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Here are 3 things white people can do right now to help #BLM
Remaining silent is being complicit.
04 June, 2020
Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images
- Protests around the world are demanding an end to police discrimination and violence against black citizens in America.
- Author and activist Dax-Devlon Ross offers advice on how white people can help during this moment.
- Ross's suggestions include thinking and voting locally, supporting black-owned businesses, and practicing self-reflection.
<p>You never forget a gun being pointed at your head. In 1999, <a href="https://dax-dev.com/" target="_blank">Dax-Devlon Ross</a> and I were heading from Washington Heights to the Upper West Side for dinner. We stopped behind a van at a red light on 140<span style="background-color: initial;"><sup>th</sup></span> and Broadway. The back door suddenly sprung open. The gun was a foot from my forehead before those policemen even reached us. Another half-dozen cops appeared from a jump out van behind us. We were surrounded. </p><p>"Where's your bag?" one screams as I step out of the backseat of the car—Dax's girlfriend was in the passenger seat. I tell him it's uptown; I'm crashing there for the night. The fact they know about my bag means they've been tailing us for at least an hour. A young white guy just doesn't travel through<em> that</em> neighborhood with a black couple for any other reason than buying drugs. The police mindset, not ours. </p><p>After nearly strip-searching me in front of a gathering crowd on Broadway, they let us go to a round of thunderous applause. Not one cop offers an apology. </p><p>In St Thomas, a cop threatens to put a hole in Dax's head because, again, a white guy and black guy do not roll together. Then there's Hackensack circa 2000. Dax often picked me up to hike in Ramapo or Ridgeweood. We're pulled over twice within a few miles of each other on Route 17. Both times in upper class white suburbs; both times for no other reason than a Vanillaroma air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror. </p><p>Well, one other reason. </p><p>I've had many white friends push back against my assertion that implicit bias is real. Maybe I'd push back had I not lived through these experiences with one of my closest friends. You believe the victim when you see racism up close. These incidents are isolated for me; for Dax, it's been a lifetime indictment. Only now have we reached a tipping point that has forced the general public to recognize what's been happening for 400 years.</p><p>Dax has long worked in social justice and civil rights. In fact, we were both columnists for The Daily Targum at Rutgers in the nineties; he's been covering this beat his entire life. His investigative reporting has been featured in the <a href="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/tackling-mass-incarceration/" target="_blank">NY Times</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/12/04/obama-administration-ordered-newark-fix-its-police-force-heres-what-has-hasnt-happened/?arc404=true" target="_blank">Washington Post</a>, <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/judges-block-reducing-jail-populations_n_5e839450c5b6a1bb764ed7bc" target="_blank">Huffington Post</a>, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/22/black-undertakers-struggle-pandemic-coronavirus" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>. Recently he published an important article that perfectly captures this moment in American history: "<a href="https://www.thirdsettlements.com/the-asterisk/a-letter-to-my-white-male-friends-of-a-certain-age" target="_blank">A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age</a>." </p><p><a href="https://www.earthrisepodcast.com/politics/89-an-honest-conversation-about-race-with-dax-devlon-ross/" target="_blank">On my podcast</a> this week I asked Dax for three actionable responses white people should consider right now. Below are his responses. </p>
EarthRise Podcast 89: An Honest Conversation About Race (with Dax-Devlon Ross)
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="df8a1046109cc2c6805707d2c808f656"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lLW74j9fvFE?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><h3>Think locally</h3><p>Do you know your local sheriff? We focus on big-ticket races. Down-ballot candidates are often skipped; otherwise, people choose an incumbent without further investigation. Ross believes it's essential to know who's running your neighborhood. Do they have a history of abuse? (<a href="https://8cantwait.org/" target="_blank">This resource</a> could help you find out.) Researching candidates for sheriff, judges, and other regional offices is important for changing the narrative. </p><p>We must also hold regional leaders accountable. For example, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has taken a lot of heat this week. When he was voted into that office in 2017, only <a href="https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-los-angeles-mayor-election-turnout-20170321-story.html" target="_blank">20 percent</a> of the eligible population even bothered to cast a ballot. Today Garcetti <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-03/protests-demanding-racial-justice-gain-momentum-across-l-a" target="_blank">announced</a> that up to $250 million will be diverted from the police budget to address health care and education issues in the black community. That's a good sign, but we have to remain vigilant during its implementation, especially when considering the <a href="https://la.curbed.com/2020/1/7/21054171/measure-hhh-first-project-open-homeless-housing" target="_blank">ongoing failure</a> of the $1.2 billion homeless initiative passed in 2016. The effects of this week's protests need to be continually fought for until they're realized. </p><h3>Support black-owned businesses</h3><p>On his Netflix show, "Trigger Warning with Killer Mike," the rapper <a href="https://kulturehub.com/killer-mike-black-owned-business/" target="_blank">tries to support</a> only black-owned businesses for a day. It's not as easy as it sounds. Ross found the humor in the episode, but ultimately, "it was also tragic." </p><p>Earlier this week, the LA Times published <a href="https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-05-31/black-owned-restaurants-in-los-angeles" target="_blank">this list</a> of 85 black-owned food services and restaurants. Ross takes it a step further: Who's your financial advisor? Your banker? Lawyer? If you own a business, how does staff diversity look?</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Maybe add some folks of color to that list of people you want to talk to. Sometimes white people implicitly assume 'white is right.' And a lot times white people are right. I'm just asking them to break it up a little bit, and think, 'How can I support businesses that are POC-owned and -led?'"</p><p>Considering how disproportionally blacks are being harmed during this pandemic—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/business/economy/black-workers-inequality-economic-risks.html" target="_blank">skyrocketing unemployment rate</a>; higher death rates in the <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/05/the-disproportionate-impact-of-covid-19-on-black-health-care-workers-in-the-u-s" target="_blank">health care sector</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/covid-19-is-hurting-black-americans-more-in-almost-every-way" target="_blank">general population</a>—economic support is more important than ever. <a href="https://webuyblack.com/" target="_blank">We Buy Black</a> is a great resource. </p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzM3Mjg0My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMjE0NjQyMX0.kkLNpTx-4NJfC9WkQYiUyBReCdnDtOi-H7l9UI7T_z4/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C87%2C0%2C19&height=700" id="57af5" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b37510c76cf62bac43ab9816b5a1ee03" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Demonstrators attend a "Sit Out the Curfew" protest against the death of George Floyd who died on May 25 in Minneapolis whilst in police custody, along a street in Oakland, California on June 3, 2020.
Photo by Philip Pacheco / AFP
<h3>Do the inner work</h3><p>"What's coming up for you?" Ross requests that you investigate previous relationships, incidents, and mindsets around black people. Has one bad interaction colored your thinking on the race? If you've used isolated experiences to dictate beliefs, you need to rethink your biases. </p><p>Education is paramount. Ross mentions a white friend who recently learned about <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-devastation-of-black-wall-street/" target="_blank">Black Wall Street</a> while watching an episode of "Watchmen." At first, his friend thought it was fake. After researching the incident after he was furious over his ignorance. A century later, Human Rights Watch <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/12/us-how-abusive-biased-policing-destroys-lives" target="_blank">found</a> police abuse centralized in the exact same region of Tulsa. You can't change what you refuse to investigate. Change begins when you explore your implicit bias.</p><p>If this week has taught us anything, it's that we desperately need to change. And then keep going, and going, because America's horrific record—our tragic present—is on full display. Turning away any longer would be criminal. The can has been kicked far too long. </p><p>--</p><p><em>Stay in touch with Derek on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/derekberes" target="_blank">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DerekBeresdotcom" target="_blank">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://derekberes.substack.com/" target="_blank">Substack</a>. His next book is</em> "<em>Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."</em></p>
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Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past
We'd like to think that judging people's worth based on the shape of their head is a practice that's behind us.
24 May, 2020
PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP via Getty Images
'Phrenology' has an old-fashioned ring to it. It sounds like it belongs in a history book, filed somewhere between bloodletting and velocipedes.
<p> We'd like to think that judging people's worth based on the size and shape of their skull is a practice that's well behind us. However, phrenology is once again rearing its lumpy head.</p><p>In recent years, machine-learning algorithms have promised governments and private companies the power to glean all sorts of information from people's appearance. Several startups now claim to be able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help employers <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SAUES8UM69EN8TSMUGF9/full" target="_blank">detect</a> the personality traits of job candidates based on their facial expressions. In China, the government has pioneered the use of surveillance cameras that identify and track ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of schools installing camera systems that automatically sanction children for not paying attention, based on facial movements and microexpressions such as eyebrow twitches.</p><p>Perhaps most notoriously, a few years ago, AI researchers Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135v1" target="_blank">claimed</a> to have trained an algorithm to identify criminals based on the shape of their faces, with an accuracy of 89.5 per cent. They didn't go so far as to endorse some of the ideas about physiognomy and character that circulated in the 19th century, notably from the work of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso: that criminals are underevolved, subhuman beasts, recognisable from their sloping foreheads and hawk-like noses. However, the recent study's seemingly high-tech attempt to pick out facial features associated with criminality borrows directly from the 'photographic composite method' developed by the Victorian jack-of-all-trades Francis Galton – which involved overlaying the faces of multiple people in a certain category to find the features indicative of qualities like health, disease, beauty and criminality.</p>
<p>Technology commentators have panned these facial-recognition technologies as 'literal phrenology'; they've also linked it to eugenics, the pseudoscience of improving the human race by encouraging people deemed the fittest to reproduce. (Galton himself coined the term 'eugenics', describing it in 1883 as 'all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had'.)</p><p>In some cases, the explicit goal of these technologies is to deny opportunities to those deemed unfit; in others, it might not be the goal, but it's a predictable result. Yet when we dismiss algorithms by labelling them as phrenology, what exactly is the problem we're trying to point out? Are we saying that these methods are scientifically flawed and that they don't really work – or are we saying that it's morally wrong to use them regardless?</p><p>There is a long and tangled <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P4-2077466723/something-old-something-new-something-pseudo-something" target="_blank">history</a> to the way 'phrenology' has been used as a withering insult. Philosophical and scientific criticisms of the endeavour have always been intertwined, though their entanglement has changed over time. In the 19th century, phrenology's detractors objected to the fact that phrenology attempted to pinpoint the location of different mental functions in different parts of the brain – a move that was seen as heretical, since it called into question Christian ideas about the unity of the soul. Interestingly, though, trying to discover a person's character and intellect based on the size and shape of their head wasn't perceived as a serious moral issue. Today, by contrast, the idea of localising mental functions is fairly uncontroversial. Scientists might no longer think that destructiveness is seated above the right ear, but the notion that cognitive functions can be localised in particular brain circuits is a standard assumption in mainstream neuroscience.</p>
<p>Phrenology had its share of empirical criticism in the 19th century, too. Debates raged about which functions resided where, and whether skull measurements were a reliable way of determining what's going on in the brain. The most influential empirical criticism of old phrenology, though, came from the French physician Jean Pierre Flourens's studies based on damaging the brains of rabbits and pigeons – from which he concluded that mental functions are distributed, rather than localised. (These results were later discredited.) The fact that phrenology was rejected for reasons that most contemporary observers would no longer accept makes it only more difficult to figure out what we're targeting when we use 'phrenology' as a slur today.</p><p>Both 'old' and 'new' phrenology have been critiqued for their sloppy methods. In the recent AI study of criminality, the data were taken from two very different sources: mugshots of convicts, versus pictures from work websites for nonconvicts. That fact alone could account for the algorithm's ability to detect a difference between the groups. In a new <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135" target="_blank">preface</a> to the paper, the researchers also admitted that taking court convictions as synonymous with criminality was a 'serious oversight'. Yet equating convictions with criminality seems to register with the authors mainly as an empirical flaw: using mugshots of convicted criminals, but not of the ones who got away introduces a statistical bias. They said they were 'deeply baffled' at the public outrage in reaction to a paper that was intended 'for pure academic discussions'.</p><img src="https://d2e1bqvws99ptg.cloudfront.net/user_image_upload/1213/inset-case_study_criminal_machine_learning_.jpg"><br>From Wu and Zhang (2016)<p><br></p><p>Notably, the researchers don't comment on the fact that conviction itself depends on the impressions that police, judges and juries form of the suspect – making a person's 'criminal' appearance a confounding variable. They also fail to mention how the intense policing of particular communities, and inequality of access to legal representation, skews the dataset. In their response to criticism, the authors don't back down on the assumption that 'being a criminal requires a host of abnormal (outlier) personal traits'. Indeed, their framing suggests that criminality is an innate characteristic, rather than a response to social conditions such as poverty or abuse. Part of what makes their dataset questionable on empirical grounds is that who gets labelled 'criminal' is hardly value-neutral.</p><p>One of the strongest moral objections to using facial recognition to detect criminality is that it stigmatises people who are already overpoliced. The authors say that their tool should not be used in law-enforcement, but cite only statistical arguments about why it ought not to be deployed. They note that the false-positive rate (50 per cent) would be very high, but take no notice of what that means in human terms. Those false positives would be individuals whose faces resemble people who have been convicted in the past. Given the racial and other biases that exist in the criminal justice system, such algorithms would end up overestimating criminality among marginalised communities.</p>
<p>The most contentious question seems to be whether reinventing physiognomy is fair game for the purposes of 'pure academic discussion'. One could object on empirical grounds: eugenicists of the past such as Galton and Lombroso ultimately failed to find facial features that predisposed a person to criminality. That's because there are no such connections to be found. Likewise, psychologists studying the heritability of intelligence, such as Cyril Burt and Philippe Rushton, had to play fast and loose with their data to manufacture correlations between skull size, race and IQ. If there were anything to discover, presumably the many people who have tried over the years wouldn't have come up dry.</p><p>The problem with reinventing physiognomy is not merely that it has been tried without success before. Researchers who persist in looking for cold fusion after the scientific consensus has moved on also face criticism for chasing unicorns – but disapproval of cold fusion falls far short of opprobrium. At worst, they are seen as wasting their time. The difference is that the potential harms of cold fusion research are much more limited. In contrast, some commentators <a href="https://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=3313129" target="_blank">argue</a> that facial recognition should be regulated as tightly as plutonium, because it has so few nonharmful uses. When the dead-end project you want to resurrect was invented for the purpose of propping up colonial and class structures – and when the only thing it's capable of measuring is the racism inherent in those structures – it's hard to justify trying it one more time, just for curiosity's sake.</p><p>However, calling facial-recognition research 'phrenology' without explaining what is at stake probably isn't the most effective strategy for communicating the force of the complaint. For scientists to take their moral responsibilities seriously, they need to be aware of the harms that might result from their research. Spelling out more clearly what's wrong with the work labelled 'phrenology' will hopefully have more of an impact than simply throwing the name around as an insult.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/dd48096e-78e9-49c1-8254-eba6700ee14b.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/algorithms-associating-appearance-and-criminality-have-a-dark-past" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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What elements make up our idea of justice?
In classical liberalism, justice leaves society better off by providing a chance for a better life.
08 April, 2020
- How can we ensure people get what they are due, in terms of justice?
- Philosophy professor at University of Arizona, David Schmidtz says the answer to this question needs context. Who is the person we're referring to, and to what are we responding?
- Some elements of justice include equality, returning favors, and the right to air grievances.
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How does the rule of law promote a free society?
In classical liberal philosophy, individual pursuit of happiness is made possible by a framework of law.
11 March, 2020
- The rule of law as a principle has a philosophical history before it was popularized by classical liberalism, which can be traced back to Greek philosopher Aristotle.
- The classical liberal conception of laws draws upon this pre-history but differs slightly. Yes, the end goal is the common good, however "goodness" varies by individual.
- In this way of thinking, instead of telling us what will make us happy, law serves as the framework that allows us to pursue our own unique happiness.
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How does toleration fit into a pluralistic society?
A truly diverse society exudes open-mindedness, not just reluctant acceptance of differing viewpoints.
26 February, 2020
- While pluralism is considered a condition, toleration is the response to it. To recognize and accept a diverse range of perspectives on ethical views is to exhibit tolerance.
- Singapore Management University professor Chandran Kukathas points to toleration as a cornerstone of the classical liberal tradition. In fact, liberal thought arises from the reality that people disagree substantially on any number of things.
- The principle of toleration offers guidance in understanding what makes a good society, as well as how that society upholds conditions of pluralism and diversity.
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