (like stoic Black woman, not allowed to be soft, etc) I'd rather have a second pair of knowledgable eyes look it over before I commit with my whole chest. 

I deeply appreciate any insights you may have, thank you for your time!

Hello! This does seem like a very intriguing story, and at least you caught where the problem points could be. So that's good!

I definitely say that if you want to get into symbolism similar to, but not OF, Haitian Zombis, you absolutely ABSOLUTELY need to do your research. Specifically on what things might be tied into closed practices, just so you know to avoid them. Research in general involving medical racism too, if you want to know how deep the rabbit hole gets with Black bodies and western experimentation, because there's plenty there too.

I would say since you sound aware of your intention and some of the concerns, go ahead, and I would highly, HIGHLY suggest a Black sensitivity reader. Someone needs to tell you if you've (literally) lost the plot, preferably before you release anything.

[lovecried]

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CONGRATULATIONS! you now have complete access to the library.

[jasmin-d55]

9/19 Blog Post Week #4

1, How does Afrocentricity influence digital spaces, and what challenges and opportunities does it face in the digital public sphere?

 In digital spaces, afrocentricity challenges popular narratives and advances African and African-American identities. It enables marginalized voices to create and disseminate content that authentically depicts their lived realities. Digital channels that include blogs and social media do allow Afrocentric artists to build networks and shape public opinion. Also, major challenges also include the digital divide, which limits access to technology, issues with censorship and algorithmic biases that could distort or block Afrocentric information. Notwithstanding these challenges, Afrocentric perspectives and cultural diversity can nevertheless be promoted and developed on the digital public sphere (Social Text, 2002).

Reference: Social Text. (2002). The revolution will be digitized: Afrocentricity and the digital public sphere. Social Text, 20(2), 125-144.

2. How may societies impacted by biassed technologies such as predictive policing help to make these technologies more fair and equitable?

Communities facing biased technologies, like predictive policing, can push for fairness by actively raising awareness about these issues, advocating for policy changes, and working closely with policymakers. Getting involved in research, creating local oversight groups, and educating community members about their rights are also crucial steps. These efforts can help ensure that technology serves everyone fairly and doesn’t perpetuate existing biases (Benjamin, 2019).

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity Press.

3. Why do people think technology is fair and unbiased, and how can we change this view to encourage a more careful look at digital systems?

Technology is often seen as unbiased because it relies on data and algorithms, which are usually assumed to be objective. However, since humans design technology, biases can unintentionally be embedded through data selection and programming. To change this view, society must involve diverse teams in development, promote transparency about how technology is built, and educate people about how biases can be programmed into systems. Ethical oversight and public participation are also essential to ensure fairness in digital systems (Benjamin, 2019).

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity Press.

4.What can we do to make the internet a fairer place for everyone? How do you believe biassed search results affect our view of underprivileged communities?

Some people may have an unfavorable impression of marginalized communities as a result of biased search results that support false information and unfavorable stereotypes about these communities. Some search engines can contribute to discrimination when they present inaccurate or harmful information. Due to this it can alter public perception. To make the internet a more fair place, more responsibility for biased results, more openness from tech corporations about how their algorithms run, and projects to involve many points of view in the building and evolution of these systems are all essential (Noble, 2018).

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.

[running-batty]

2 hour walk, 10 min drive most likely. Looks like one of the many housing communities that popped up in the late 2000s. Homes probably went for around 200k at the time. 3-4bed 2 bath. 2 car garage. Neighborhood probably promised amenities like a playground, pool or tension court or evennall three. It's debatable if it actually got built. It depends on how far along the community was before the housing bubble crashed or is this one recovered after.

Lot size is reasonable Close to each other which is very normal for these communities. Looks like it's 1/4 to 1/2 an acre of land, it's hard to tell exactly because you can't see just how far back they go. Yes they will have that much land and will have them sit even closer to each other than that. I've seen places with a 1/2 acre that had only 4 feet between each house for no reason. Just long ass lots. No trees up close and some clear lines where the second floor starts so that further pushes the late 2000s building boom idea. You see a lot of shody qork during that time because they were throwing them up as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible. So many places were outright violating building codes.(Always get a home inspection on any home in a planned community that popped up during that time!!!)

These places were designed to be maze like. No, wait. Not past tense. Are designed to be maze like because they are still making communities like this. You see em all the time in Florida with nasty little HOAs attached to them to keep the undesirables out~ It's acceptable racism and classism all rolled into one big micromanagement package with legal protection!

Anyway..

These places will often be really close to shopping! Crazy close in fact! And yet it will take you for-fucking-ever to get out of them! If they even have sidewalk all the way through! And that's a common problem, many love to have the sidewalks randomly stop for 100 to 300 feet randomly. Often for no good reason. Sometimes just due to the fact that a lot is sitting empty. But many times it's due to the fact that they decided that this amenity doesn't need a sidewalk to get to it. Want to take your stroller to the little park? Get fucked. Feel unsteady walking in grass? Sucks for you!

[avandelay20]

Proposed density reforms expose NIMBYs as racist

Those with influence—often white and privileged—shape policies and practices that adversely impact non-white immigrants and the Indigenous.

Communities of color, especially Indigenous Australians, suffer from discriminatory decisions that seek to preserve white majority culture on a council-by-council basis.

Hiding behind "Heritage listings" or NIMBY-ism to protect "the character" of a white-majority suburbs needs to end.

Those in opposition to COMMON SENSE density improvements near train and metro lines may not realise it, but their talking points are mostly racist dog-whistles.

News Corp, of course, has plenty of coverage of the NIMBYs and their pathetic battle cries:

https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/politics/sydney-mayors-antidevelopment-protesters-hit-nsw-parliament-iagainst-increased-density/news-story/cd8d673206b2efda374d2b9cf814863e

Australia’s capital cities, especially Sydney, grapple with a complex web of real estate practices that shape urban landscapes. Three significant phenomena—redlining, community-led NIMBY-ism, and the strategic use of heritage listing—are interconnected and deeply rooted in racism.

Let’s explore how these practices intersect and perpetuate inequality.

Redlining

Historical Context: Redlining emerged in the late 1930s in the United States. Real estate professionals and public sector actors developed color-coded maps to assess areas’ “riskiness” for housing investment and mortgage lending. These maps explicitly relied on racist assumptions, blocking Black households and other communities of color from homeownership opportunities based on race, ethnicity, and religion1.

Australian Parallel: Australia experienced similar discriminatory practices. Although it wasn't called “redlining,” racially biased lending policies existed. Indigenous Australians and non-white immigrants faced barriers to homeownership due to discriminatory practices by banks and real estate agents.

Community-Led NIMBY-ism

NIMBY-ism (Not In My Backyard) refers to local opposition to new developments, often driven by existing residents. While NIMBY-ism can arise from various concerns, it sometimes masks underlying racism.

Racial Dimension: In Australia, NIMBY-ism disproportionately affects marginalized communities. When residents resist affordable housing projects or apartment buildings, they inadvertently perpetuate segregation. These actions reflect a fear of change and a desire to maintain the status quo, which often aligns with racial biases.

Heritage Listing as a Tool of Exclusion

Heritage Listing: Designating buildings or areas as “heritage” aims to preserve historical and cultural significance. However, this tool is increasingly used to block development.

Racial Implications: Heritage listing can reinforce racial disparities. In Sydney, for instance, heritage protection disproportionately favors affluent neighborhoods with European colonial history. Meanwhile, sites significant to Indigenous Australians or other non-European communities receive less attention. This selective preservation perpetuates racial inequality by excluding certain narratives from urban memory.

The Roots of Racism

Implicit Bias: These practices stem from implicit biases—unconscious prejudices that shape decision-making. Real estate professionals, policymakers, and residents may not overtly harbor racist beliefs, but their actions reflect systemic racism.

Power Dynamics: Racism in real estate operates within power structures. Those with influence—often white and privileged—shape policies and practices. Communities of color, especially Indigenous Australians, bear the brunt of discriminatory decisions.

Legacy: The ghosts of historical redlining and discriminatory practices continue to haunt our cities. The denial of housing opportunities based on race persists, albeit in subtler forms.

To dismantle racist tendencies (whether overt or implicit), we must acknowledge their historical roots and actively work toward equitable housing policies.

Australia deserves inclusive cities where everyone has a place to call home.

So do us all a favour and check yourself before you start banging on about "protecting the character of a (white-euro) suburb" or "preserving the (white-euro) history of a street / building / house".

[designresearch604-ahnesshim]

Week 8: Further Research

Sun Ho Lee

Sun Ho Lee is a graphics designer based in Korea and America, but studied graphics design in America. In analysing her body of work, she focuses a lot on cultural themes, relationships with her roots and home country.

Before she was a graphics designer she helped North Korean refugees escape from their traffickers and oppressors. Activism and her design are intertwined as she "preserves and shares the cultural and political in-betweeners who have been neglected...". She aims to create and build a community that is culturally sensitive.

She weaves typography and materiality into her work to communicate abstract ideas to tangible and flexible systems.

She makes visible stories of other Asians through print and textile designs, she makes to create a space and platform for people bi-cultural people.

In her multi-disciplinary practice she highlights the experience of others and herself of the people who she describes as "cultural in-betweeners". These are beautifully crafted and designed with purpose and intent in projects such as:

Is This a Typo ?

In this publication and printed matter, Sun Ho questions and challenges this norm, "Is this a Typo ?". Many immigrants, people of colour, people of ethnic name change their name to avoid the hassle of correcting others and to also avoid mocking and racism.

There are 39 contributors who share and tell their personal stories about their names, butchered, tossed around and names that are recognised as typos on digital interface. This publication brings honour and celebrates ethnic names, their meanings and the individuals who carry them.

I personally can relate to this project as my parents also have given themselves english names so that they can avoid having to correct others of their names and also my siblings whose names on their birth certificate, passport are of ethnic names but also have given themselves english names.

Although my name is not an ethnic name, I can't exactly say it's a western name. Up until this day I still get mocked and teased for my name and when I was younger, especially in primary and intermediate I struggled with the name I was given and wanted to change it to something more generic. I can relate to the struggles and mockery these people have experienced.

Swish Swoosh

This project explores how Asian multilingual or bilingual individuals switch "codes" (languages) at home and in a professional setting. This publication also goes beyond just switching languages but the shift and change within our personality, traits and values.

This knitted ephemera Sun Ho made for this project states that the process of knitting is quite messy like how immigration was for immgirants. The original knitting machine could only read 24 pixels of information per row but she hacked it, increasing the data capacity to 200 pixels. The hacked machine produces glitches, refusing to "surrender to this new, forced way of existing" – this hints at when we swtich codes, we erase parts of us in order to fit in but those parts never can go away but come back.

The Chronicles of Sameri

Through materiality and publication Sun Ho emphaszies the fragility of memories through the glass material she uses for the publication, but also the use of rope communicates the strength and durability of her family members. This publication encapsulates the memories of her war-divided family, with hiopes of reuniting them with their children, siblings and parents (some whom they never even got to meet but only know of). Hr grandparents have cultivated a land in the midst of a barren mountain called Sameri and built houses so that following generations could live there, never having to seperate like how the war separated them.

She "wove together" spotty memories of her aunties, uncles pf grandma and grandpa.

Ji Hee Lee

Is a Korean graphics designer that is based in Germany. Recurring themes she explores in her practice are racial inequalities/stereotypes and how Asians/women experience, to draw attention and address these ideas through visual communication.

In her practice, through thorough research and analysing of her work she uses effective copywriting throughout her work. Some of them are more subtle while some of them are more powerful and can come off slightly aggressive – this is also shown through visual design.

Such as this:

Steretypography Posters

Ji Hee Lee breaks down cultural boundaries built by stereotypes. She explores this idea further by exploring different typefaces and seeking how "western" typefaces are perceived and how "Asian" typefaces are perceived by society. One way she broke this down was by going through a site called "dafont", which is a site for free fonts and there is a section seperate for asian fonts. Ji Hee states “By browsing these typefaces, you can see how ‘Asia’ is perceived to the eye of Westerners,”.

These anime inspired characters, ornamental bamboo sticks and chopsticks that embellish Asian typefaces and fonts come off as pervasive which is also met offline. She used these free fonts from these sites to design a series of posters that reveal how these typefaces have been heavily manipulated to appear "non-Latin" or "non-Western".

Her posters placed side by side fragmentally read: “Stereotypical Representations of foreign cultures build national and cultural boundaries,” and “Those types represent neither us nor you.”

It's interesting to see how this designer has approached her work and the themes and ideas she unpacks through exploration of western and typefaces that try to not appear to be somewhat "Asian". I thought this was an effective and creative way to unpack this idea by exploring how Asia as a whole is perceieved through the eyes of society and western people, when in-fact that is not what represents us.

Poster for Antiracism, 2016

Ji Hee lee continue to reveal the ways racism and stereotyping can become normalized both in visual culture and in society and has been a prominent idea Lee has working on ever since moving to Germany in 2016, as she encountered numerous racial experiences. She found herself sharing her own experiences with another fellow student So Jin Park and they came up with an idea to create a platform where Asians could come up and share their story and heritage, which now directly links to her next project "I Am Angry".

I Am Angry

From the platform they created they designed and launched a website "I Am Angry" to house the stories of these people – a website where they hope to continue to empower and help the Asian community find ways to deal with micro-aggression.

The site is divided into 6 sections, with "Now please stop saying Ni Hao to me" being what Lee calls the "heart and soul" of the website. When ou click on the "diagram" section it arranges itself to three sub sections of the page "sexism, xenophobia and racism". Persoanl stories that were recorded are scattered across the page and the ones that are centered are ones that touch on all three sub sections.

These stroies are displayed on pop-up windows and purposely designed to annoy users as they cannot close these windows which reflect the micro-aggressions they experience. Lee states "It’s a metaphor that derives from our everyday encounters: how we have no control over the situation.”

Many of her projects that she works on addresses these issues as these stereotypes and micro-aggressions is what impacts her as a designer and her day-today life, especially ever since moving to Germany. She believes the projects she works on have impact and promotes awareness and also speak against the prejudice, hoping to see gradual change within society.

Celine Dam

Celine Dam is a Vietnamese-Chinese writer and actor from Auckland, New Zealand. She has written several pieces for print, online publications and zines and is grateful to inform others through her unique lens. Through these art forms and practice, she hopes to bring light to more Asian stories within western media.

Pork & Poll Taxes

This is a theatrical play that Celine has starred in.

This play is set in the 1890's which follows a Chinese family in Aotearoa and China with the men looking for gold (Sam Gan Saan) and women staying in the latter. Although it is a fictional play the historical background and roots are rbought to light through this play.

To give some historical background, in the late 19th century many Chinese men sought their way to NZ to make fortunes in the Gold Rush. Migrant workers were brought over from China by the government to work in the Otago minefields. But as employment in mines began to dwindle, anti-Chinese prejudice began to flourish.

In 1881 this sentiment became official with a poll tax of £10 (equivalent to  $1770 today) was imposed on Chinese migrants and the number allowed to land from each ship arriving in New Zealand was restricted. Only one Chinese passenger was allowed for every 10 tons of cargo. In 1896 this was changed to one passenger for every 200 tons, and the tax was increased to £100 ($20,000).

For Chinese migrants arriving in New Zealand during the poll tax era, legal discrimination weren't the only obstacle they were faced with – migrants were also met with hostility from New Zealand’s Pākehā population, giving rise to organisations such as the Anti-Chinese Association and the White New Zealand League. 

Pork and Poll Taxes touches on many of these issues, exploring themes such as sacrifice, belonging and what it means to be a family, which Pua (director & writer) says she based on two Chinese proverbs: “One says that ‘we grow roots where we land’, which speaks to the Chinese diaspora and this idea that you can build a new life and home somewhere else. And the contrasting proverb is ‘fallen leaves always return home to their roots’, which touches on this idea that you always go back to where you’re from.”

Celine states "last night i claimed back the Chinese culture i'd once so heavily rejected. last night i dedicated my performance to my younger self. how liberating that she was now onstage speaking her mother tongue, claiming a culture she once ran away from. i dedicated that performance to my Chinese mother and all the richness of culture she has gracefully passed onto me. to my ancestors who kept their heads down so that i could lift mine up, and finally to talia pua. thank you for the opportunity to fall back in love with being Chinese."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @celinedam_

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/03-08-2021/pork-and-poll-taxes-reclaiming-new-zealands-forgotten-history-on-stage

Dear Mama and Baba: A letter to my Asian Parents about Depression

This is a raw letter to her asian parents about a mental illness that does not cease to "exist" in asian culture and through Celines beautiful writing highlights the issue of depression in Asian culture and how it is an illness where usually it is not accepted or dismissed because older generations of Asians think its due to "lack of effort"and therefore, many concealing their illness. But Celine speaks out on the matter. She puts herself in the fore front so that other Asian's living in NZ can overcome it because the very culture has dismissed the concept of it.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/27-09-2020/dear-baba-and-mama-a-letter-to-my-asian-parents-about-my-depression

Grappling With my Chinese Name

Through this written essay Celine highlights a complicated relationship with her Chinese name. At age 12, she gave herself the name Celine, so she could avoid having teachers and peers mangle the name she was given by her parents. In this essay she tries to come to terms with all the ways our society has made her want to hide her name.

https://www.renews.co.nz/grappling-with-my-chinese-name/

In her work and practice she centres her Kiwi-Chinese,Vietnamese identity. In most of her practice, you can see her constant effort in bringing awareness and tackling on issues that she experiences as. Kiwi-Asian and her difficulty of accepting her identity but also takes us on a journey with her as she re-learns a culture she once walked away from.

Although Celines practice and work is very much different to mine, the themes and issues she tackles down with in her work is very similar to mine and the ideas and experiences I have as a Kiwi-Asian myself. I found myself relating to her, especially as Eastern Asian culture is very similar, Chinese and Korean. Many of the issues she brought up in her written pieces, I was able to relate.

Tyrone Ohia

Tyrone Ohia is a Maori designer. In this video Tyrone talks about his approach to his design practice.

He talks about his ancestors – which has rich and deep connections in Maori culture. He states "It was our view of the environment around us – the forest, the sea, the sky, the earth, all of those things. The most important thing is to open your eyes, our ears, and our minds to receive this type of knowledge.".

His guiding principle is to fully understand the Whakapapa and the. foundations of the project so tat he can encompass the history and meaning into his designs that he produces.

I also have similar views on how I start my design as well. When taking on any design jobs I like to have a full deep knowledge of whom and what I am designing for, especially if related to cultural matters.

This can be seen in these designs and project Tyrone worked on:

https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/page/toi-tu-toi-ora-artist-profile-tyrone-ohia

Toi tu Toi Ora

Their approach to designing this identity for the gallery and the satellite exhibition in Britomart was to reflect the unique Maori curatorial framework of the show which is based on the Maori creation narrative. Rather than using the Western chronological order of works they base it on Maori celestial origins.

Basing it on Maori concepts of time and space the shows title forms an interwoven timescape – an infinite ever-changing pattern that spills out of the gallery that draws the viewers into the Maori world. You can see that the words Toi Tu Toi ora repeatedly chants through the gallery space and out into the world, – the words mean "Maori art stands strong and in good health."

The typeface has straight edges, but also warps and bends in mythical ways to reflect the straight lines of Māori woven art forms, and the organic curves of carved art forms.

The shifting between the black and white colour scheme reflects the extremes of the Māori creation narrative – moving from darkness into the world of light, echoing the many dualities within Te Ao

https://bestawards.co.nz/toitanga/toitanga/extended-whanau/toi-tu-toi-ora-contemporary-maori-art-2/

https://concreteplayground.com/auckland/event/toi-tu-toi-ora-contemporary-maori-art

Saul Bass

Seachange Studio

[leavesfromthesametree]

4. Sian Stacey Community Engagement Coordinator & Island Manager of Bardsey Island 2015-2018

Photographed by Matt Horwood Tell us something about yourself that nobody else knows. I was given a conditional offer to study Engineering at the University of Liverpool, having mistakenly chosen the wrong course code, thinking I’d chosen English! I ended up studying English and Drama at Goldsmiths in London but can’t help but wonder what my life might have ended up like if I’d struggled through an Engineering degree in Liverpool.

What do you enjoy doing in your own time? My perfect day would be spent in the sea, either surfing or swimming. Being in the sea gives my mind the best rest and reset, and has also given me some of my most amazing experiences, be that being in eyeline with a group of ringed plovers swopping to the shoreline, or spotting dolphins just meters away as the sun set one day last summer whilst a couple of us were still out trying to get some small summer waves off Ynys Las.

Tell us a bit about your experience of working on the Summit to Sea project. Working on the Summit to Sea project has been a huge challenge! I began working for the project when the concerns and frustrations of the local community were at their loudest. I worried I’d made the wrong decision taking the job, the concerns being raised by people were worries I also had. I managed to set my mindset to seeing myself as working on behalf of the local community, ensuring their voices were heard and listened to. Once the project re-set and began its co-design process a new set of challenges emerged, communicating quite how the project had changed to people who had no trust in the project. But gradually I’ve built relationships with a wide range of people, and trust has begun to be rebuilt. It’s not exciting, and a little bit scary, to see how we can all work together to deliver the co-designed project to help nature and people thrive in the area.

If you had to pick one thing, what are you most passionate about? Finding a way for us to come together to address the changes we all face in the light of climate change and the biodiversity crisis and what this means for our lives. How can we build resilience within ourselves, our communities, how can we hear each other and our fears and work together to support one another.

What makes you angry? Short answer: Inequality, racism, homophobia, how some are able to become so wealthy! Long answer: I volunteered for Aber Food Surplus the day after Boxing Day and helped rescue 650kg worth of food that would have ended up in landfill and instead was re-circulated throughout the community – this included 80 turkeys. I was so angry seeing this face to face, realising that in all our incredible systems that have been designed by humanity we fail on a food system that leaves far too many hungry, wastes food and underpays food producers. There must be a better way!

If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be? That our leaders responded to the climate and biodiversity crisis with the same urgency they have to Covid 19. Answers to these crises aren’t easy, but there are so many solutions already if only there was the will and commitment from our ‘leadership’. I see greater leadership on a local level and amongst the youth climate strikers who have been raising their voices to try and bring about change.

Do you feel connected to nature and/or wildlife and if so, tell us a bit about when you first found an interest or felt connected. I feel most connected to nature in late January and early February. Every morning when I take the dog out for a run or a walk the long quiet winters finally turn into brighter and nosier mornings as the dawn chorus begins to return. Hearing the birds returning, or finding their voices again for those resident birds, connects me not only to nature but gives me a deeper connection to our cycles of life and how generations before us would no doubt have also felt the same sense of relief to see another Winter finishing and the teasing of warmer days to come ahead of us. *** 4. Sian Stacey Cydlynydd Ymgysylltu Cymunedol & Cyn Warden Enlli 2015-18

Dywedwch rywbeth amdanoch eich hun nad oes neb arall yn ei wybod. Cefais gynnig amodol i astudio Peirianneg ym Mhrifysgol Lerpwl, ar ôl dewis y cod cwrs anghywir ar gam, gan feddwl fy mod wedi dewis Saesneg! Yn y diwedd fe wnes i astudio Saesneg a Drama yn Goldsmiths yn Llundain ond ni allaf feddwl tybed sut y byddai fy mywyd wedi bod yn y pen draw pe bawn wedi cael trafferth trwy radd Peirianneg yn Lerpwl.

Beth ydych chi'n mwynhau ei wneud yn eich amser eich hun? Byddai fy niwrnod perffaith yn cael ei dreulio yn y môr, naill ai'n syrffio neu'n nofio. Mae bod yn y môr yn rhoi’r gorffwys a’r ailosodiad gorau i’m meddwl, ac mae hefyd wedi rhoi rhai o fy mhrofiadau mwyaf rhyfeddol i mi, boed hynny mewn amrantiad gyda grŵp o gwtiaid torchog yn swapio i’r draethlin, neu’n gweld dolffiniaid ychydig fetrau i ffwrdd â’r haul. gosod un diwrnod yr haf diwethaf tra bod cwpl ohonom yn dal i fod allan yn ceisio cael ychydig o donnau haf oddi ar Ynys Las.

Dywedwch ychydig wrthym am eich profiad o weithio ar y prosiect Copa i'r Môr. Mae gweithio ar y prosiect Copa i'r Môr wedi bod yn her enfawr! Dechreuais weithio i'r prosiect pan oedd pryderon a rhwystredigaethau'r gymuned leol ar eu mwyaf. Roeddwn yn poeni fy mod wedi gwneud y penderfyniad anghywir wrth wneud y swydd, roedd y pryderon a godwyd gan bobl yn bryderon a oedd gennyf hefyd. Llwyddais i osod fy meddylfryd i weld fy hun yn gweithio ar ran y gymuned leol, gan sicrhau bod eu lleisiau’n cael eu clywed a’u clywed. Unwaith i'r prosiect ail-osod a dechrau ar ei broses cyd-ddylunio, daeth set newydd o heriau i'r amlwg, gan gyfleu'n union sut roedd y prosiect wedi newid i bobl nad oedd ganddynt unrhyw ymddiriedaeth yn y prosiect. Ond yn raddol rydw i wedi adeiladu perthynas ag ystod eang o bobl, ac mae ymddiriedaeth wedi dechrau cael ei hailadeiladu. Nid yw’n gyffrous, ac ychydig yn frawychus, i weld sut y gallwn i gyd weithio gyda’n gilydd i gyflawni’r prosiect a gyd-gynlluniwyd i helpu natur a phobl i ffynnu yn yr ardal.

Pe bai'n rhaid i chi ddewis un peth, beth ydych chi'n angerddol amdano fwyaf? Dod o hyd i ffordd i ni ddod at ein gilydd i fynd i’r afael â’r newidiadau rydyn ni i gyd yn eu hwynebu yng ngoleuni newid yn yr hinsawdd a’r argyfwng bioamrywiaeth a beth mae hyn yn ei olygu i’n bywydau. Sut gallwn ni adeiladu gwytnwch o fewn ein hunain, ein cymunedau, sut gallwn ni glywed ein gilydd a’n hofnau a chydweithio i gefnogi ein gilydd.

Beth sy'n eich gwylltio? Yr ateb byr: Anghydraddoldeb, hiliaeth, homoffobia, sut mae rhai yn gallu dod mor gyfoethog!

Ateb hir: Gwirfoddolais i Aber Food Surplus y diwrnod ar ôl Gŵyl San Steffan a helpu i achub gwerth 650kg o fwyd a fyddai wedi mynd i safleoedd tirlenwi ac yn lle hynny a gafodd ei ail-gylchredeg ledled y gymuned – mae hyn yn cynnwys 80 o dwrcïod. Roeddwn i mor grac wrth weld hyn wyneb yn wyneb, gan sylweddoli ein bod ni, yn ein holl systemau anhygoel sydd wedi'u cynllunio gan ddynoliaeth, yn methu â system fwyd sy'n gadael llawer gormod yn newynog, yn gwastraffu bwyd ac yn tandalu cynhyrchwyr bwyd. Mae'n rhaid bod ffordd well!

Pe gallech chi newid un peth am y byd, beth fyddai hwnnw? Bod ein harweinwyr wedi ymateb i’r argyfwng hinsawdd a bioamrywiaeth gyda’r un brys ag sydd ganddynt i Covid 19. Nid yw atebion i’r argyfyngau hyn yn hawdd, ond mae cymaint o atebion eisoes os mai dim ond ewyllys ac ymrwymiad ein ‘harweinyddiaeth’ oedd yn bodoli. Rwy’n gweld mwy o arweiniad ar lefel leol ac ymhlith y streicwyr hinsawdd ieuenctid sydd wedi bod yn codi eu lleisiau i geisio sicrhau newid.

Ydych chi'n teimlo'n gysylltiedig â natur a/neu fywyd gwyllt ac os felly, dywedwch ychydig wrthym am pryd y daethoch o hyd i ddiddordeb gyntaf neu pan wnaethoch deimlo cysylltiad. Rwy'n teimlo'n fwyaf cysylltiedig â natur ddiwedd Ionawr a dechrau Chwefror. Bob bore pan fyddaf yn mynd â’r ci allan am dro neu am dro mae’r gaeafau hir, tawel o’r diwedd yn troi’n foreau mwy disglair a mwy swnllyd wrth i gytgan y wawr ddechrau dychwelyd. Mae clywed yr adar yn dychwelyd, neu ddod o hyd i’w lleisiau eto ar gyfer yr adar preswyl hynny, yn fy nghysylltu nid yn unig â natur ond yn rhoi cysylltiad dyfnach i mi â chylchoedd ein bywyd a sut y byddai cenedlaethau o’n blaenau yn ddiau hefyd wedi teimlo’r un ymdeimlad o ryddhad i’w weld. gaeaf arall yn gorffen a phryfocio dyddiau cynhesach i ddod o'n blaenau

[myungjaezzz]

My older brother began attending Siena College in the fall of 2017, but he had been a part of Siena’s community long before then. He attended summer camps at Siena during middle school, going on to become a mentor at said camps all throughout high school and also college. He participated as a mentor for Siena’s Saturday Scholars program, in which students from underfunded urban high schools were bussed to Siena and taught everything from basic chemistry to how to build computers. He also did research through CURCA (Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity) where they coded and designed augmented reality apps from scratch using software such as Unity and Blender to teach difficult physics concepts in a classroom setting. 

While a student at Siena, my brother also faced discrimination and racism, mostly from other students, but even from some professors. My brother and I are both Korean, adopted into a white family, and we live in a predominantly white area, and have always attended predominantly white schools. We were both the only student of colour in our first year seminar classes, causing many awkward and downright uncomfortable situations. My brother has been called a multitude of slurs and other hateful things while on campus, ranging from “the Asian” to “chink”  to “yellow fellow”. He has been told to go back to where he came from, and even that he brought COVID-19 here. Siena has never done anything more than give the perpetrator a slap on the wrist and a warning. 

My brother was supposed to graduate in May of 2021, only to find out he had one class left to take for his degree, of which just one section with 15 spots was offered over the summer. We were afraid he would have to take it during the fall semester with absolutely no financial aid due to the fact that he would then be considered a part time student, but thankfully, his advisor was able to get the class waived, and my brother was expected to graduate in August of 2021. 

August came and went, and my brother had still not received his diploma. He soon discovered that there was an unknown financial hold on his account, even though we had finished making all his payments. The hold was called a “degree processing fee”, and it was $175. It might not seem like a lot, but the principle of it is absurd. My brother’s tuition had already cost $150,000, he had nearly been unable to graduate, and there was still a hidden $175 fee. 

So my mom wrote the following email to the president of Siena complaining about my brother’s gruelling and complicated graduation process:

The following was Chris Gibson’s response. This was how he chose to represent not only himself but the whole of Siena College to an entire family of Siena alumni (my father graduated in 1986, the same year as Chris Gibson, and my mother in 1989).

I believe his response speaks for itself:

Please signal boost this.

This dismissive treatment of real issues and constant suppression of diverse voices has gone on long enough. Chris Gibson, as well as many other colleges and universities across the country, needs to answer for what they’ve done and create real change.

Tokenism is not inclusivity.

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[blkgirlsinthefuture]

Black Magic and Defense Against the White Arts: Assimilation, Identity, and Purpose in Higher Education and the Internet

Black Student Union and Black Caucus are two very different organizations that, in their respective series, serve an important narrative purpose: to introduce the audience to what Blackness is on a certain college campus and how that Blackness congregates into something that resembles a community. In BLACK ENOUGH, the Black Student Union (Weston) is Blackness as multifaceted yet unified - whether you were from Queens or the Caribbean, whether you wore your hair in afros or in braids, if you fit a broad (but admittedly not broad enough) definition of Blackness, you were to be part of the one (non-Greek) Black organization on campus. In Dear White People, however, Black Caucus shows Blackness as an alliance: the Caucus was not a unified entity, more so a forum for various different Black organizations to congregate and discuss the tea of the week; these organizations included CORE, Black AF, the Black Student Union (Winchester), and the African-American Student Union.

I wonder which entity Amaya may have fit better in during her Black Welcome Week - if both Black Student Union and Black Caucus existed, which would she have chosen, if either at all? It’s important to acknowledge that both Weston and Winchester are PWIs/HWIs, with long histories of slavery and segregation; in these institutions, Black people don’t exactly have the luxury of bountiful representation in bodies of power - they have to make their own spaces where they can, whether in 1965 or 2021. As a result of lack of representation, a lot of racism (especially microaggressions) is perpetrated and it is a chore to get White people (and even some Black people) to understand the impact of these incidents. In “Algorithms of Oppression”, Safiya Umoja Noble details how Black minorities in our physical world manifest in the digital as machines, systems designed to oppress Black people. Part of resisting this coded manifestation of White supremacy is to build Black communities, and this is where Noble and BLACK ENOUGH share a common ground: they both make the digital part of their framing with #BlackGirlMagic and “#BlackGirlMagicPotion”. The act of making a hashtag is the act of putting a flag in the ground and summoning people to it in order to build a city around this phrase and ideals that underlie it. #BlackGirlMagic celebrates the multitude of ways in which Black women and girls exist and thrive and create and challenge in a world that is intent on tearing them down on all fronts. On the flip side, though, “#BlackGirlMagicPotion” exposes what happens when certain Blacknesses are excluded from the equation, barred from the city. Amaya is kept out of #BlackGirlMagic yet is constantly invited inside anyway; even if she’s constantly asked to join the Black Student Union, it is with the expectation that she needs to majorly change. Amaya dances with White groups instead of going to Black parties, she doesn’t say “finna” and she can’t really twerk, she relaxes her hair instead of wearing it natural, and this all implicitly makes her a pariah in some Black spaces.

When people talk about Black culture and Black community, they often have a very monolithic notion of what that entails: rap and hip-hop, Malcolm X and W.E.B Dubois, dreadlocks and baby curls, fuck the police and free the Black brutha. Growing up, I didn’t identify with much of any of this, and it instilled in me a pervasive anti-Blackness (especially against Black men) that I am still trying to unlearn to this day. The complexities of identity are often controlled by White simplicity. You actually care about school? Black people don’t care about school, so you’re not really Black - you’re better than them, something else… something White. The many Black characters that Amaya interacts with speak a thousand words with their looks at her: she spends too much time with White people, she’s forgotten how to be Black. While this perspective has some merit, it doesn’t capture the whole picture. What I am continuing to learn is that Blackness is everywhere and in everything - there is nothing out there for White people that Black people haven’t carved out space for themselves in - nerd- and geekdom, for example, can be magnificently Black spaces, even if stereotypes of Black people would refuse to acknowledge that.

Amaya’s journey, like my own, is one where she learns that she doesn’t need to be the Black girl others expect her to be; she can make her own Blackness, using the ingredients of her own lived experiences, to create a new, unique, and just-as-great #BlackGirlMagicPotion. And just as Amaya comes to embrace this in Weston’s halls, we too can embrace our own potions in the digital realm; social media a dangerous yet powerful tool for community-building and self-loving. Thanks to social media, Black people around the world have been able to meet each other and break down cultural barriers that would otherwise have kept them apart. Still, we must be vigilant - Noble is not starry-eyed about the role of technology in Black lives, but she still offers hope for a future where, if we are critical, we can survive and may even start to change that which oppresses us, that our Black magic potions can be potent defenses against the White supremacist arts.

-Jonathan

[systemsanctuaryserver]

Server Mission Statement:

This server is founded on the idea of creating a new kind of social and support oriented system space that promotes healing and healthy community by basing our rules, policies, and moderating decisions in an ethical code.

*For those interested in a more in-depth understanding of these values, here is a further explanation. Folks are also encouraged to reach out to us Kit Folk for any further information or to have answered any questions on the server and blog ethics!*

Core server values: This community is built on the following values: internal and external community building, anti-discrimination and equality, justice, communal healing, celebration of plurality, anti-discourse, system responsibility, conflict resolution and restorative justice, radical consent, and through the above ethics, the creation of a safer space.

Internal and External Community: The aim of this server is not simply to be an internet hangout, but to be a community to all that participate here. Through the practicing morals that help to make this space more than simply a server, we strive to not only build a unique online space but to replicate healthy relationships and team building in a way that can be applied internally within a system as well. A community is only as strong as it’s members’ commitment to treating each other and the space with respect, responsibility, and dignity, and these are values we hope to express in our interactions and structure of this server.

Equality and anti-discrimination: It is not enough to simply believe in non-discrimination; rather, we must actively live those beliefs and take all possible steps to be not only non-discriminatory, but *anti-discriminatory*. This means doing our best together to be anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-ableist, anti-sexist, anti-Nazi, antifascist, and pro-Addict, among many other things.

Justice: We will do our utmost to create a community in which justice is believed in, supported, encouraged, and sought after to the best of our ability.

Community healing: We believe in community healing from trauma, mental illness, and addiction, but also from ableism, racism, anti-Addict sentiment, fascism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and the many other injustices of our societies. Although in many ways healing is an intimate and personal journey, we believe that it is both our right and our duty to create an atmosphere in which we may all find healing together; in striving to create a community which actively works against those injustices which harm us; in treating each other and ourselves with dignity, respect, and compassion; and in each working to build an environment together in which we can all thrive.

Celebration of plurality: We believe in creating a unique space dedicated to being a celebration of multiplicity, free from the expectations of an ableist society to hide ourselves and our multiplicity. We aim to achieve this by founding a space designed in every way we can to be by systems, for systems. We also aim to achieve this goal by practicing radical acceptance of others’ truths, in believing and respecting each other at their word on matters of identity. This means that behaviors such as “fake claiming” are a violation not only of server rules, but of the very morals and ethics on which this community is founded.

Anti-discourse: In accordance with the previous statement, this server is anti-discourse. We believe that exclusionary discourse can serve to divide, damage, and discredit our community, and creates a breeding ground for toxic and unhealthy interactions and beliefs within each other and ourselves. Though we understand this may not be a value shared by all members of this community, it is one enforced strictly within the server itself, and something we ask all server members to respect and abide by.

System responsibility: As we acknowledge all systems as real, we also acknowledge the unique conditions of sharing a body and how this intersects with our community values of taking responsibility for our choices and actions, and therefore encourage collective system responsibility among our community members.

Radical consent: We believe in the importance of practicing radical consent. This means first and foremost that only a freely-given, non-coerced ‘yes’ means yes. This applies not only to real-life or romantic situations, but to all interactions between community members. Additionally this applies to the way the server itself will be structured as a safer space; namely, that the server will be structured to value and prioritize server members’ consent in choosing the types of content they wish to see through roles and the right to request conversation changes.

Conflict resolution: We believe in striving to uphold and build this space around values of conflict resolution and restorative justice. We feel that purely punitive action is neither just nor effective in fostering the atmosphere of trust, safety, structure, and community that we mean to achieve here. As such, we aim to enforce server rules and handle conflicts by use of these principles, and with the understanding that conflict is a natural part of life to be addressed with earnest honesty in good faith.

Safer Space: This server is dedicated to the goal of being a saf*er* space. Because everyone’s needs are different, we acknowledge that not all needs can be served entirely by server rules and policy and as such we commit to striving to make all possible compromises and work with server members individually and as a team to provide the safest possible space for all community members to thrive in.

[orbemnews]

Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist? Hundreds of people gathered for the first lecture at what had become the world’s most important conference on artificial intelligence — row after row of faces. Some were East Asian, a few were Indian, and a few were women. But the vast majority were white men. More than 5,500 people attended the meeting, five years ago in Barcelona, Spain. Timnit Gebru, then a graduate student at Stanford University, remembers counting only six Black people other than herself, all of whom she knew, all of whom were men. The homogeneous crowd crystallized for her a glaring issue. The big thinkers of tech say A.I. is the future. It will underpin everything from search engines and email to the software that drives our cars, directs the policing of our streets and helps create our vaccines. But it is being built in a way that replicates the biases of the almost entirely male, predominantly white work force making it. In the nearly 10 years I’ve written about artificial intelligence, two things have remained a constant: The technology relentlessly improves in fits and sudden, great leaps forward. And bias is a thread that subtly weaves through that work in a way that tech companies are reluctant to acknowledge. On her first night home in Menlo Park, Calif., after the Barcelona conference, sitting cross-​legged on the couch with her laptop, Dr. Gebru described the A.I. work force conundrum in a Facebook post. “I’m not worried about machines taking over the world. I’m worried about groupthink, insularity and arrogance in the A.I. community — especially with the current hype and demand for people in the field,” she wrote. “The people creating the technology are a big part of the system. If many are actively excluded from its creation, this technology will benefit a few while harming a great many.” The A.I. community buzzed about the mini-manifesto. Soon after, Dr. Gebru helped create a new organization, Black in A.I. After finishing her Ph.D., she was hired by Google. She teamed with Margaret Mitchell, who was building a group inside Google dedicated to “ethical A.I.” Dr. Mitchell had previously worked in the research lab at Microsoft. She had grabbed attention when she told Bloomberg News in 2016 that A.I. suffered from a “sea of dudes” problem. She estimated that she had worked with hundreds of men over the previous five years and about 10 women. Their work was hailed as groundbreaking. The nascent A.I. industry, it had become clear, needed minders and people with different perspectives. About six years ago, A.I. in a Google online photo service organized photos of Black people into a folder called “gorillas.” Four years ago, a researcher at a New York start-up noticed that the A.I. system she was working on was egregiously biased against Black people. Not long after, a Black researcher in Boston discovered that an A.I. system couldn’t identify her face — until she put on a white mask. In 2018, when I told Google’s public relations staff that I was working on a book about artificial intelligence, it arranged a long talk with Dr. Mitchell to discuss her work. As she described how she built the company’s Ethical A.I. team — and brought Dr. Gebru into the fold — it was refreshing to hear from someone so closely focused on the bias problem. But nearly three years later, Dr. Gebru was pushed out of the company without a clear explanation. She said she had been fired after criticizing Google’s approach to minority hiring and, with a research paper, highlighting the harmful biases in the A.I. systems that underpin Google’s search engine and other services. “Your life starts getting worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people,” Dr. Gebru said in an email before her firing. “You start making the other leaders upset.” As Dr. Mitchell defended Dr. Gebru, the company removed her, too. She had searched through her own Google email account for material that would support their position and forwarded emails to another account, which somehow got her into trouble. Google declined to comment for this article. Their departure became a point of contention for A.I. researchers and other tech workers. Some saw a giant company no longer willing to listen, too eager to get technology out the door without considering its implications. I saw an old problem — part technological and part sociological — finally breaking into the open. It should have been a wake-up call. In June 2015, a friend sent Jacky Alciné, a 22-year-old software engineer living in Brooklyn, an internet link for snapshots the friend had posted to the new Google Photos service. Google Photos could analyze snapshots and automatically sort them into digital folders based on what was pictured. One folder might be “dogs,” another “birthday party.” When Mr. Alciné clicked on the link, he noticed one of the folders was labeled “gorillas.” That made no sense to him, so he opened the folder. He found more than 80 photos he had taken nearly a year earlier of a friend during a concert in nearby Prospect Park. That friend was Black. He might have let it go if Google had mistakenly tagged just one photo. But 80? He posted a screenshot on Twitter. “Google Photos, y’all,” messed up, he wrote, using much saltier language. “My friend is not a gorilla.” Like facial recognition services, talking digital assistants and conversational “chatbots,” Google Photos relied on an A.I. system that learned its skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data. Called a “neural network,” this mathematical system could learn tasks that engineers could never code into a machine on their own. By analyzing thousands of photos of gorillas, it could learn to recognize a gorilla. It was also capable of egregious mistakes. The onus was on engineers to choose the right data when training these mathematical systems. (In this case, the easiest fix was to eliminate “gorilla” as a photo category.) As a software engineer, Mr. Alciné understood the problem. He compared it to making lasagna. “If you mess up the lasagna ingredients early, the whole thing is ruined,” he said. “It is the same thing with A.I. You have to be very intentional about what you put into it. Otherwise, it is very difficult to undo.” The Porn Problem In 2017, Deborah Raji, a 21-​year-​old Black woman from Ottawa, sat at a desk inside the New York offices of Clarifai, the start-up where she was working. The company built technology that could automatically recognize objects in digital images and planned to sell it to businesses, police departments and government agencies. She stared at a screen filled with faces — images the company used to train its facial recognition software. As she scrolled through page after page of these faces, she realized that most — more than 80 percent — were of white people. More than 70 percent of those white people were male. When Clarifai trained its system on this data, it might do a decent job of recognizing white people, Ms. Raji thought, but it would fail miserably with people of color, and probably women, too. Clarifai was also building a “content moderation system,” a tool that could automatically identify and remove pornography from images people posted to social networks. The company trained this system on two sets of data: thousands of photos pulled from online pornography sites, and thousands of G‑rated images bought from stock photo services. The system was supposed to learn the difference between the pornographic and the anodyne. The problem was that the G‑rated images were dominated by white people, and the pornography was not. The system was learning to identify Black people as pornographic. “The data we use to train these systems matters,” Ms. Raji said. “We can’t just blindly pick our sources.” This was obvious to her, but to the rest of the company it was not. Because the people choosing the training data were mostly white men, they didn’t realize their data was biased. “The issue of bias in facial recognition technologies is an evolving and important topic,” Clarifai’s chief executive, Matt Zeiler, said in a statement. Measuring bias, he said, “is an important step.” ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ Before joining Google, Dr. Gebru collaborated on a study with a young computer scientist, Joy Buolamwini. A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ms. Buolamwini, who is Black, came from a family of academics. Her grandfather specialized in medicinal chemistry, and so did her father. She gravitated toward facial recognition technology. Other researchers believed it was reaching maturity, but when she used it, she knew it wasn’t. In October 2016, a friend invited her for a night out in Boston with several other women. “We’ll do masks,” the friend said. Her friend meant skin care masks at a spa, but Ms. Buolamwini assumed Halloween masks. So she carried a white plastic Halloween mask to her office that morning. It was still sitting on her desk a few days later as she struggled to finish a project for one of her classes. She was trying to get a detection system to track her face. No matter what she did, she couldn’t quite get it to work. In her frustration, she picked up the white mask from her desk and pulled it over her head. Before it was all the way on, the system recognized her face — or, at least, it recognized the mask. “Black Skin, White Masks,” she said in an interview, nodding to the 1952 critique of historical racism from the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. “The metaphor becomes the truth. You have to fit a norm, and that norm is not you.” Ms. Buolamwini started exploring commercial services designed to analyze faces and identify characteristics like age and sex, including tools from Microsoft and IBM. She found that when the services read photos of lighter-​skinned men, they misidentified sex about 1 percent of the time. But the darker the skin in the photo, the larger the error rate. It rose particularly high with images of women with dark skin. Microsoft’s error rate was about 21 percent. IBM’s was 35. Published in the winter of 2018, the study drove a backlash against facial recognition technology and, particularly, its use in law enforcement. Microsoft’s chief legal officer said the company had turned down sales to law enforcement when there was concern the technology could unreasonably infringe on people’s rights, and he made a public call for government regulation. Twelve months later, Microsoft backed a bill in Washington State that would require notices to be posted in public places using facial recognition and ensure that government agencies obtained a court order when looking for specific people. The bill passed, and it takes effect later this year. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment for this article, did not back other legislation that would have provided stronger protections. Ms. Buolamwini began to collaborate with Ms. Raji, who moved to M.I.T. They started testing facial recognition technology from a third American tech giant: Amazon. The company had started to market its technology to police departments and government agencies under the name Amazon Rekognition. Ms. Buolamwini and Ms. Raji published a study showing that an Amazon face service also had trouble identifying the sex of female and darker-​skinned faces. According to the study, the service mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and misidentified darker-​skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. For lighter-​skinned males, the error rate was zero. Amazon called for government regulation of facial recognition. It also attacked the researchers in private emails and public blog posts. “The answer to anxieties over new technology is not to run ‘tests’ inconsistent with how the service is designed to be used, and to amplify the test’s false and misleading conclusions through the news media,” an Amazon executive, Matt Wood, wrote in a blog post that disputed the study and a New York Times article that described it. In an open letter, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Gebru rejected Amazon’s argument and called on it to stop selling to law enforcement. The letter was signed by 25 artificial intelligence researchers from Google, Microsoft and academia. Last June, Amazon backed down. It announced that it would not let the police use its technology for at least a year, saying it wanted to give Congress time to create rules for the ethical use of the technology. Congress has yet to take up the issue. Amazon declined to comment for this article. The End at Google Dr. Gebru and Dr. Mitchell had less success fighting for change inside their own company. Corporate gatekeepers at Google were heading them off with a new review system that had lawyers and even communications staff vetting research papers. Dr. Gebru’s dismissal in December stemmed, she said, from the company’s treatment of a research paper she wrote alongside six other researchers, including Dr. Mitchell and three others at Google. The paper discussed ways that a new type of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins its search engine, can show bias against women and people of color. After she submitted the paper to an academic conference, Dr. Gebru said, a Google manager demanded that she either retract the paper or remove the names of Google employees. She said she would resign if the company could not tell her why it wanted her to retract the paper and answer other concerns. The response: Her resignation was accepted immediately, and Google revoked her access to company email and other services. A month later, it removed Dr. Mitchell’s access after she searched through her own email in an effort to defend Dr. Gebru. In a Google staff meeting last month, just after the company fired Dr. Mitchell, the head of the Google A.I. lab, Jeff Dean, said the company would create strict rules meant to limit its review of sensitive research papers. He also defended the reviews. He declined to discuss the details of Dr. Mitchell’s dismissal but said she had violated the company’s code of conduct and security policies. One of Mr. Dean’s new lieutenants, Zoubin Ghahramani, said the company must be willing to tackle hard issues. There are “uncomfortable things that responsible A.I. will inevitably bring up,” he said. “We need to be comfortable with that discomfort.” But it will be difficult for Google to regain trust — both inside the company and out. “They think they can get away with firing these people and it will not hurt them in the end, but they are absolutely shooting themselves in the foot,” said Alex Hanna, a longtime part of Google’s 10-member Ethical A.I. team. “What they have done is incredibly myopic.” Cade Metz is a technology correspondent at The Times and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World,” from which this article is adapted. Source link Orbem News #Arent #machines #Making #racist

[bensk]

Be curious. Be humble. Be useful.

I was invited to give the annual Taub Lecture for graduating Public Policy students at the University of Chicago, my alma mater and the department from which I graduated. This is what I came up with.

---

I am incredibly grateful and honored to be here tonight. The Public Policy program literally changed my life.

My name is Ben Samuels-Kalow, my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m a 2012 Public Policy graduate, and I will permit myself one “back in my day” comment: When I was a student here, the “Taub Lecture” were actual lectures given by Professor Taub in our Implementation class. I’ve spent the last nine years teaching in the South Bronx. For the past two years, I have served as Head of School at Creo College Prep, a public charter school that opened in 2019.

I was asked tonight to tell you a bit about my journey, and the work that I do. My objection to doing this is that there is basically nothing less interesting than listening to a white man tell you how he got somewhere, so I'll keep it brief. I grew up in New York City and went to a public high school that turned out Justice Elena Kagan, Chris Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, among many others…none of whom were available tonight.

We, on this Zoom, all have one thing in common — we have been very, very close to graduating from the University of Chicago. I have never sat quite where you sit. I didn’t graduate into a pandemic. But the truth is that everyone graduates into a crisis. The periods of relative ease, the so-called “ends of history”, even the end of this pandemic, are really matters of forced perspective. This crisis isn’t over. Periods of relative peace and stability paper over chasms of structural inequality.

You went to college with the people who will write the books and go on the talk shows and coin the phrases to describe our times. You could write that book. You could go into consulting and spend six weeks at a time helping a company figure out how to maximize profits from their Trademark Chasm Expanding Products.

You could also run into the chasm.

What is the chasm?

It is the distance between potential and opportunity. It is a University on the South Side of Chicago with a student body that is 10% Black and 15% Latinx, with a faculty that is 65% white.

It is eight Black students being admitted to a top high school in New York City...in a class of 749.

What is the chasm?

The chasm is that in our neighborhood in The Bronx, where I’m standing right now, 1 in 4 students can read a book on their grade level, and only 1 in 10 will ever sit in a college class.

It is maternal mortality and COVID survival rates. The chasm is generational wealth and payday loans.

It is systemic racism and misogyny.

It is the case for activism and reparations.

In my job, the chasm is the distance between the creativity, brilliance, and wit that my students possess, and the opportunities the schools in our neighborhood provide.

In the zip code in which I grew up in New York City, the median income is $122,169. In the zip code where I have spent every day working since I graduated from UChicago, the median income is $30,349. The school where I went to 7th grade and this school where next year we will have our first 7th grade are only a 15 minute drive apart.

In my first quarter at UChicago, I joined the Neighborhood Schools Program, and immediately fell in love with working in schools. I joined NSP because a friend told me how interesting she found the work. I’d done some tutoring in high school, and had taught karate since I was 15. I applied, was accepted, and worked at Hyde Park Academy on 62nd and Stony Island in a variety of capacities from 2008 to 2012.

At the time, Hyde Park Academy had one of very few International Baccalaureate programs on the South Side, and every spring, parents would line up out the door of the school to try to get their rising 9th grader in. I worked with an incredible mentor teacher and successive classes of high school seniors whose wit, creativity, and skill would've been at home in the seminars and dorm discussions we all have participated in three blocks north of their high school.

In my work at Hyde Park Academy, I learned the first lesson of three lessons that have shaped my career as a teacher. Be curious. I had been told in Orientation that there were “borders” to the UChicago experience, lines we should not cross. I am forever grateful to the people who told me to ignore that BS. Our entire department is a testimony to ignoring that BS. We ask questions like, why did parents line up for hours to get into what was considered a “failing” high school? Why had no one asked my kids to write poetry before? Why are they more creative and better at writing than most of the kids I went to high school with, but there is only one IB class and families have to literally compete to get in? I learned as much from my job three blocks south of the University as I did in my classes at the University...which is to say, I was learning a LOT, but I had a lot more to learn.

I knew I wanted to be a teacher from my first quarter here. I did my research. The Boston Teacher Residency was the top program in the country, so I applied there. I was a 21 year old white man interested in education, so...I applied to Teach for America. In the early 2010’s, I looked like the default avatar on a Teach for America profile. It was my backup option. I was all in on Boston, and was sure, with four years working in urban schools, a stint at the Urban Education Institute, and, at the time, seven years of karate teaching under my belt, I was a shoe in.

I was rejected from both programs. Which brings me to my second lesson. Be humble. We are destined for and entitled to nothing. There is an aphorism I learned from one of my favorite podcasts, Another Round: "carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." If you are a mediocre white man, like me, do as much as you can not to be. If you look like me, you live life on the "lowest difficulty setting." This means I need to question my gifts, contextualize my successes, and actively work against systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity.

Over the last two years, I have interviewed over 300 people to work at this school. There are a series of questions that I ask folks with backgrounds like myself:

Have you ever lived in a neighborhood that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked on a team that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked for a boss/supervisor/leader who was a person of color?

The vast majority of white folks, myself at 21 included, could not answer “yes” to these three questions. This is disappointing, but I've also lived and worked in two of the most segregated cities on this continent, so it is not surprising. By the time I sat where you’re sitting now, I had learned a lot about education policy and sociology. I'd taken every class that Chad offered at the time. I'd worked at UEI, I'd worked in a South Side high school for four years, and I still thought I was entitled to something. Unlearning doesn't usually happen in a moment, and I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but these rejections were the best thing that has happened to me in my growth as a human.

I moved back home to New York, was accepted to my last-choice teaching program, and started teaching at MS 223: The Laboratory School of Finance & Technology. I ended up teaching there for 5 years. I had incredible mentors, met some of my best friends, started a Computer Science program that’s used as a model at hundreds of schools across New York City…and most importantly, while making copies for Summer School in July of 2015, I met my wife.

All this to say — if you aren’t 100% convinced that what you’re doing next year is Your Thing, keep an open mind…and make frequent stops in the copy room.

I learned that teaching was My Thing. I didn't want to do ed policy research. I got to set education policy, conduct case studies, key informant interviews, run statistical analysis…with 12 year olds. This was the thing I couldn’t stop talking about, reading about, learning about. I really and truly did not care about the “UChicago voices” of my parents and my friends who kept asking what I was going to do next. My answer: teach.

If you look like me, and you teach Computer Science, there are opportunities that come flying your way. I was offered jobs with more prestige, jobs with more pay, jobs far away from the South Bronx. I was offered jobs I would have loved. But I’d learned a third lesson: be useful. If you have a degree from this place, people will always ask you what the next promotion or job is. They will ask "what's next for you" and they will mean it with respect and admiration.

Here’s the thing: teaching was what’s next. “But don’t you want to work in policy?” Teaching is a political act. It is hands-on activism, it is community organizing, it is high-tech optimistic problem-solving and low-tech relationship building. It is the reason we have the privilege of choosing a career, and it is a career worth choosing.

I had internalized what I like to call the Dumbledore Principle: “I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.” This meant unlearning the very UChicago idea that if you were smart and if you think and talk like we are trained to think and talk at this place, you should be in charge. The best things in my life have come from unlearning that. Learning from mentors to never speak the way I was praised for in a seminar. Learning from veteran teachers how to be a warm demander who was my authentic best self...and more importantly brought out the authentic best self in my students. Being useful isn't the same thing as being in charge…and that is ok.

I believe this deeply. Which is why, when I was offered the opportunity to design and open a school, my first thought was absolutely the hell no. I said to my wife: “I’m a teacher. Dumbledore Principle — we’re supposed to teach, make our classrooms safe and wonderful for our kids.”

I also knew that teaching kids to code wasn’t worth a damn if they couldn’t read and write with conviction, so I started looking for schools that did both — treated kids like brilliant creatives who should learn to create the future AND met them where they were with rigorous coursework that closed opportunity gaps. In our neighborhood, there were schools that did the latter, that got incredible results for kids. Then there was my school, where kids learned eight programming languages before they graduated, but at which only 40% of our kids could read.

We were lauded for this, by the way. 40% was twice the average in our district. We were praised for the Computer Science — the mayor of New York and the CEO of Microsoft visited and met with my students. It felt great. I wasn’t convinced it was useful.

Kids in the neighborhood where I grew up didn’t have to choose between a school that was interesting and a school that equipped them with the knowledge and skills to pursue their own interests in college and beyond. Why did our students have to choose? I delivered this stressed-out existential monologue to my wife that boiled down to this: every kid deserves a school where they were always safe, and never bored. We weren’t working at a school like that. I was being offered a chance to design one. But…Dumbledore principle.

My wife took it all in, looked at me, and said: “You idiot. Dumbledore RAN a school.”

Friends, you deserve a partner like this.

The road to opening Creo College Prep, and the last two years of leading our school as we opened, closed, opened online, finished our first year, moved buildings, opened online again, opened in-person (kind of) and now head into our third year, has reinforced my lessons from teaching — be curious, be humble, be useful. These lessons are about both learning and unlearning. A white guy doing Teach for America at 21 is a stereotype. A white guy starting a charter school is a stereotype with significant capital, wading into complicated political and pedagogical waters. The lessons I learn opening a school and the unlearning I must do to be worthy of the work are not destinations, they are journeys.

Be curious

I didn’t just open a school. Schools are communities, they are institutions, and they are bureaucracies. If you work very, very hard, and with the right people, they become engines that turn coffee and human potential into joy and intellectual thriving capable of altering the trajectory of a child’s life.

First you have to find the right people. I joined a school design fellowship, spent a year visiting 50 high-performing schools across the country, recruited a founding board of smart, committed people who hold me accountable, and spent time in my community learning from families what they wanted in a school. There is studying public policy, and then there is attending Community Board meetings and Community Education Council Meetings, and standing outside of the Parkchester Macy's handing out flyers and getting petition signatures at Christmastime next to the mall Santa.

I observed in schools while writing my BA, and as a teacher, but it was in this fellowship that I learned to “thin slice,” a term we borrowed from psychology that refers to observing a small interaction and finding patterns about the emotions and values of people. In a school, it means observing small but crucial moments — how does arrival work, how are students called on, how do they ask for help in a classroom, how do they enter and leave spaces, how do they move through the hallways, where and how do teachers get their work done — and gleaning what a school values, and how that translates into impact for kids. Here’s how I look at schools:

Does every adult have an unwavering belief that students can, must, and will learn at the highest level?

Do they have realistic and urgent plans for getting every kid there? Are these beliefs and plans clear and held by kids?

Are all teachers strategic, valorizing planning and intellectual nerdery over control or power?

Is the curriculum worthy of the kids?

Can kids explain why the school does things they way they do? Can staff? Can the leader?

If I'm in the middle of teaching and I need a pen or a marker, what do I do? Is that clear?

What’s the attendance rate? How do we follow up on kids who aren’t here?

How organized and thoughtful are the physical and digital spaces?

Are kids seen by their teachers? Are their names pronounced correctly? Do their teachers look like them? Do they make them laugh, think, and revise their answers?

Would I want to work here? Would I send my own kids here?

Be humble

I learned that there are really two distinct organizations that we call “school.” One is an accumulation of talent (student and staff) that happens to be in the same place at the same time, operating on largely the same schedule.

These were the schools I attended. These are schools you got to go to if you got lucky and you were born in a zip code with high income and high opportunity. These are schools where you had teachers who were intellectually curious, and classmates whose learning deficits could be papered over by social capital…and sometimes, straight up capital.

“Accumulation of talent” also describes the schools I worked at. These were schools where if you got lucky and you were extraordinary in your intelligence, determination, support network, and teachers who’d decided to believe in you, you became one of the stories we told. “She got into Cornell.” “That whole English class got into four year colleges.”

Most schools in this country, it turns out, are run like this. I knew all about local control and the limits of federal standards on education and the battles over teacher evaluations and so much other helpful and important context I learned in my PBPL classes.  But when thin-slicing a kindergarten classroom in Nashville on my first school visit of the Fellowship, I saw a whole other possibility of what “school” can be.

School can be a special place organized towards a single purpose. One team, one mission. Where the work kids do in one class directly connects to the next, and builds on the prior year. Where kids are treated like the important people they are and the important people they will be, where students and staff hold each other to a high bar, where there is rigor and joy. A place where staff train together so that instead of separate classrooms telling separate stories about how to achieve, there is one coherent language that gives kids the thing they crave and deserve above all else: consistency.

We get up every morning to build a school like that. It’s why my team starts staff training a month before the first day of school. It’s why we practice teaching our lessons so that we don’t waste a moment of our kids’ time. It’s why everyone at our school has a coach, including me, so we can be a better teacher tomorrow than we were today. It’s why we plan engaging, culturally responsive, relevant lessons. It’s how we keep a simple, crucial promise to every family: at this school, you will always be safe, and you will never be bored.

Be useful

Statistically speaking, it is not out of the realm of possibility that several of you will one day be in a position to make big sweeping policy changes. You will have the power to not only write position papers, but to Make Big Plans. I will be rooting for you, but I hope that you won’t pursue Big Plans for the sake of Big Plans.

The architect who designed the Midway reportedly said "make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." I had that quoted to me in several lectures at this school, and you know what?

It’s bullshit.

I am asking you not to care about scale. Good policy isn’t about scale, it’s about implementation, and implementation requires the right people on the ground. Implementation can scale. The right people cannot. We can Make Big Plans, but every 6th grade math class still needs an excellent math teacher. That's a job worth doing. I could dream about starting 20 schools, but every school needs a leader. That’s a job worth doing. Places like UChicago teach us to ask "what's next" for our own advancement, to do this now so we can get to that later. I learned to ask "what's next" to be as useful as possible to as many kids as I have in front of me.

I hold these two thoughts in my mind:

The educational realities of the South Bronx have a lot more to do with where highways were built in our neighborhood than with No Child Left Behind or charter schools, and require comprehensive policy change that address not only educational inequity, but environmental justice, and systemic racism.

The most useful policy changes I can make right now are to finalize the schedule for our staff work days that start on June 21, get feedback on next year’s calendar from families, and finish hiring the teachers our kids deserve.

I will follow the policy debates of #1 with great interest, but I know where I can be useful, and I’ll wake up tomorrow excited to make another draft of the calendar. I hope you get to work on making your Small Plans, and I will leave you with the secret — or at least the way that worked for me:

Find yourself people who are smarter than you and who disagree with you. Find problems you cannot shut up or stop thinking about. Do what you can’t shut up about with intellect and kindness. Use the privilege and opportunity that we have because we went to this school to make sure that opportunity for others does not require privilege. Run into the chasm.

Be curious, be humble, be useful.

Thank you.

[notkassandra]

Blog Post: 09/30

What are the consequences of online white supremacy?

The digital era has enable white supremacist to globally link effortlessly among the millions and millions of racist sites, to promote their ideologies. The internet allows for white supremacist to promote their ideologies freely, as they hide behind a screen anonymously. The widespread of white supremacy online has contributed to the easy accessibility and global linkages of white supremacy resources, helps perpetuate harm in real life to those of marginalized communities, and has generated challenges when trying to honor racial equality. The hate spewed from white supremacist exceeds from the digital platform to cause damage in the real world. Just three years ago, white supremacist groups held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia to save the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, where white supremacists marched with wielding torches. This rally ended with a car deliberately plowing into a crowd of people who opposed the rally, resulting in one death and injuring. This example helps indicate how white supremacy in the digital world can help transcend hate and harm into the real world affecting the lives of human beings.  

How does the game Shadow Warrior reinforce racist ideologies?

J. Ow utilizes Shadow Warrior to depict racism and colonialism in the video game. The cyborg in the game rapes and commits genocide. This game is played from a first person perspective, which places the gamer into the role of colonizer. The game mixes Chinese and Japanese nationalities, which seems ignorant in the sense that the creator makes it seem as if the two are the same. The creators have the mentality of “if you don’t like it , don’t buy it”, which enables this racist behavior to continue to flourish in the video game industry. Referring back to week four discussion of predominantly white male bodies upholding the roles of software engineers, who create these racist computer codes, this can be connected to the predominately white roles who create these video games. The lack of diversity and inclusion, allows for the enforcement of false narratives of people of color in video games and adds to the racist ideologies in video games.  

How is our identity reflected in cyberspace?

Cyberspace adds to the ability for people to remain anonymous surrounding their identities in real life. You may log in and not have anyone know your race or gender, but this does not allow for you to escape your identity that you hold offline. However, we are already shaped by the importance of race offline, that we cannot resist to bring our values and experiences as we log on. We continue to build our identity online through designing an avatar, creating a username, etc.  

How is racism present in online video games?

The video game industry has increasingly become a popular media, with the added feature of being able to play online with friends and people around the world. This online feature has created a racist and toxic environment for people of color. For example, Call of Duty lobbies demonstrate this racist behavior by the use of racial slurs being blurted out exponentially throughout the game. For players who choose to have a rainbow calling card, which is shown after you kill someone, offensive slurs are said towards that player.  

Daniels, J. (2009). White Supremacy in the Digital Era. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Right (pp. 3-16). Rowman & Littlefield.

Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. (2000). Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction. Race in Cyberspace (pp. 1-13). Routledge.

Ow, J. A. (2000). The Revenge of the Yellowface Cyborg Terminator: The Rape of Digital Geishas and the Colonization of Cyber-Coolies in 3D Realms’ Shadow Warrior. Race in Cyberspace (pp. 51-68) Routledge.

[voidingintotheshout]

For those looking for any silver lining they can during this election, may be a distraction from the vote count; I would like to share the story of how Mississippi got rid of the confederate symbol on their flag and replaced it with the above flag, which I think is one of the more beautiful state flags. Don’t get me wrong, they’re always going to be a red state but I feel like the story below is an image of what advocacy and political action can do. Keep up the faith, we’re gonna make sure every vote is counted it’ll just take persistence and patience.

From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mississippi

A proposal floated by several members of the Legislature was to create a new Mississippi flag. This flag, with a yet-to-be-determined design that did not include any Confederate images, would be used alongside the current flag. This plan was soundly rejected by Governor Tate Reeves who compared it to the separate but equal doctrine, stating that if implemented it wouldn't "satisfy either side of this debate".[67]

Response Edit

On June 18, 2020, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, Greg Sankey, announced the SEC would consider banning championship events in Mississippi until the flag is changed. The SEC is the athletic conference for the two largest universities in Mississippi, Ole Miss and Mississippi State.[68] The announcement by the conference was followed by support of changing the flag from Chancellor Glenn Boyce of The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) and President Mark E. Keenum of Mississippi State University.[69][70] The athletic directors of the universities, Keith Carter (Ole Miss) and John Cohen (Mississippi State), also supported changing the flag, along with various coaches from the universities.[71][72][73][74] On June 19, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) banned all post-season play from occurring in Mississippi until the flag is changed. The NCAA had previously banned predetermined events such as football bowl games and men's basketball tournament games in 2001 from occurring in the state. The new rule also bans merit-based championship sites, such as baseball regionals, softball regionals, women's basketball tournament games and tennis tournament games. Ole Miss hosted both baseball and softball regionals in 2019. Mississippi State hosted a baseball regional, men's tennis tournament games and women's basketball tournament games in 2019.[75]

Also on June 19, the leaders of the eight public universities in Mississippi (Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi and University of Southern Mississippi) issued a joint statement calling for a new state flag.[76] On June 22, Conference USA banned all postseason play in Mississippi until the removal of the Confederate emblem from the state flag.[77] Conference USA is home to the state's third largest university, Southern Miss, and has hosted its annual baseball tournament in Mississippi for eight of the past nine years. On June 23, presidents of the fifteen community colleges in Mississippi issued a joint statement showing their support for a new flag.[78]

The Mississippi Baptist Convention condemned the current state flag on June 23, 2020. In a statement, Baptist leaders said: "The racial overtones of the flag's appearance make this discussion a moral issue. Since the principal teachings of Scripture are opposed to racism, a stand against such is a matter of biblical morality."[79]

Walmart announced that it would cease displaying the state flag at its 85 Mississippi store locations on June 23, 2020.[80] The retailer normally displays the applicable state flag alongside the U.S. national flag at its locations in the U.S.[81]

Legislative action Edit

On June 27, 2020, the Mississippi Legislature passed a resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 79, that suspended rules in the legislative chambers in order to debate and vote on a bill to remove and replace the state flag. The motion was passed with the House approving by a vote of 85–34 and the Senate approving by a vote of 36–14.[82][83][84][85]

On June 28, 2020, the Legislature passed a bill, House Bill 1796, that would relinquish the state flag, remove the state flag from public buildings within 15 days of the bill's effective date, and constitute a nine-member commission to design a new flag that would be put to voters in a referendum to be held in November 2020.[86][13] The bill required that the Confederate battle flag not be included on the proposed design, and the motto "In God We Trust" be included,[87] as Georgia did when it removed the Confederate emblem from its state flag in 2003. In the House, the bill was passed by 91 in favor and 23 against.[65] In the Senate, the bill was passed with 37 in favor and 14 against.[88]

Earlier that weekend, Governor Tate Reeves had stated that he would sign any flag bill passed that weekend by the Legislature into law.[89] Subsequently, after the Legislature passed the bill, a spokesperson for the governor stated: "The governor does not want to rush this moment in history for our state. Once ... he's had the opportunity to review it, Gov. Reeves will sign the bill in the coming days."[65] Reeves then signed the flag bill into law on June 30, 2020. As the legislation repealed the sections of the Mississippi State Code which made provisions for a state flag, namely Section 3-3-16, Mississippi ceased once again to have an official state flag at this point.[15][90]

Flag commission and referendum Edit

Under the terms of House Bill 1796 (approved by Governor on June 30, 2020), a body known as the Commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag would be constituted to suggest a design for a new state flag no later than September 14, 2020. The act stipulated that any design proposed by the commission must include the words "In God We Trust" and must not contain the Confederate battle flag. The commission consists of nine members, three of which were appointed by the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, three members appointed by the Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, and three by the Governor. Former state Supreme Court Justice Reuben V. Anderson was elected as the commission's chairman at its first meeting on July 22.

The proposed design will then be subject to a referendum to be held concurrently with the general election on November 3, 2020. Should the referendum result in a "yes" vote for the proposed design, then the design will be officially adopted as the new state flag of Mississippi during the next regular legislative session. Should the referendum result in a "no" vote for the proposed design, the commission will reconvene and propose different designs. The legislation states that further referenda can then be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November of a year in which the commission makes a new recommendation until a "yes" vote is achieved. Mississippi will remain without an official state flag until a new one is adopted through this process.[92]

Controversy in new flag requirements Edit

The act stipulated that the new flag must include the words "In God We Trust." The Satanic Temple has threatened to sue Mississippi if the controversial phrase[93] is included on the flag.[94][95] Americans United for Separation of Church and State declared the state's actions as trading "a white nationalist symbol for a Christian nationalist one."[96] Both The American Humanist Association and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have published their own editorials decrying the use of the phrase on a new flag.[97][98]

Call for public submissions Edit

The commission invited public submissions for ideas for a new state flag in mid-July 2020. In accordance with the rules imposed by House Bill 1796, designs would only be accepted if they contained the words "In God We Trust" and not include the Confederate battle flag. The commission also added that suggestions would need to be unique and adhere to principles of the North American Vexillological Association: that the design should use only two or three basic colors, be simple enough for a child to draw, and have meaningful symbolism. Entries were to be submitted by email or by post and be received by the commission by August 13, 2020 to be considered.[99] The deadline was moved to August 1st to allow time for the commission to complete the selection process.

More than 2000 submissions (other estimates put this figure at 2800 images but a few images were erroneously repeated) meeting the legislative criteria were received and displayed on a public gallery website.[101] Each of the 9 commission members picked 25 flags, narrowing the list down to 147.[102] While a modified Hospitality flag did not proceed beyond the first round, a similar-looking "Mosquito flag" briefly did,[103] apparently due to a commissioner's typographical error.[104] At an August 14 meeting, the commission announced that they had selected nine finalists. These finalists, depicting various elements including a representation of the Mississippi River, magnolias, and stars composed of diamonds significant to the Choctaw nation, had either red, white, and blue or green and white color schemes. The commission announced that they would narrow these designs down to five finalists at its next meeting on August 18.[105][106] Five finalists were published on August 18,[107] and this was reduced to two flags on August 25.[108][109]

The final two flags were the "Great River Flag"[110] designed by Micah Whitson and the "The New Magnolia" designed by Rocky Vaughan, Sue Anna Joe, and Kara Giles.[111]

On September 2, the commission voted 8–1 to put the New Magnolia flag on the November ballot. Slight modifications were made to the original design, including making the text bolder and the red and gold bars thicker. The flag will officially be referred to as the "In God We Trust Flag".[17] Rocky Vaughan is credited with designing the flag's overall layout, with design support provided by Kara Giles, Dominique Pugh, and Sue Anna Joe (who created the magnolia illustration featured in the center). Micah Whitson was also given credit for the appearance of the first nations star.[112] [113] The flag was officially adopted by a vote of the people on November 3, 2020.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mississippi

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Anti-Racism Resources

As White folks who want to fight racism, it is our responsibility to listen to and elevate the voices and experiences of Black and Indigenous People of Color. It is also our responsibility to keep ourselves informed and talk to other White people about issues of systemic racism and stand up when we witness racism. 

Addressing and dismantling structures of White Supremacy is a long-term process that requires hard but necessary work. We’ve compiled some resources that have been useful for us as we continue to keep ourselves informed, and we hope it will be useful for you as well. 

Change takes action. Informed action is the most effective.

 Learning

Listening

Some good podcasts on Race and Movement Building: 

1619  

Code Switch

Intersectionality Matters!

Irresistible 

Justice in America

Pod Save the People

This Land

When We Fight We Win!

We’ve also compiled a playlist of podcast episodes that will continue to be revised and updated; you can list here. 

Reading

Some of our recommendations: 

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Where Do We Go From Here by Martin Luther King Jr.

Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde

The writings of Angela Davis

The writings of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, including “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”

YWCA Social Justice Glossary

A reading list for kids

Black-owned booksellers: 

Key Bookstore

List 1

List 2

Another good book resource:

Social Justice Books

Web

Racial equity and resources for White people

Anti-Racism, Equity, and Inclusion

Anti-Racism resources for White people.

If You Want To Be Anti-Racist, This Non-Optical Allyship Guide Is Required Reading

Recources for Racial Identity Development; Designed specifically for, but not limited to, White people

Save the Tears: White Woman's Guide

Why you should stop saying “all lives matter,” explained in 9 different ways

99 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

Police

Mapping Police Violence

MPD 150: A People’s Project Evaluating Policing

The Marshall Project

What To Do Instead of Calling the Police

Indigenous History, Rights, and Activism

Civil Rights for Indigenous Groups: Native Americans, Alaskans, and Hawaiians

Indigenous Peoples Movement

Native American Activism: 1960s to Present

On Indigenous Peoples Day, new ideas for American Indian land rights

One Way to Help Native Americans: Property Rights

Remember Whose Land You’re On: The 2019 Indigenous People’s Movement

The American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The Dakota Access Pipeline

The Wild West Re-Lived: Oil Pipelines Threaten Native American Tribal Lands Tribal Lands

TransCanada Pushes KXL Construction Despite COVID-19 Threats

Treaties Still Matter: The Dakota Access Pipeline

6 Native leaders on what it would look like if the US kept its promises

#MMIWG2S – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Womxn, Girls, and Two Spirit

Support the Movement!

Movement Building

For Nonprofits (but really useful for anyone)

In the Arts 

For Teachers

Teaching for Change

If Not Us Then Who? - This has educational resources but also general information and movement building action items

Zinn Education Project

Equity Toolkits

Center for Leadership and Justice Organizing Process

Creative Reaction Lab’s Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide

Designing Value: What Does it Mean to Design with Equity in Mind?

Open Communities Alliance Policy Toolkits

Sustainable CT Equity Toolkit

Black Lives Matter

Donate to Bail Funds

Connecticut Bail Fund

Community Bail Fund

More Action Items

National Resource List

Some Action Items for White & Non Black POCs

Ways You Can Help

How to talk to our White friends and family

How to Talk About Racism With Your White Parents

How to talk to your non-black family members about race, according to therapists

How to Talk to Your White Family About Racism

If You’re Having Tough Conversations

Ten Lessons for Talking About Race, Racism, and Racial Justice

Want To Have Better Conversations About Racism With Your Parents? Here's How

These resources are just the beginning, and do not cover all the ways people in the U.S.A. face discrimination and oppression due to the structures of white supremacy.

However, we hope that this motivates you to start learning and keep learning.

Start unlearning your own prejudices and reflecting on your unconscious biases, and start talking to your friends and family about it too.

Thank you!