Racial disparities

Defending Black Lives Means Banning Facial Recognition

July 11, 2020 Tawana Petty, Wired. Strategize! Black America, Facial Recognition, Mass Surveillance, Racial disparities

Uprisings for racial justice are sweeping the country. Following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, named and unnamed, America has finally reached its moment of reckoning. And politicians are starting to respond. But you can’t end police violence without ending police surveillance. That starts with banning facial recognition, a technology perfectly designed for the automation of racism. I live in Detroit, a city with more than 500,000 Black people. In my city, we live under constant surveillance. We are in a perpetual lineup. Our faces are caught on camera everywhere we go—harvested and analyzed by algorithms. Numerous studies have shown that facial recognition algorithms exhibit systemic racial and gender bias. Detroit’s police chief openly admitted that their software is wrong up to 96 percent of the time.

Oakland School Board Votes To Remove Police From School

June 26, 2020 Wilson Walker, CBS San Francisco. Create! Education, Oakland, Police in Schools, Racial disparities

After about a two-hour debate the Oakland School Board tonight voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department from campuses. The “George Floyd Resolution” eliminates the school districts police force of 10 sworn officers and 50 unarmed campus safety officers. The Board also added several amendments to the final proposal. One requires the superintendent to ensure all staff receive training. Citing the disproportionate arrests of Black students by Oakland’s school police, as well as the district’s “obligation to promote the healthy development of each one of its students” and the many alternative ways to handle discipline inside schools, the board directed the superintendent to take steps required to eliminate the department.

What Elinor Ostrom’s Work Tells Us About Defunding The Police

June 24, 2020 Aaron Vansintjan, Shareable. Create! Abolish Police, Defund the police, Police, Racial disparities

In the past weeks, I’ve watched the news about the explosion of protests against police brutality and racism in the United States and around the world, and the resulting conversations on police defunding, reform or abolition. As I scrolled through social media and obsessively scanned and rescanned the headlines, a small thought tugged at me. It was the story of how one of my heroes, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, had arrived at the research that made her famous. Ostrom has become celebrated as the person who introduced the world to “the commons” — that is, how people can, and do, manage the resources in their community through participation and sharing, instead of violence and competition. Her work was revolutionary and has changed the fields of economics, planning, public policy and environmental science.

Black Workers Face Two Of The Most Lethal Preexisting Conditions For COVID-19

June 11, 2020 Elise Gould and Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! COVID-19, Racial disparities, Recession, wealth inequality

“We’re all in this together” has become a rallying cry during the coronavirus pandemic. While it is true that COVID-19 has affected everyone in some way, the magnitude and nature of the impact has been anything but universal. Evidence to date suggests that black and Hispanic workers face much more economic and health insecurity from COVID-19 than white workers. Although the current strain of the coronavirus is one that humans have never experienced before, the disparate racial impact of the virus is deeply rooted in historic and ongoing social and economic injustices. Persistent racial disparities in health status, access to health care, wealth, employment, wages, housing, income, and poverty all contribute to greater susceptibility to the virus—both economically and physically.

Indict And Punish The Perpetrators Of COVID Mass Death

May 25, 2020 Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report. Create! COVID-19, Death, Racial disparities, Racism

Not just Trump, but the whole US ruling class must pay for the mass Covid death toll among Blacks because only the ruling class has the power to systematically allocate life-death chances for whole populations over generations. Not just Trump, but the whole US ruling class must pay for the mass Covid death toll among Blacks because only the ruling class has the power to systematically allocate life-death chances for whole populations over generations.

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