Tag: racism

Biden’s Cybersecurity Czar Says ‘Systemic Racism’ Is Major Threat to US Security

President Joe Biden’s incoming cyber defense deputy has claimed that “systemic racism” is one of the greatest threats to U.S. cybersecurity.

Camille Stewart, a former Google strategist whom Biden reportedly tapped for White House deputy national cyber director, has argued that “our #NatSec apparatus must be a part of dismantling systemic racism,” and “pursuing anti-racist and anti-hate policy outcomes” should be a chief national security focus for the administration.

Biden’s new hire is likely to stoke concerns from Republican legislators that his administration has been more focused on pushing a race-focused ideological agenda than on traditional national defense issues—such as the increasing risk of cyberattacks from Russia, Iran, and China. The Department of Justice said in June it is bracing for more cyberwarfare from adversarial countries. Last month, the FBI revealed it intercepted an Iranian-backed cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital, and Russian hackers targeted an American satellite company in Ukraine earlier this year.

Stewart, who served as policy adviser for the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, has criticized the United States as an intrinsically racist society in her writing and on social media.

She claimed that the U.S. economy “lost $16 trillion b/c of Racism against Black Americans,” and warned in 2020 that “SYSTEMIC RACISM WILL RUIN THIS DEMOCRACY,” arguing that systemic racism was a part of “every institution not just the criminal justice system.”

“[Solutions] to cybersecurity challenges will never reach their full potential until systemic racism is addressed and diverse voices are reflected among our ranks at all levels,” Stewart wrote in a 2020 column for the Council on Foreign Relations titled “Systemic Racism Is a National Security Threat.”

She added that “communities of color are disproportionately affected by cyberattacks that target critical infrastructure.”

Keep reading

Professor Insists Anti-Cheating Rules Aren’t Fair to ‘Black and Latinx’ Students

University of Cincinnati instructor Antar A. Tichavakunda has strong views on regulations regarding particularly pigmented pupils.

The professor has penned a piece for Inside Higher Ed insisting darker individuals don’t deserve the same rules as whites.

In “Let’s Talk About Race and Academic Integrity,” he serves up stats:

[In a study], Black and Asian…students reported being accused of plagiarism [twice that of] any other group… Further, Black students were the most likely to report being accused of cheating in college (9 percent of Black students reported being accused of cheating in a college course, compared to 6 percent of all students).

Hence, we need to take a serious look at race related to “academic integrity.”

For those of you who are unfamiliar:

Academic integrity is already about race. From the assumptions behind who looks like they are cheating to the punishments given for cheating to the technology that monitors cheating to what counts as cheating, the idea of academic integrity is racialized through and through.

It appears Antar’s positions hold that only white people can be racist; and white people are indeed racist. He gives the example of a black woman to whom he spoke while doing book research. She explained she was the only black female in her major and she never cheated. Once, she caught someone trying to copy her during a test. She moved across the room, fearing she’d be the one accused.

According to Antar, that proved a point:

The measures she took…are telling. … Racist and sexist beliefs shape assumptions about who looks like they are cheating and who is likely to be believed in front of a non-Black instructor.

He assails anti-cheating software, which “does not always accurately assess people who have darker skin.”

[A]s scholars such as Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Noble have shown, the algorithms and codes structuring such technologies can perpetuate racial biases and stereotypes.

Amid our ideas on academic integrity, he poses, “we can be too punitive.”

He wouldn’t destructively ding a student solely for lifting lines:

I won’t be failing a student for one copy and paste too many when the option of a redirection and a resetting of expectations is right there. Often, the problem lies in pedagogy — not the student. A zero-tolerance policy around plagiarism or academic integrity can do more harm than good.

Intolerance = inequity = iniquity:

If zero-tolerance educational policies have taught us anything, it is that they tend to disproportionately harm Black and Latinx students. The same goes for academic integrity policies.

It sounds as if whitey makes the rules; and he’s boldly bigoted:

The people who make the decisions about which transgressions are forgivable and which transgressions are necessary to report and punish do not exist in a race-neutral vacuum.

Interrogation’s on order:

Decision makers, from faculty members to student conduct officers, hold beliefs about identity that — if uninterrogated — could potentially be racist and discriminatory.

The instructor also asserts — “from experience” — that white fraternities and sororities “sometimes have test banks that members can use.”

His takeaway:

Some students take exams and do homework with unfair advantages.

And:

Collaborating or cheating on exams can adversely impact Black students at schools where they are in the extreme minority.

It seems everyone cheats. But blacks have fewer chances; Re: racism.

Keep reading

“WE ARE NOT TACOS”: HISPANIC ASSOCIATION SLAMS JILL BIDEN FOR COMPARING LATINOS TO “BREAKFAST TACOS”

Hispanics are livid after First Lady Jill Biden compared them to “breakfast tacos” during a Monday speech to the 2022 UnidosUS Annual Conference held in Texas, where she opined on Hispanics’ “Quest for Equity.”

During her speech, Biden said that “the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength.”

This did not sit well with Latinos, who spent the day dragging her on Twitter. It also caught the attention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), which said in a statement: “We are not tacos.”

“Using breakfast tacos to try to demonstrate the uniqueness of Latinos in San Antonio demonstrates a lack of cultural knowledge and sensitivity to the diversity of Latinos in the region,” reads the statement.

“Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by a variety of diasporas, cultures and food traditions, and should not be reduced to a stereotype.”

Keep reading

Cal State professor: White people shouldn’t ask to come to Juneteenth cookout

White people should not ask Melina Abdullah if they can come to her Juneteenth cookout – she has already made up her mind.

“Attention white people… Please don’t ask if you can come to the cookout…” the California State University Los Angeles professor tweeted on Monday. “#Juneteenth is freedom day for Black folks. It should be #Reparations day for white folks,” the professor of Pan-African Studies told white people.

Juneteenth occurs on June 19, but it is a federal holiday on Monday, June 20. It commemorates the date, two and half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, that Union troops in Galveston, Texas were informed that “the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free,” according to Juneteenth.com.

Congress and President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.

Abdullah has a history of sharing her thoughts on racial issues.

She called the trial of actor Jussie Smollett for faking hate crimes in Chicago a “white supremacist charade.” Abdullah, who advocates for an abolition of the police and prison, said in an ideal world Smollett would not have even gone to trial.

She stated:

In an abolitionist society, this trial would not be taking place, and our communities would not have to fight and suffer to prove our worth. Instead, we find ourselves, once again, being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.

Abdullah has criticized “white saviors” who “swoop in” to help black people. “It assumes that we don’t have our own solutions, our own plans, to disrupt white supremacy because white folks have lived in a world where they are really centered in the universe,” she told Mashable. “They think that every solution should be with them at the front of it.”

Keep reading

WaPo: Black Americans May Need to ‘Flee’ U.S. Due to ‘Crazy White People’

Black Americans may need to “flee the country” in the face of an apparently growing population of “crazy White people” who are “not to be trifled with,” according to a recent Washington Post piece.

In an essay published in the Post on Tuesday titled, “Why Black people are afraid of ‘crazy’ White people,” columnist and associate editor Jonathan Capehart begins by letting readers in on a “little secret” — “black people” don’t fear typical white people, but rather “crazy” ones.

“Things felt so dicey during the Trump years, I half-joked that my husband and I might have to reenact that scene from ‘The Sound of Music’ and flee the country,” he said. 

“Now, an alarming new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] shows that my ‘Operation von Trapp’ might need to go live,” he added. “The ranks of ‘crazy’ White people appear to be growing — and the rest of us don’t know what to do about it.”

Capehart defines “crazy” as one who “believes any aspect of the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy.” 

“This is the noxious idea that liberals are deliberately replacing White people with non-Whites and immigrants,” he said, claiming it “allegedly drove an 18-year-old man to target Black people in Buffalo, killing 10 and wounding three.”

He called the fact that the “twisted belief” is so widely held, “terrifying,” as he cited a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll allegedly revealing the “present-day Black fear of White violence.”

He also argued that the “right to self-protection, let alone the right to bear arms, doesn’t exactly apply to Black people.”

“Imagine I get a gun for self-protection (not that I ever would, but stay with me). A situation arises in which I use it to protect myself. But then the cops arrive, see a gun, ‘fear for their lives,’ and, well, the rest writes itself,” he said. 

“Remember Philando Castile?” he asked in reference to a black man who was fatally shot in 2016 by a Minnesota police officer in an incident that was live-streamed in a widely shared Facebook video. “We can’t win.”

Though Capehart “won’t be getting a gun. Ever,” he considers the decision to “leave the country for my own protection.”

“It’s a question many people of color have been pondering the past several years,” he wrote, highlighting Daily Beast reporter Wajahat Ali’s latest column, “Is It Time for Me to Leave America?”

However, according to Capehart, the decision to leave is not due solely to “race,” but also to issues surrounding gender, LGBTQ, and abortion.

“The SPLC report notes a correlation between the obsession with ethnic ‘replacement’ and a fixation on gender identity,” he wrote. “And look: More than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed this year alone, many of them targeting trans children and their families.” 

“This is not to mention the threat to abortion access or to other rights (such as my marriage) that could fall like dominoes,” he added.

Though citizens can and must “vote and organize, and change hearts and minds and all that,” Capehart demands that “marginalized people” not be blamed for “being scared.”

“The warnings of a potential loss of freedom, liberty and life are omnipresent and unrelenting, like being in the middle of Times Square with every sign flashing ‘You in danger!’” he wrote.

Capehart attributes all the aforementioned “threats” to a supposed rise in “crazy” white Americans.

“And it’s all because the number of ‘crazy’ White people in America fearing ‘replacement’ appears to be growing — and they seem ready to do whatever it takes to stay at the pinnacle of American life,” he wrote.

“I’m not sure they will succeed in getting me to leave my country,” he added. “But ‘Operation von Trapp’ is ready. ‘Crazy’ White people are not to be trifled with.”

The Post essay comes as many on the left continue to depict America as a systemically racist country.

Last month, a Washington Post essay called on Black Americans “tired” of American hostility to consider relocating to Ghana to be “free from White America’s psychic violence.”

Keep reading