Diversity!
Tag: race
Can’t make it up: Cornell University has a new vaccine mandate — and it only applies to white students!
Cornell University has a new flu shot mandate in order to try and keep flu cases down so healthcare resources stay open for Covid patients. But the mandate applies to white people only, because of course it does, because we live in a clown world that gets clownier by the day.
That’s right, at Cornell you can duck the mandatory flu shot by claiming your race as an exemption. Unless you’re white, obviously.
Cornell has a FAQ page “especially for people of color” that explains how victimized they’ve been by white people and thus how they can’t be expected to trust someone to require them to get vaccinated (or something?) and ends with an invitation for non-white people to send an email to the department for an exemption to the vaccine mandate.
Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” created to produce and allocate COVID-19 vaccines to the American populace, is set to begin rolling out a mass-vaccination campaign in the coming weeks. With the expected approval of its first vaccine candidate just days away, the allocation and distribution aspects of Operation Warp Speed deserve scrutiny, particularly given the critical role one of the most controversial companies in the country will play in that endeavor.
Palantir Technologies, the company founded by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and a handful of their associates, has courted controversy for its supporting role in the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its participation in the detention of “illegal” immigrants through their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and in “predictive policing” law enforcement programs that disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. Equally controversial, but perhaps lesser known, is Palantir’s long-standing and enduring ties to the CIA and intelligence community at large, which was intimately involved in the development of Palantir’s products that now run on the databases of governments and corporations around the world.
Facebook To End Race-Blind Hate Speech Moderation
Facebook is ending race-blind hate speech moderation and will begin policing hate speech directed at black Americans, Muslims, multi-racial Americans, Jewish people and LGBTQ people more aggressively than hate speech directed at white Americans, according to the Washington Post.
The “WoW Project” is aimed at automatically detecting hate speech that is “the worst of the worst,” internal documents about the project that were obtained by the Washington Post said. The project will re-engineer Facebook’s automated moderation system to try and get better at detecting hateful language aimed at minority groups.
New Jersey weighs ‘social equity’ tax on marijuana
New Jersey lawmakers may include a so-called social equity tax in the legislation establishing a legal market for recreational marijuana, according to reports.
Bills in the state Senate and Assembly would give cannabis regulators the authority to impose the “social equity excise fee,” which would help fund programs aimed at reducing racial disparities caused by drug laws.
The influential Legislative Black Caucus has lobbied for programs aimed at helping Black communities, which have been hard-hit by marijuana prohibition. Black residents are likelier to be arrested on marijuana charges than white residents, for example.
The Johns Hopkins, CDC Plan to Mask Medical Experimentation on Minorities as “Racial Justice”
The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities but in such a way as to make those minorities feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs” when receiving an experimental vaccine that those documents admit is likely cause “certain adverse effects…more frequently in certain population subgroups.” Research has shown that those “subgroups” most at risk for adverse effects are these same minorities.
The documents also acknowledge that information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups. It even frames this clearly disproportionate focus on racial minorities as related to national concerns over “police brutality,” claiming that giving minorities the experimental vaccine first is necessary to combat “structural racism” and ensure “fairness and justice” in the healthcare system and society at large.
School District Decides Asians Aren’t Students of Color
One school district in Washington state has evidently decided that Asians no longer qualify as persons of color.
In their latest equity report, administrators at North Thurston Public Schools—which oversees some 16,000 students—lumped Asians in with whites and measured their academic achievements against “students of color,” a category that includes “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students” who have experienced “persistent opportunity gaps.”
Most indicators in the report show that the achievement gap between white/Asian students and “students of color” is fairly narrow and improving over time. It would probably be even narrower if Asian students were categorized as “students of color.” In fact, some indicators might have even shown white students lagging behind that catch-all minority group. Perhaps Asians were included with whites in order to avoid such an outcome. (The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.)
What the equity report really highlights is the absurdities that result from overreliance on semi-arbitrary race-based categories. The report also measured “students of poverty”—those who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches—against non-poverty students, and unsurprisingly found a much more significant achievement gap. Students of poverty perform 28 percent worse on math tests, for instance. That socioeconomic category captures something real and meaningful in a way that the gerrymandered race category does not.
Thomas Sowell on equality…
Another Professor Resigns Following Accusations She Pretended To Be Non-White
Kelly Kean Sharp resigned Tuesday from her assistant professorship at Furman University following accusations that she pretended to be non-white, a university spokesman said.
An anonymous person outed the African American history scholar through a Medium post, InsideHigherEd reported. The anonymous writer said that he or she “distantly” knew Sharp when Sharp was in graduate school at the University of California, Davis, and that Sharp only recently began identifying as Chicana.
Sharp reportedly formerly identified herself as Chicana in her Twitter profile, which has since been removed. The Medium post includes screenshots of Sharp’s tweets showing Sharp referring to her grandmother, who she calls her abuela, and describing how her abuela “came to the U.S. during WWII” and “worked hard so I could become a teacher.”
The Medium post writer said that Sharp had never spoken about being Mexican before, and the writer reportedly spoke with other colleagues who were also “confused” and asked Sharp about her “newfound identity.”
Time is a flat circle…
Hellbound and Down 
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