Tag: race

Facebook apologizes after its AI software labels Black men ‘primates’ in a video featured on the platform

Facebook on Friday issued an apology after its AI software labeled Black men “primates” in a video featured on the social media network.

The New York Times first reported the story. A Facebook spokesperson told the publication that it was a “clearly unacceptable error,” and said the recommendation software involved had been disabled. 

“We disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realised this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again,” the spokesperson said.

In a statement to the publication, Facebook said: “We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”

The offensive terminology related to a video, dated June 27, 2020, which was posted by The Daily Mail. The clip was titled “white man calls cops on black men at marina,” and featured Black men in disputes with white police officers and civilians. 

Facebook users who watched the video received an automated prompt asking if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates,” according to The New York Times. 

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Pennsylvania professor teaches White people committing suicide can be an ‘ethical’ act

A professor employed at a Catholic university in Pennsylvania said on camera that there are merits to the claim that it’s ethical for White people to commit suicide. 

“White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” said a quote in a slide for a presentation hosted by Duquesne University psychology professor Derek Hook. 

In the lecture, which was presented to Baltimore-based American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work in June, Hook quoted a South African philosophy professor, Terblanche Delport, who has written about White people committing suicide in South Africa, before further discussing the comments and arguing “there was something ethical in Delport’s statements.” 

“The reality [in South Africa] is that most white people spend their whole lives only engaging black people in subservient positions …. My question is then how can a person not be racist if that’s the way they live their lives? The only way then for white people to become part of Africa is to not exist as white people anymore,” Hook says, quoting Delport on a slide in the lecture. 

“If the goal is to dismantle white supremacy, and white supremacy is white culture … then the goal has to be to dismantle white culture and ultimately white people themselves. The total integration into Africa by white people will also automatically then mean the death of white people as white as a concept would not exist anymore,” the quote continued. 

After reading the quotes, Hook said, “I want to suggest that psychoanalytically we could even make the argument that there was something ethical in Delport’s statements.”

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Scholars Insist Preschoolers Must Be Taught ‘Antiracism’ ‘Throughout the Day’

What kind of education do preschoolers need?

A scholarly quartet has ideas, and they recently revealed them online.

For the Summer 2021 edition of the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) journal, science was dutifully dropped.

The authors of “Viewpoint. Creating Antiracist Early Childhood Spaces“:

  • Rosemarie Allen — associate professor of early childhood education at Metropolitan State University of Denver
  • Dorothy Shapland — assistant professor of early childhood education at Metropolitan State University of Denver
  • Jen Neitzel, Ph.D. — executive director at Educational Equity Institute
  • Iheoma U. Iruka Ph.D. — research professor of public policy and founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

First of all, what is “antiracism“?

UCLA law professor and Intersectionality Matters! podcast host Kimberlé Crenshaw helps out:

“Anti-racism is the active dismantling of systems, privileges, and everyday practices that reinforce and normalize the contemporary dimensions of white dominance. This, of course, also involves a critical understanding of the history of whiteness in America.”

Per CNN, microaggressions to avoid:

  • “Don’t blame me. I never owned slaves.”
  • “All lives matter.”
  • “I don’t care if you’re white, black, yellow, green or purple.”

“The focus on racial equity following the murder of George Floyd,” the NAEYC piece begins, “has resulted in conversations about racism that were unheard of less than a year ago.”

And now, the four figure, an antiracist approach must be enacted and sustained.

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AP Exam Requires Students To Choose Answers Indicating Voting Laws Are Racially Biased

The College Board has been accused of indoctrinating students in ‘woke’ politics by requiring them to choose an answer on an AP Government exam indicating voter ID discourages black people from voting. 

“Nothing to see here, just an official AP Government practice exam forcing students to falsely say voter ID is racist and urging them to overturn voter ID laws in order to pass the test,” tweeted Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist.

The multiple-choice question asks, “Based on the infographic, which of the following claims would an opponent of state voter-ID laws most likely make?”

Students’ options for an answer are as follows:

  • (A) Voter-ID laws are likely to decrease turnout among African American voters because they are less likely to have government-issued IDs.
  • (B) Voter turnout will likely decrease by 10% if voters are required to present a government-issued ID to vote.
  • (C) Voter-ID laws will likely decrease election fraud, which will increase voter confidence in institutions and thereby increase turnout.
  • (D) African American voters who do not have government-issued IDs are likely to participate at the grassroots level and exert influence through channels other than turning out to vote.

Answer A is correct per the test rubric.

The following question on the test asks: “Based on the infographic, which of the following strategies would a group seeking to increase turnout likely pursue?”

Students are expected to select “Lobby state legislatures to overturn voter-ID legislation” in order to be marked with a correct answer.

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Biden’s infrastructure bill is chock-full of anti-white racism

The infrastructure bill the Senate passed Tuesday discriminates against white people at every turn.

Americans are enthusiastic about spending money on physical infrastructure — bridges, roads, broadband. But this racist bill hands out jobs and contracts and locates projects based on race, not merit. Minority businesses and neighborhoods hold the inside track. If you’re white, you’re low-priority.

The bill includes grants to install solar or wind technologies and generate jobs in areas decimated by closing coal mines or coal-fired electric plants. Here’s the catch: When contractors bid, the bill says minority-owned businesses will get selected first. Bad news for small-time white contractors in depressed areas.

The same is true for the bill’s proposals to improve traffic patterns in cities. Contractors and subcontractors get priority only if they’re owned by minorities or women. White male business owners can take a hike.

Americans should be outraged — but not surprised. After all, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March, also put into place an ugly system of discrimination against whites. It offered debt relief to black farmers, but not white farmers. Another provision offered billions in aid to minority-owned and women-owned restaurants, but told struggling restaurants owners who happened to be white men that they had to go to the back of the line.

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Oregon Suspends High School Graduation Standards To Make ‘Equitable’ Rules For ‘Students Of Color’

Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) signed a bill last month suspending proficiency requirements for high school graduates for the next five years.

Brown quietly signed into a law a bill suspending her state’s proficiency requirements on July 14. Oregon is expected to go without proficiency standards for high school graduates until new rules are crafted and implemented in 2024. Those new rules will likely not apply to high school graduates until 2027; however, as Oregon education officials are reluctant to change standards for students that have already entered high school, according to The Oregonian.

The governor’s office did not announce her signing of the bill in a signing ceremony nor in a press release. The signed bill did not appear in the legislative database as signed until July 29, an uncommon occurrence for a bill that was signed over two weeks prior. A spokesman for the governor said that suspending proficiency requirements would aid the state’s minority students.

“Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color” stand to benefit from the legislation, Brown’s deputy communications director Charles Boyle told The Oregonian in a statement. “Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports.”

Oregon’s proficiency requirements mandate that all high school graduates demonstrate a roughly 10th grade level competence in reading, writing, and math. Those standards were first suspended last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic as students were taken out of classrooms and school was moved almost entirely online.

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Biracial Harvard-educated doctor claims hospital DEMOTED her for opposing plans to have only black staff treat black patients in wake of George Floyd murder

A Harvard-educated, biracial physician was removed as head of the OB/GYN department of a Minneapolis hospital after she opposed offering patients ‘segregated care based on race’, she claims. 

Dr. Tara Gustilo filed a discrimination complaint against Hennepin Healthcare System in June saying she was demoted for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement on her social media page.

The complaint says that she was removed from her position despite rave job performance reviews during her six-year stint as head of a 32-person team.

‘Under my leadership, my department improved my patient satisfaction scores and connected our hospital’s diverse population with the care that they needed,’ Gustilo says in the complaint.

She received ‘one of the highest patient satisfaction ratings of all the doctors at Hennepin Healthcare and in the nation.’

But in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, Gustilo criticized ‘anti-racist’ training, claiming that it was ‘actually teaching racism.’

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Racial Advocacy Group To White Texas Parents: Sign Our Pledge Not To Send Your Kids To Ivy League Schools Or We’ll Doxx You

A “racial advocacy group” in Dallas issued a press release in which they told whites to pledge that their children would “not apply to or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School,” urged the white parents to “encourage friends, neighbors, and family members to do the same” and then threatened, “Please note Dallas Justice Now will be publicly announcing the names of those who have and have not signed the pledge.”

Dallas Justice Now (DJN) wrote to their “White Allies”:

Talk is not enough. Commit yourself towards taking action and making sacrifices to correct centuries of injustice. Open up spaces for Black and LatinX communities by refusing to send your kids to Ivy League and US News & World Report Top 50 schools and encourage friends, neighbors, and family members to do the same. Imagine if those hundreds of thousands of spots at these institutions were occupied only by marginalized communities. Imagine the opportunities. We can achieve true equity within our lifetimes but only if white folks are willing to sacrifice their privileges.

The release continued with the “Dallas Justice Now Pledge”:

As a white person with privilege both from my whiteness and my neighborhood I recognize the need to make sacrifices for the purpose of correcting hundreds of years of murder, slavery, discrimination, and lack of educational and economic opportunities perpetrated upon people of color. I understand that access to top schools is a key component in economic and social advancement. Therefore, I commit that my children will not apply to or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School so that position at that school is available for people of color to help correct historical wrongs.  If I do not have children under 18 then I will commit to encouraging my white privileged friends, neighbors, and family members with children to sign the pledge and holding them accountable until they do so. 

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Penn State Professor Tells White Student ‘You’re Breathing … So You May Have Oppressed Somebody Today’

Pennsylvania State University is defending a professor who pulled a white student in front of his class and told him that he’s breathing, so he may have oppressed someone today.

Professor Sam Richards, who teaches the 700-student “SOC119: Race and Ethnic Relations” course, pulled students up before the class on June 30 to discuss white privilege.

“I just take the average white guy in class, whoever it is, it doesn’t really matter,” Richards said. “Dude, this guy here. Stand up, bro. What’s your name, bro?”

The student, Russell, stood up to face the class.

“Look at Russell, right here, it doesn’t matter what he does,” the professor continued, according to a report from Campus Reform. “If I match him up with a black guy in class, or a brown guy… who’s just like him, has the same GPA, looks like him, walks like him, talks like him, acts in a similar way…and we send them into the same jobs…Russell has a benefit of having white skin.”

In another class on March 4, Richards attacked two white students as “oppressors” while discussing the Critical Race Theory training taking place at Coca-Cola. The company made headlines after it was revealed that they had instructed their employees to “be less white.”

Richards, according to Campus Reform, asked the class for thoughts on a Coca-Cola slide which read, “To be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with party, break with white solidarity.”

“I think, you know, it’s more or less just recognizing the advantages you have in life,” James, a student, responded. “Whatever that may be, and not thinking yourself superior because of that.”

The professor was pleased with that answer, then turned to another student, Brian, and asked, “What White people would find that offensive?”

“Conservatives, I guess,” Brain responded.

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