Musings on technology and justice
Martin Luther King feared fully expected that there would be a backlash as basic human rights for African Americans expanded. There were historic precedents for this such as the reversal of post-Civil War Reconstruction-era freedoms during the last decades of the 19th century and the rise of segregationist laws throughout the southern US during the […]
Read More Avondale Estates is having a backlashDr King spent his last precious hours advocating for the economic rights of African American sanitation workers in Memphis. In his broader vision, this was one arm of a struggle for justice for the poor and powerless that spanned divides of gender and race. I recently met Ryan Harrison at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and […]
Read More Investing in empowermentThe Atlanta WordCamp is an annual gathering for people that use and develop WordPress sites. Although it is put on by and for the Atlanta WordPress community, I met people from all over. I gave a talk there Sunday (4/15/18) on the state of inclusion in distributed companies. Since WordPress is maintained by a distributed company […]
Read More Distributed Inclusion at WordCamp AtlantaThe recent election of Doug Jones to the U.S. senate in Alabama — thanks largely to African American turnout — got me thinking: What if the Black populations of Southern cities were to experience a dramatic increase? How many other elections would be impacted? Does that seem far-fetched? Over a tenth of the Black population of […]
Read More Back to Mississippi: Black migration in the 21st centuryCan the resistance inspire a new generation of mathematicians? Samuel Hansen thinks so. In his recent post on The Aperiodical, he describes how the recent avalanche of math-informed court decisions on gerrymandering in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are putting mathematics in the spotlight. It is really heartening that discrete geometry and other branches of advanced mathematics can be use […]
Read More Mathematicians, rock the vote!In the US, the African American scholar (and February 1st Google doodle subject) Carter G Woodson began working in 1926 to establish “Negro History Week“, for in Woodson’s day the contributions of Black people were “overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” Woodson’s Negro History week evolved into today’s […]
Read More Black history month is Black mathematicians month — in the UKA.I. and Big Data Could Power a New War on Poverty is the title of on op-ed in today’s New York Times by Elisabeth Mason. I fear that AI and Big Data is more likely to fuel a new War on the Poor unless a radical rethinking occurs. In fact this algorithmic War on the Poor […]
Read More AI and the War on PovertyThe impact of AI on communities of color — particularly through job displacement and policing — is now undeniable. Given that HBCUs have historically been on the forefront of technology education for the Black community, I am proposing to build a list of current activities (courses, research, seminars, clubs, etc.) at the HBCUs relevant to […]
Read More AI and the Souls of Black FolkSeveral months ago I read Timothy Snyder’s award winning Black Earth, an important but difficult book on the horrific destruction of millions of lives in the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Despite the gravity of the book, there was a deep and eternal hope that I found in its stories of the ordinary […]
Read More Reverence for the righteous
Charles write here 