Obama gives speech about black women

Brittney Cooper does a great job putting this in context.

Obama did not arrive at this thinking about the importance of Black women solely out of a sense of altruism. Though he quipped that Black women are a “majority of my household,” a fact about which he “cares deeply,” the president arrived at the expansive view of the problems and possibilities that shape Black women’s lives because of many months of committed advocacy work from groups focused on the well-being of Black women and girls.

When the president announced his My Brother’s Keeper initiative focused on the structural challenges faced by men and boys of color in Winter 2014, more than 1,500 Black women signed a letter demanding that the program include remedies for Black women and girls. This public push led to months of closed-door meetings in which a series of reports about the dismal outcomes Black girls face with regard to the school-to-prison pipeline and the sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline forced the president’s team to reconsider what it might mean to suggest that only one sex was worthy of his attempts to address structural racism.

BPA/SWIP Good Practice Guidelines Go Global!

I’m very pleased to announce that the BPA/SWIP Good Practice Guidelines have their first non-UK subscriber. Kudos to Montclair State!

Job Searches and Members of Under-Represented Groups

As the recently appointed Acting Chair of the APA Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession, I’ve been getting a number of emails from job search committees asking for help in identifying listservs and websites that reach members of under-represented groups in philosophy. The APA Resources on Diversity and Inclusiveness is a good start, as is the UP Directory of philosophers from under-represented groups. The UP Directory even has a bulletin board service that emails job listings every Monday. (You do not have to be listed in the directory to subscribe to the bulletin board service.)

I’m hoping that Feminist Philosophy readers can help identify listservs that reach philosophers from under-represented groups, and am asking that you note these in the comments. I’ve already conferred with Amy Ferrer this morning and she’s agreed to add this information to the Resources on Diversity and Inclusiveness page. Given that the job search season is upon us, it would be great to put a centralized resource of philosophy listservs for job search committees to use this season.

“I look like an LGBT Engineer”

A brief piece on the invisibility of LGBT people in engineering. Very much reminded me of Esa’s on philosophy.

It became evident that we’d not heard about any problems from the LGBT academic and student communities in engineering. At first, that seemed like a good thing. However, I started to think about the number of individuals in this minority group that we actually knew of. We could only name one or two, including myself!

“Why does it matter?” asked one of my colleagues, respectfully, and I was grateful for her question. It matters for many reasons.