SOCIAL JUSTICE – Page 11

An Obstacle To Race And Gender Inclusion – The Iconic American Inventor Is Still A White Male

2Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE, VIDEO REELS

An Obstacle To Race And Gender Inclusion – The Iconic American Inventor Is Still A White Male

When President Barack Obama signed the America Invents Act in 2011, he was surrounded by a group of people of diverse ages, genders and races. The speech he delivered about the legislation, which changed the technical requirements for filing a patent, highlighted this diversity by emphasizing that today anyone can become an inventor in the United States. Despite Obama’s optimism about women and people of color inventing and patenting the nation’s new and innovative technologies, both groups still lag considerably behind their white male counterparts in being recognized as inventors and owning patents, in the U.S. and globally. Women and people of color possess the same intellectual capacities as their white male counterparts. Yet empirical studies consistently show that patent law overwhe...

What A Revolt’s Archives Tells Us About Reckoning With Slavery And Who Owns The Past

2Dec

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

What A Revolt’s Archives Tells Us About Reckoning With Slavery And Who Owns The Past

The consequences of 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade are still felt today. Untangling the power structures and systemic racism that came with slavery is ongoing, with police brutality, memorials to slave owners and reparations forming part of the discussion. Statue of the Berbice slave revolt leader Kofi in Georgetown, Guyana. David Stanley - Flickr/WikiMedia, CC BY-SA But as the United Nations marks Dec. 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, a practice it notes “is not merely a historic relic,” modern society also has to reckon with another question: Who has access to the records about slavery’s past? I was struck by this question recently as I gave a Zoom talk in Guyana on my new book Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast about ...

Why Black Diners Get Poorer Service From Wait Staff And Bartenders Than White Customers

30Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Why Black Diners Get Poorer Service From Wait Staff And Bartenders Than White Customers

When Black diners get poorer service from wait staff and bartenders than white customers, it’s more likely because of racial bias than the well-documented fact that they tip less, according to a new survey I recently published. To reach that conclusion, my colleague Gerald Nowak and I recruited over 700 mostly white full-service restaurant servers and bartenders to review a hypothetical dining scenario that randomly involved either white or Black customers. We then asked them to predict the tip that the table would leave, the likelihood that the table would exhibit undesirable dining behaviors and the quality of service they would likely provide the table. We also asked participants to fill out a survey to learn how frequently they observed anti-Black expressions of bias in their workpla...

The First Black Person To Head The NAACP A Century Ago, James Weldon Johnson

2Apr

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SOCIAL JUSTICE, VIDEO REELS

The First Black Person To Head The NAACP A Century Ago, James Weldon Johnson

In this moment of national racial reckoning, many Americans are taking time to learn about chapters in U.S. history left out of their school texbooks. The early years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights group that initially coalesced around a commitment to end the brutal practice of lynching in the United States, is worth remembering now. An interracial group of women and men founded the group that would soon become known as the NAACP in 1909. A coalition of white journalists, lawyers and progressive reformers led the effort. It would take another 11 years until, in 1920, James Weldon Johnson became the first Black person to formally serve as its top official. As I explain in my forthcoming book “Nonviolence Before King: The Politics of Being...

In Early 20th Century Segregation Policies In Federal Government Harmed Blacks For Decades To Come

13Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

In Early 20th Century Segregation Policies In Federal Government Harmed Blacks For Decades To Come

Economic disparities in earnings, health and wealth between Black and white Americans are staggeringly large. Historical government practices and institutions – such as segregated schools, redlined neighborhoods and discrimination in medical care – have contributed to these wide disparities. While these causes may not always be overt, they can have lasting negative effects on the prosperity of minority communities. Abhay Aneja and I are researchers at University of California, Berkeley, who specialize in examining the causes of social inequality. Our new research examines the U.S. federal government’s role in creating conditions of racial inequality more than a century ago. Specifically, we researched the harmful impact of government discrimination against Black civil service employees. W...

Combating Disinformation Targeting Black Communities

5Apr

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Combating Disinformation Targeting Black Communities

Since 2016, organizers have identified campaigns sowing falsehoods about the pandemic and the presidential election and have worked to counteract them. Earlier this year, Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor saw a friend arguing on Twitter about Black identity. Aiwuyor noticed that the Twitter account her friend was fighting with was a new one, with zero followers and also wasn’t following anyone else. She told her friend he was probably arguing with a bot or troll. The revelation stopped the online debate in its tracks: her friend stopped engaging with the suspicious account. When Aiwuyor tells others that infuriating online debates could be with bots or trolls, those incendiary exchanges begin to come into focus, and lose some of their power. “They are happy to hear they haven’t lost their min...

Don’t Underestimate Far-Right Extremists 5 Reasons Not To

30Oct

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Don’t Underestimate Far-Right Extremists 5 Reasons Not To

Far-right extremists have been in the news, with an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor and rallies like the one the Proud Boys held in Portland in September. With a hotly contested election underway in a polarized society, many people are concerned about violence from far-right extremists. But they may not understand the real threat. The law enforcement community is among those who have failed to understand the true nature and danger of far-right extremists. Over several decades, the FBI and other federal authorities have only intermittently paid attention to far-right extremists. In recent years, they have again acknowledged the extent of the threat. But it’s not clear how long their attention will last. While researching my forthcoming book, “It Can Happen Here: White Power an...

Suburbia Is No Longer All White President Trump — And Black Suburbanites Are More Politically Active Than Their Neighbors

28Oct

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Suburbia Is No Longer All White President Trump — And Black Suburbanites Are More Politically Active Than Their Neighbors

President Donald Trump has tweeted up a storm about how his Democratic challenger Joe Biden wants to “abolish suburbs” and institute programs that would bring impoverished criminals into the suburbs, where they will destroy the “suburban lifestyle dream.” In the final stages of his campaign, Trump has made an explicit appeal to suburban women: “So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damn neighborhood,” the president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in mid-October. I am a political scientist who studies race in America’s suburbs; my book “African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior” was published in 2017. I contend that Trump’s tweets are not about the actual suburbs. Instead, they are meant to e...

Fox News Viewers And ‘BLM’ CNN Viewers And ‘KKK’

28Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism, SOCIAL JUSTICE

Fox News Viewers And ‘BLM’ CNN Viewers And ‘KKK’

It’s no secret that U.S. politics has become highly polarized. Even so, there are probably few living Americans who ever witnessed anything that quite compares with this fall’s first presidential debate. Was it really the case that the nation could do no better than a verbal food fight, with two candidates hurling fourth-grade insults and talking past each other? To us, the discordant debate was just one more symptom of the nation’s fraying civic discourse, which, in a recent study, we were able to show extends to the words we use to talk about politics. Earlier this year, we started constructing a data set that consists of all of the viewer comments on YouTube videos posted by four television networks – MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and One America News Network – that target slices of the poli...

19Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Today’s Youth Are Done With It

Climate change has joined racism, sexism, and related aggressions in creating a new dynamic demanding redress of America’s inequalities and defining its divisions. On the Republican right, President Donald Trump’s constituencies pursue restoration of an idealized American “greatness” lionizing the superiority of nativist White, aged, wealthy, Christian, publicly avowed heterosexual men to exploit the environment at will. On the liberal left, an emerging multiracial activism surrounding environmental degradation has become visible. But it isn’t just limited to climate change: mass impoverishment and indebtedness, combined with the dismantlement of education, employment, and shared social systems, is forcing today’s young activists to confront the intergenerational implications of “nowism.”...