Race and America: why data matters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Federica Cocco and Alan Smith at the Financial Times: “… To understand the historical roots of black data activism, we have to return to October 1899. Back then, Thomas Calloway, a clerk in the War Department, wrote to the educator Booker T Washington about his pitch for an “American Negro Exhibit” at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was right in the middle of the scramble for Africa and Europeans had developed a morbid fascination with the people they were trying to subjugate.

To Calloway, the Paris exhibition offered a unique venue to sway the global elite to acknowledge “the possibilities of the Negro” and to influence cultural change in the US from an international platform.

It is hard to overstate the importance of international fairs at the time. They were a platform to bolster the prestige of nations. In Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, Robert Rydell writes that fairs had become “a vehicle that, perhaps next to the church, had the greatest capacity to influence a mass audience”….

For the Paris World Fair, Du Bois and a team of Atlanta University students and alumni designed and drew by hand more than 60 bold data portraits. A first set used Georgia as a case study to illustrate the progress made by African Americans since the Civil War.

A second set showed how “the descendants of former African slaves now in residence in the United States of America” had become lawyers, doctors, inventors and musicians. For the first time, the growth of literacy and employment rates, the value of assets and land owned by African Americans and their growing consumer power were there for everyone to see. At the 1900 World Fair, the “Exhibit of American Negroes” took up a prominent spot in the Palace of Social Economy. “As soon as they entered the building, visitors were inundated by examples of black excellence,” says Whitney Battle-Baptiste, director of the WEB Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of WEB Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America….(More)”

Working with students and alumni from Atlanta University, Du Bois created 60 bold data portraits for the ‘Exhibit of American Negroes’

Working with students and alumni from Atlanta University, Du Bois created 60 bold data portraits for the ‘Exhibit of American Negroes’ © Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

#HumanRights: The Technologies and Politics of Justice Claims in Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ronald Niezen: “Social justice and human rights movements are entering a new phase. Social media, artificial intelligence, and digital forensics are reshaping advocacy and compliance. Technicians, lawmakers, and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the nonhuman. #HumanRights examines how new technologies interact with older models of rights claiming and communication, influencing and reshaping the modern-day pursuit of justice.

Ronald Niezen argues that the impacts of information technologies on human rights are not found through an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other, “traditional” forms of media to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. Niezen considers various ways that the pursuit of justice is happening via new technologies, including crowdsourcing, social media–facilitated mobilizations (and enclosures), WhatsApp activist networks, and the selective attention of Google’s search engine algorithm. He uncovers how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the “new victimology” that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others. #HumanRights paints a striking and important panoramic picture of the contest between authoritarianism and the new tools by which people attempt to leverage human rights and bring the powerful to account….(More)”.

Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group: “This position paper on Indigenous Protocol (IP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a starting place for those who want to design and create AI from an ethical position that centers Indigenous concerns. Each Indigenous community will have its own particular approach to the questions we raise in what follows. What we have written here is not a substitute for establishing and maintaining relationships of reciprocal care and support with specific Indigenous communities. Rather, this document offers a range of ideas to take into consideration when entering into conversations which prioritize Indigenous perspectives in the development of artificial intelligence.

The position paper is an attempt to capture multiple layers of a discussion that happened over 20 months, across 20 time zones, during two workshops, and between Indigenous people (and a few non-Indigenous folks) from diverse communities in Aotearoa, Australia, North America, and the Pacific.

Our aim, however, is not to provide a unified voice. Indigenous ways of knowing are rooted in distinct, sovereign territories across the planet. These extremely diverse landscapes and histories have influenced different communities and their discrete cultural protocols over time. A single ‘Indigenous perspective’ does not exist, as epistemologies are motivated and shaped by the grounding of specific communities in particular territories. Historically, scholarly traditions that homogenize diverse Indigenous cultural practices have resulted in ontological and epistemological violence, and a flattening of the rich texture and variability of Indigenous thought….(More)”.

The Data Assembly

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Press Release: “The Governance Lab (The GovLab), an action research center at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, announced the creation of The Data Assembly. Beginning in New York City, the effort will explore how communities perceive the risks and benefits of data re-use for COVID-19. Understanding that policymakers often lack information about the concerns of different stakeholders, The Data Assembly’s deliberations will inform the creation of a responsible data re-use framework to guide the use of data and technology at the city and state level to fight COVID-19’s many consequences.

The Data Assembly will hold deliberations with civil rights organizations, key data holders and policymakers, and the public at large. Consultations with these stakeholders will take place through a series of remote engagements, including surveys and an online town hall meeting. This work will allow the project to consider the perspectives of people from different strata of society and how they might exercise some control over the flow of data.

After the completion of these data re-use deliberations, The Data Assembly will create a path forward for using data responsibly to solve public challenges. The first phases of the project will commence in New York City, seeking to engage with city residents and their leaders on data governance issues. 

“Data is increasingly the primary format for sharing information to understand crises and plan recovery efforts; empowering everyone to better understand how data is collected and how it should be used is paramount,” said Adrienne Schmoeker, Director of Civic Engagement & Strategy and Deputy Chief Analytics Officer at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics. “We look forward to learning from the insights gathered by the GovLab through The Data Assembly work they are conducting in New York City.”…(More)”.

Exploring Blockchain Technology for Government Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the World Economic Forum: “The costs to society of public-sector corruption and weak accountability are staggering. In many parts of the world, public-sector corruption is the single-largest challenge, stifling social, economic and environmental development. Often, corruption centres around a lack of transparency, inadequate record-keeping and low public accountability.

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, when applied thoughtfully to certain corruption-prone government processes, can potentially increase transparency and accountability in these systems, reducing the risk or prevalence of corrupt activity.

In partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia (Procuraduría General de Colombia), the Forum has led a multistakeholder team to investigate, design and trial the use of blockchain technology for corruption-prone government processes, anchored in the use case of public procurement.

Using cryptography and distributed consensus mechanisms, blockchain provides the unique combination of permanent and tamper-evident record-keeping, transaction transparency and auditability, automated functions with “smart contracts”, and the reduction of centralized authority and information ownership within processes. These properties make blockchain a high potential emerging technology to address corruption. The project chose to focus on the public procurement process because it constitutes one of the largest sites of corruption globally, stands to benefit from these technology properties and plays a significant role in serving public interest…(More)”.

Humankind: A Hopeful History

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rutger Bregman: “This is a book about a radical idea.

An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history.

At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimized by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life. An idea so intrinsic to human nature that it goes unnoticed and gets overlooked.

If only we had the courage to take it more seriously, it’s an idea that might just start a revolution. Turn society on its head. Because once you grasp what it really means, it’s nothing less than a mind-bending drug that ensures you’ll never look at the world the same again. So what is this radical idea?

That most people, deep down, are pretty decent…(More)”.

How to Sustain Your Activism Against Police Brutality Beyond this Moment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bethany Gordon: “…Despite the haunting nature of these details and the different features of this moment, I am worried that empathetic voices lifting up this cause will quiet too soon for lasting change to occur. But it doesn’t have to happen this way. Gaining a better understanding of the empathy we feel in these moments of awareness and advocacy can help us take a more behaviorally sustainable approach.

Empathy is a complex psychological phenomenon, describing eight distinct ways that we respond to one another’s experiences and emotions, but most commonly defined in the dictionary as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Using this broader definition, scholars and activists have debated how effective empathy is as a tool for behavior change—particularly when it comes to fighting racism. Paul Bloom argues that empathy allows our bias to drive our decision-making, bell hooks states that empathy is not a promising avenue to systemic racial change, and Alisha Gaines analyzes how an overemphasis on racial empathy in a 1944 landmark study, “An American Dilemma,” led to a blindness about the impact of systemic and institutional racial barriers. This more general understanding and application of empathy has not been an effective aid to fighting systemic oppression and has led to a lot of (well-meaning?) blackface.

A more nuanced understanding of empathy—and its related concepts—may help us use it more effectively in the fight against racism. There are two strains of empathy that are relevant to the George Floyd protests and can help us better understand (and possibly change) our response: empathic distress and empathic concern, also known as compassion.

Empathic distress is a type of empathy we feel when we are disturbed by witnessing another’s suffering. Empathic distress is an egocentric response—a reaction that places our own well-being at its center. When we’re motivated to act through empathic distress, our ultimate goal is to alleviate our own suffering. This may mean we take action to help another person, but it could also mean we distract ourselves from their suffering.

Compassion is a type of empathy that is other-oriented. Compassion operates when you feel for another person rather than being distressed by their suffering, thereby making your ultimate goal about fixing the actual problem….(More)’

How Data Can Map and Make Racial Inequality More Visible (If Done Responsibly)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Reflection Document by The GovLab: “Racism is a systemic issue that pervades every aspect of life in the United States and around the world. In recent months, its corrosive influence has been made starkly visible, especially on Black people. Many people are hurting. Their rage and suffering stem from centuries of exclusion and from being subject to repeated bias and violence. Across the country, there have been protests decrying racial injustice. Activists have called upon the government to condemn bigotry and racism, to act against injustice, to address systemic and growing inequality.

Institutions need to take meaningful action to address such demands. Though racism is not experienced in the same way by all communities of color, policymakers must respond to the anxieties and apprehensions of Black people as well as those of communities of color more generally. This work will require institutions and individuals to reflect on how they may be complicit in perpetuating structural and systematic inequalities and harm and to ask better questions about the inequities that exist in society (laid bare in both recent acts of violence and in racial disadvantages in health outcomes during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis). This work is necessary but unlikely to be easy. As Rashida Richardson, Director of Policy Research at the AI Now Institute at NYU notes:

“Social and political stratifications also persist and worsen because they are embedded into our social and legal systems and structures. Thus, it is difficult for most people to see and understand how bias and inequalities have been automated or operationalized over time.”

We believe progress can be made, at least in part, through responsible data access and analysis, including increased availability of (disaggregated) data through data collaboration. Of course, data is only one part of the overall picture, and we make no claims that data alone can solve such deeply entrenched problems. Nonetheless, data can have an impact by making inequalities resulting from racism more quantifiable and inaction less excusable.

…Prioritizing any of these topics will also require increased community engagement and participatory agenda setting. Likewise, we are deeply conscious that data can have a negative as well as positive impact and that technology can perpetuate racism when designed and implemented without the input and participation of minority communities and organizations. While our report here focuses on the promise of data, we need to remain aware of the potential to weaponize data against vulnerable and already disenfranchised communities. In addition, (hidden) biases in data collected and used in AI algorithms, as well as in a host of other areas across the data life cycle, will only exacerbate racial inequalities if not addressed….(More)”

ALSO: The piece is supplemented by a crowdsourced listing of Data-Driven Efforts to Address Racial Inequality.

Tribalism Comes for Pandemic Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Yuval Levin at The New Atlantis: “he Covid-19 pandemic has tested our society in countless ways. From the health system to the school system, the economy, government, and family life, we have confronted some enormous and unfamiliar challenges. But many of these stresses are united by the need to constantly adapt to new information and evidence and accept that any knowledge we might have is only provisional. This demands a kind of humble restraint — on the part of public health experts, political leaders, and the public at large — that our society now finds very hard to muster.

The virus is novel, so our understanding of what responding to it might require of us has had to be built on the fly. But the polarized culture war that pervades so much of our national life has made this kind of learning very difficult. Views developed in response to provisional assessments of incomplete evidence quickly rigidify as they are transformed into tribal markers and then cultural weapons. Soon there are left-wing and right-wing views on whether to wear masks, whether particular drugs are effective, or how to think about social distancing.

New evidence is taken as an assault on these tribal commitments, and policy adjustments in response are seen as forms of surrender to the enemy. Every new piece of information gets filtered through partisan sieves, implicitly examined to see whose interest it serves, and then embraced or rejected on that basis. We all do this. You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly….(More)”.

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ruha Benjamin: “From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture….(More)”.