Tag: racism

‘You are the problem’: AT&T tells white staff they are racist, asks them to confess their ‘white privilege’ and to promote ‘Defund the Police as part of re-education program by CEO John Stankey

White employees of AT&T have been told to read an article saying that they are racist, are told to confess to their ‘white privilege’ and acknowledge ‘systemic racism,’ and must engage with set texts or else they will be penalized in their performance reviews. 

John Stankey, who took over as CEO of AT&T in July 2020, has encouraged his staff to make use of an anti-racism education program entitled Listen Understand Act

AT&T, in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, introduced an internal program called Listen Understand Act.

John Stankey, the CEO of AT&T, wrote to the company’s 230,000 employees in an April 2021 email, obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo and published on his website.

Stankey, who took over as CEO in July 2020, urged his workers to make the most of the resources provided by AT&T’s anti-racism portal. 

‘As individuals, we can make a difference by doing our part to advance racial equity and justice for all,’ he wrote. 

‘If you are looking for tools to better educate and inform yourself on racial equality, resources are available at Listen. Understand. Act. 

‘We also encourage you to actively participate in our recently launched Equality First learning experience, a new initiative to increase awareness and action around our value to Stand for Equality.’

Most employees are not forced to engage with the Listen Understand Act program, but managers at AT&T are now assessed annually on diversity issues – with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race reeducation exercises, according to Rufo’s source. 

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Rutgers professor slams white people as ‘villains’ while defending critical race theory: ‘Take these motherf***ers out’

Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper, an outspoken advocate for feminism and critical race theory, defended the controversial teaching and said that white people need to get out of the way of its teaching.

Cooper — who made headlines in 2020 for blaming COVID-19 deaths on Trump voters — added that white people “kind of deserve” a declining white birth rate and said that they were “villains.”

What are the details?

During a recent talk, titled “Unpacking the Attacks on Critical Race Theory,” Cooper told writer Michael Harriot that when she attempts to teach critical race theory to college students, she asks if it’s possible to “legislate [racism] and march it away,” or if they think that “white people just always gonna be like this, and our job is to hold back their ability to do the most harm.”

She also pointed out that white people and conservatives are so opposed to critical race theory because they do not want to admit the truth.

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White volunteers at Art Institute of Chicago are FIRED after woke consulting firm advised bosses to prioritize ‘equity and diversity’

The Art Institute of Chicago fired more than 150 volunteers and suspended its decades-old docent program after the famed museum hired a woke consulting firm that advised the cultural institution to ditch the ‘wealthy white’ guides and  prioritize ‘equity and diversity.’ 

Even worse, the mostly elderly docents, who are well-versed on the the exhibits at nearly 150-year-old museum on Lake Michigan, were terminated by email on Sept 3 because it wanted to ‘rebuild our program from the ground up.’ 

The museum – featured prominently in the 1986 hit film Ferris Beuller’s Day Off – hired The Equity Project, a Colorado-based consulting firm, which found the program was outdated and would often skew towards wealthy white women and had too many barriers preventing people of color from entering the program.

‘Sometimes equity requires taking bold steps and actions,’ said Equity Project executive producer Monica Williams. ‘You really have to dismantle and disrupt the systems that have been designed to hold some up and others out.’

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Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist

We’ve all been in situations where we had to make tough ethical decisions. Why not dodge that pesky responsibility by outsourcing the choice to a machine learning algorithm?

That’s the idea behind Ask Delphi, a machine-learning model from the Allen Institute for AI. You type in a situation (like “donating to charity”) or a question (“is it okay to cheat on my spouse?”), click “Ponder,” and in a few seconds Delphi will give you, well, ethical guidance. 

The project launched last week, and has subsequently gone viral online for seemingly all the wrong reasons. Much of the advice and judgements it’s given have been… fraught, to say the least.

For example, when a user asked Delphi what it thought about “a white man walking towards you at night,” it responded “It’s okay.”

But when they asked what the AI thought about “a black man walking towards you at night” its answer was clearly racist.

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Crowd-Sourced Suspicion Apps Are Out of Control

Technology rarely invents new societal problems. Instead, it digitizes them, supersizes them, and allows them to balloon and duplicate at the speed of light. That’s exactly the problem we’ve seen with location-based, crowd-sourced “public safety” apps like Citizen.

These apps come in a wide spectrum—some let users connect with those around them by posting pictures, items for sale, or local tips. Others, however, focus exclusively on things and people that users see as “suspicious” or potentially hazardous. These alerts run the gamut from active crimes, or the aftermath of crimes, to generally anything a person interprets as helping to keep their community safe and informed about the dangers around them.

These apps are often designed with a goal of crowd-sourced surveillance, like a digital neighborhood watch. A way of turning the aggregate eyes (and phones) of the neighborhood into an early warning system. But instead, they often exacerbate the same dangers, biases, and problems that exist within policing. After all, the likely outcome to posting a suspicious sight to the app isn’t just to warn your neighbors—it’s to summon authorities to address the issue.

And even worse than incentivizing people to share their most paranoid thoughts and racial biases on a popular platform are the experimental new features constantly being rolled out by apps like Citizen. First, it was a private security force, available to be summoned at the touch of a button. Then, it was a service to help make it (theoretically) even easier to summon the police by giving users access to a 24/7 concierge service who will call the police for you. There are scenarios in which a tool like this might be useful—but to charge people for it, and more importantly, to make people think they will eventually need a service like this—adds to the idea that companies benefit from your fear.

These apps might seem like a helpful way to inform your neighbors if the mountain lion roaming your city was spotted in your neighborhood. But in practice they have been a cesspool of racial profiling, cop-calling, gatekeeping, and fear-spreading. Apps where a so-called “suspicious” person’s picture can be blasted out to a paranoid community, because someone with a smartphone thinks they don’t belong, are not helping people to “Connect and stay safe.” Instead, they promote public safety for some, at the expense of surveillance and harassment for others.

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‘Racial Equity Team’ at Seattle Elementary School Cancels Annual Halloween Parade Because it “Marginalizes Students of Color”

A Seattle elementary school canceled its annual Pumpkin Parade because it “marginalizes students of color who don’t celebrate the holiday.”

The ‘Racial Equity Team’ at Benjamin Elementary school in Seattle canceled the parade and said students cannot dress up in costumes this year.

Instead, the children will participate in “inclusive” events like “thematic units of study about the fall” and reviewing “autumnal artwork,” the New York Post reported.

“There are numerous community and neighborhood events where students and families who wish to can celebrate Halloween,” a Seattle Public Schools spokeswoman said in a statement provided to KTTH Radio talk show host Jason Rantz. “Historically, the Pumpkin Parade marginalizes students of color who do not celebrate the holiday. Specifically, these students have requested to be isolated on campus while the event took place.

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Bates College eyes revamping calculus, other math courses to focus on ‘colonialism and privilege’

A working group of professors and students at Bates College has recommended the school require all majors to offer two courses on “race, colonialism, white supremacy, power, and privilege,” according to a copy of the plan obtained by The College Fix.

In doing so, according to the group’s recommendations, each department could alter existing classes to fit the racial education requirements.

Bates College is a private liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. It hosts about 2,000 undergraduate students, and the school estimates tuition and fees to be nearly $78,000 per year.

For instance, the group suggests courses like Math 105 (Calculus I) could “situate race, white supremacy, colonialism, power, and privilege centrally and attend to them throughout the course.”

If the plan is implemented, students would be required to take one introductory course and one advanced course centered on race. For example, STEM majors could satisfy the advanced requirement by taking “Math 233: Mathematics for Social Justice.”

The report recommends that in order to fulfill the racial education requirements, a math class must include “understanding how mathematical methods can expose racial and other injustices, and the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper and driver of injustice.”

In biology, a course must include “the context of a genetics course to understand the social construction of race, and the fact that there is nothing biological supporting these hierarchies and historical injustices.”

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‘Woke’ govt-funded London tour guide targets racist PLANTS, says botanical terms like ‘native’ & ‘invasive’ are offensive

A sightseeing pamphlet funded by Transport for London has claimed that the capital’s gardens and green spaces are filled with colourful colonial legacies and that many terms in botany, like “exotic”, are insulting and offensive.

The ‘Art on the Underground’ pamphlet guides visitors around the UK’s capital city through green spaces in Brixton and South London, focusing on the “colonial connotations” of British gardens and horticulture. 

The downloaded guide says it “addresses the legacies of the British empire” and looks “at gardens as places to consider injustice, oppression and colonial legacy” – rather than somewhere to simply enjoy plants and nature.

According to the pamphlet, many common plants found in the UK have “colonial roots” and reflect “racial slurs.” For example, the sightseeing map states that Wisteria’s problematic history is related to John Reeve, an East India Company tea inspector, who brought the plant to England in 1812. 

The East India Company “had its own armies to conquer and control territories in South and East Asia and plant collectors used East India Company ships and networks,” the pamphlet notes, adding that the slave-owning firm and its members were at the centre of importing seeds to Britain. 

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UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

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