Stereotype threat: scaling up the interventions May 22, 2013

Great stuff.

For example:

A controlled, incremental and systematic approach to the application of interventions is a possible path to scaling up interventions. For example, PERTS(http://www.perts.net/home/PERTS.php), created by doctoral students Dave Paunesku and Carissa Romero of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, features such an approach. This method uses the Internet to deliver interventions to students. Teachers volunteer to have their students go to computer terminals to complete the interventions in a standardized fashion on designated days. As the procedure for delivering the interventions is highly controlled, the treatment message is given as intended, minimizing the potential for error. Interventions delivered in this manner have yielded reliable increases in GPA in studies of thousands of students across the country—particularly for low-performing ones.

Constructing the Myth of the Crack Baby May 21, 2013

Ta Nehisi Coates has a short blurb about about the crack baby ‘epidemic’ in the early 1980s in the US.  You can also watch a ten minute video / short documentary about it here.

a pregnant woman with one hand resting on her belly.

Coates mentions the influence of racism in how women were being prosecuted for being pregnant while addicted to cocaine. In fact, there’s a whole confluence of racism, classism, misogyny, and ableism that feed into the crack baby hysteria:
–the racism and classism that goes into poor WoC being more easily seen as irresponsible mothers who were recklessly endangering their unborn children
–the general misogyny that a woman’s health (like helping her with her addiction) is not nearly as important as the health of the her unborn child (so she should be prosecuted for potentially harming it.)
–the ableism that influence our standards of health.  Part of the hysteria was that babies would be born with physical and cognitive disabilities, which not only lead us to think of them as not being fully human, but we were then also concerned about all the extra money they disabled kids would cost us.  Because you know, the *tragedy* here is not that there are a bunch of women addicted to a dangerous drug, but that people’s taxes will go up from from all these costly, disabled babies.

Eek, it’s like a messed-up game of “spot how the -ism influences our moral concerns.”

Using Optical Illusions to Combat Implicit Bias

“Giving White People The Illusion Of Darker Skin Makes Them Less Racist”

 

New ‘Geography of Hate’ project maps hate speech on Twitter May 13, 2013

A new project called ‘Geography of Hate‘ gives detailed information about the geographic distribution of hate speech on Twitter. According to The Verge:

the interactive map charts ten relatively common slurs across the continental US, either by general category or individually. Looking at the whole country, you’ll often see a mass of red or what the map’s creators call a “blue smog of hate.” Zooming in, however, patches appear over individual regions or cities; some may be predictable, while others are not. . .

Unlike many other studies, for example, the tweets weren’t collected and analyzed algorithmically — a method that could accidentally collect non-derogatory uses of these terms. Instead, the team first searched through a year’s worth of geotagged tweets for words, then had a group of students at Humboldt State University look at each one. Only tweets they found explicitly negative went on the map: a derogatory use of the word “dyke” would be added, for example, but one reclaiming the term for a gay pride parade would not. In total, the map charts about 150,000 negative, slur-filled tweets.

Since the map looks at only geotagged tweets, it’s not a pure representation of Twitter, but this is standard practice for such mapping. Hateful tweets are weighted by the total number of tweets in an area, so you’ll see the proportional number of slurs, not just areas with the largest number of Twitter users.

 

The information is incredibly interesting (and eye-opening!), the map is user-friendly, and there’s loads of information available about the study’s methodology. Go check it out!

On being a black female postgraduate in the UK May 3, 2013

An important article by Janine Bradbury.

in a climate where only one in 13 (7.7%) university professors are from BME backgrounds, where only 50 out of a total 14,000 university professors in Britain are from black Caribbean or black African backgrounds, and only 10 of these are women, how much tenacity does one black female PhD student need to achieve her full potential?

Race and Economic Inequality April 25, 2013

CNN reports on some pretty stunning new figures about the relationship between race and economic status in America. As you can see below, the figures (for household ‘net worth’) aren’t pretty.

Even more depressingly, the gap between black and white has almost doubled during the recession. But racism is totally over now because there’s a black president!

Using History to Teach April 12, 2013

From a recent news article:

“A high school English teacher could face disciplinary action for giving a writing assignment that asked students to make a persuasive argument blaming Jews for the problems of Nazi Germany, Albany school district officials said Friday.”

The assignment, first reported Friday by the Albany Times Union, asked students to research Nazi propaganda, then assume their teacher was a Nazi government official who had to be convinced of their loyalty. The assignment told students they “must argue that Jews are evil.”

My first reaction was, this could have been a poignant exercise on rhetoric, logic and history, but didn’t take into account the current existence and legacy of antisemitism.  Though, whether that is a valid reaction might depend on what one thinks of things like The Third Wave experiment.  The more I read over the article though, the more I’m baffled about what the teacher in NY was even trying to accomplish. (Were they just trying to be edgy?)

“Accidental racist” April 11, 2013

I first heard the song on Tues, when I was foolish enough to act on my mild curiosity about what Limbaugh is saying. The person talking – perhaps Medved – was criticizing the song for implying that it’s the white guys who own all the blame & guilt. His critique was line by line. I just looked at a tape of The View’s discussion. It was pretty positive but not very specific.

SO YOU CAN DECIDE FOR YOURSELF!!

Below is a audio tape with a picture of the singers, and then the tape of the view.

L.L. cool J and Brad Paisley:

In case you thought racism was over… March 27, 2013

The “White Student Union” at Towson University in Maryland has announced they’re going to start doing nighttime “patrols” of campus. Pretty unbelievably (and by unbelievable I only mean that I cannot fathom the amount of cognitive dissonance involved) they claim not to be racist in the least, and yet refer to concern regarding “black predators,” and–at least some members–express an openness to the permissibility of slavery.

Truly disgusting. You can read more about it here.

Does affirmative action help the disadvantaged students it is supposed to benefit? March 17, 2013

The Supremes are going to take up an affirmative action (AA) suit. One argument against AA may seem to be the result of benevolent concern for under-represented groups. It employs mismatch theory.

“Mismatch theory” says that AA clearly gets some students into better schools than they are otherwise qualified for. But such students are then at a disadvantage, since those who get in on merit will out perform them and leave them at a loss in class after class.

As Dan Slater in the NY Times says:

[Mismatch] is the idea that affirmative action can harm those it’s supposed to help by placing them at schools in which they fall below the median level of ability and therefore have a tough time. As a consequence, the argument goes, these students suffer learningwise and, later, careerwise.

And Slater seems to think a 1991 study of the law bar is significant, though very imperfect:

In 1991, more than 27,000 incoming law students — about 2,000 of them black — completed questionnaires for the B.P.S. (Bar Passing Study)and gave permission to track their performance in law school and later on the bar.

Among other things, the questionnaire asked students (a) whether they got into their first-choice law school, (b) if so, whether they enrolled at their first choice, and (c) if not, why not.

Data showed that 689 of the approximately 2,000 black applicants got into their first-choice law school. About three-quarters of those 689 matriculated at their first choice. The remaining quarter opted instead for their second-choice school, often for financial or geographic reasons. So, of the 689 black applicants who got into their first choice, 512 went, and the rest, 177, attended their second choice, presumably a less prestigious institution.

Those who went to their second choice schools did significantly better.

Duke researchers have weighed in and they argue that it is STEM fields that mismatch causes problems. Stem courses build on expertise acquired in earlier classes, and problems can multiply in very serious ways.

As far as I know, this is pretty much the whole mismatch argument, made famous in fact by Clarence Thomas. I’m really interested in hearing what you think of it. I’m going to restrict myself to pointing out that the mismatch argument proponents don’t seem very concerned about all the others who get into universities on something other than academic merit. For starters, legacy students and athletes are among them. Perhaps also famous actors, members of royal families, the children of presidents, and so on. And since the worry is that students who benefit from AA will be below the median, shouldn’t we worry about all the other students there too?