Failing to Indict Darren Wilson Won’t End the Movement Against Police Violence Failing to Indict Darren Wilson Won’t End the Movement Against Police Violence
This has been, and will continue to be, about the protection of black life and the end of the police state.
Nov 19, 2014 / Mychal Denzel Smith
The Value of Whiteness The Value of Whiteness
A lawsuit is being waged against the “wrongful birth” of a black child.
Nov 12, 2014 / Column / Patricia J. Williams
Police Are the Problem Police Are the Problem
The way we use the police in this country is inherently discriminatory.
Oct 31, 2014 / Mychal Denzel Smith
What’s the Real Issue? Blaming AAAD Obscures the UNC Scandal’s Broader Societal Causes What’s the Real Issue? Blaming AAAD Obscures the UNC Scandal’s Broader Societal Causes
UNC’s recently uncovered unprecedented cheating scandal took place in the department of African and Afro American studies, a fact which has raised an age-old, prejudicial arg...
Oct 29, 2014 / StudentNation / StudentNation
How Racism Stole Black Childhood How Racism Stole Black Childhood
People who are black and poor aren’t allowed to be young and irresponsible.
Oct 29, 2014 / Column / Gary Younge
Why Threats Against Obama Speak Volumes on Race in America Why Threats Against Obama Speak Volumes on Race in America
Threats against Barack Obama have been three times more frequent than for his predecessors. There’s an obvious explanation: he’s black.
Oct 6, 2014 / William Greider
Michael Dunn Was Found Guilty—but That’s Not Enough to Ensure Justice in an Unjust World Michael Dunn Was Found Guilty—but That’s Not Enough to Ensure Justice in an Unjust World
A guilty verdict does not undo the racist world we live in.
Oct 2, 2014 / Mychal Denzel Smith
Minority Report Minority Report
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big Data on hiring practices. Hiring algorithms are often seen as an “objective,” meritocratic assessment, free of irrational prejudice or biases. But the report warns that because “[d]igital indicators of race, religion, or sexual preference can easily be observed or inferred online,” the mining of social media and Google-search data can reinforce systemic discrimination. The result may be a perpetuation of an unjust status quo: disproportionately white, upper-class, elite-educated and culturally homogeneous. Sloppy résumé scans end up excluding people based on superficial criteria—where they live, for example, a metric bound to reflect already-existing housing discrimination. Big Data manipulation allows these subtle individual slights to be expanded to new orders of magnitude with monstrous efficiency. Since the algorithm reflects social patterns, researcher David Robinson tells The Nation, “any time someone is the victim of old-fashioned human discrimination, that discrimination is likely to be reflected in some of the data points that these new algorithms measure. Culturally speaking, there is a real tendency to defer to decisions that come from computers—which means if we’re not careful, it is reasonable to expect that computers will sanitize biased inputs into neutral-seeming outputs.” Read Next: David Auerbach on data profiling and microtargeting
Oct 1, 2014 / Michelle Chen
Is ‘Big Data’ Actually Reinforcing Social Inequalities? Is ‘Big Data’ Actually Reinforcing Social Inequalities?
An increasingly technologized world makes life easier… for some people, anyway.
Sep 29, 2014 / Michelle Chen
My Brother’s Keeper Will Expand, but Not to Include Women and Girls My Brother’s Keeper Will Expand, but Not to Include Women and Girls
President Obama gave a nod to women and girls of color, but critics say his racial justice initiative still misses the mark.
Sep 28, 2014 / Dani McClain