Ryan Boren

Engineering is a social production not merely a scientific or technological one. And educational engineering is not just a profession; it is an explicitly commercial endeavor. For engineers, as historian David Noble has pointed out, are not only “the foremost agents of modern technology,” but also “the agents of corporate capital.” “Learning engineers,” largely untethered from history and purposefully severed from the kind of commitment to democratic practices urged by Dewey, are now poised to be the agents of surveillance capital.

Source: HEWN, No. 312

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

Source: The Nationalist’s Delusion – The Atlantic

White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage. Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.

I began to see what I think of as the pillars of whiteness—the unexamined beliefs that prop up our racial responses. I could see the power of the belief that only bad people were racist, as well as how individualism allowed white people to exempt themselves from the forces of socialization. I could see how we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people, rather than as a complex, interconnected system. And in light of so many white expressions of resentment toward people of color, I realized that we see ourselves as entitled to, and deserving of, more than people of color deserve; I saw our investment in a system that serves us. I also saw how hard we worked to deny all this and how defensive we became when these dynamics were named. In turn, I saw how our defensiveness maintained the racial status quo.

Source: DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (pp. 1-4). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

Publications | Robin DiAngelo, PhD

Why is fairness to people with disabilities a different problem from fairness concerning other protected attributes like race and gender?

Disability status is much more diverse and complex in the ways that it affects people. A lot of systems will model race or gender as a simple variable with a small number of possible values. But when it comes to disability, there are so many different forms and different levels of severity. Some of them are permanent, some are temporary. Any one of us might join or leave this category at any time in our lives. It’s a dynamic thing.

I think the more general challenge for the AI community is how to handle outliers, because machine-learning systems—they learn norms, right? They optimize for norms and don’t treat outliers in any special way. But oftentimes people with disabilities don’t fit the norm. The way that machine learning judges people by who it thinks they’re similar to—even when it may never have seen anybody similar to you—is a fundamental limitation in terms of fair treatment for people with disabilities.

Source: Can you make an AI that isn’t ableist?

“VoiceOver is on the iPhone. They did it. They did it. They did it.”

“Here in one, one day, in one fell swoop, they’ve changed everything.”

“I went to the AT&T store and I bought myself an iPhone, and I was so mesmerized,” Sawczyn says. “I was able to do this at the same time as other people were buying their phones. I didn’t have to wait for a new version of software to come out, or an update to be made, or someone sighted to help me. I could just go to the AT&T Store, buy my device, go home, plug it in, and with iTunes, I could start up VoiceOver and the thing just worked great.”

“The accessibility of the iPhone changed my life, because now I’m working as a professional software developer,” Quinn says.

Source: 36 Seconds That Changed Everything – How the iPhone Learned to Talk

Great piece on the addition of VoiceOver to the iPhone ten years ago.

In Mills’s view, white supremacy is a system of power and domination, one founded on racial oppression and which provides material benefits to people socially defined as “white.” More broadly, critical race theorists such as Mills emphasize the role of European colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery in producing intertwined ideologies of white superiority and scientific racism in order to retroactively justify the (continued) exploitation of people socially defined as “nonwhite.” And here’s the kicker: Mills has convincingly argued that the maintenance of white supremacy involves and requires “cognitive dysfunctions” and warped representations of the social world that conveniently serve the interests of the majority population. These distortions and cognitive errors produce “the ironic outcome that whites [are] in general … unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”

This brings us back to Mills’s rather esoteric phrase: the epistemology of ignorance. The word “epistemology” refers to the study of knowledge and its formation, so an epistemology of ignorance would involve creating “knowledge” based on … a profound lack of knowledge or stupidity. Using fancy academic language, Mills is basically saying that whites’ ideas “about race” are fundamentally based on misrepresentations and distortions of social reality, but their “not knowing,” their ignorance, gets routinely repackaged as credible, authoritative “knowledge,” even as “science.” But racial ignorance is not restricted to white folks, unfortunately. My sociological interpretation of Mills’s argument is that racist societies socialize all of us to be racial idiots, insofar as we are exposed to forms of racial ignorance. Moreover, this widespread ignorance sustains the racial power structure, and the racial order, in turn, helps maintain the economic power of capitalist elites. The powerful always thrive on the miseducation of groups they seek to exploit and control. As long as everyday citizens are fed a daily mental diet of white supremacist ideology, historical ignorance, and disinformation, the overall power structure remains difficult to detect—and oppose. Thus, becoming less stupid about race involves discovering how we’ve all been socialized in ways that obscure the realities of racial domination for the benefit of white male property owners.

Source: Fleming, Crystal Marie. How to Be Less Stupid About Race (pp. 34-35). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

Beacon Press: How to Be Less Stupid About Race

When I finally turned to social media, I found that the recommendations I’d been given for how to care for Edmund were incomplete and ignored the crucial perspective of disabled adults. On Twitter, I connected with disabled people for the first time. I devoured their tweetstorms, blog posts, and articles. I started to learn about the experience of disability. Stella Young’s TED Talk on disability, with all her wry humor, made me rethink how disabled people are both sentimentalized and denied basic accommodations. By reading their perspectives, I saw Edmund in a whole new light.

I heard disabled adults argue that disabled kids need to learn agency and independence rather than compliance. They want to ensure that disabled people are accommodated and receive what they need to live their lives. Many disabled people don’t want to be cured; disability is frequently essential to their identities. This is even reflected in how most disabled people define themselves: They often prefer to be called “disabled people” because their disability is vital to their sense of self, whereas parents often say “people with disabilities” because they want to stress that their child’s disability doesn’t define them.

This may seem like semantics, but it reflects the tension between these two groups. Some disabled people resent that parents, not disabled people, are often the spokespeople for disability issues, because their priorities can be so different. Upon facing a diagnosis for a child that entails disability, parents often want a cure. Failing that, they frequently want their child’s disability to at least be less apparent to the outside world. I certainly empathized with this impulse. As parents, we want the world to readily accept our kids.

But when I read an autistic person describe firsthand how painful loud noises are, I began to understand how urgent it is that I protect Edmund from similar pain. I shouldn’t try to “manage” this behavior by coaching him to tolerate the pain, as some other parents and health care professionals recommended; I should instead remove him from a place with noises that hurt him. When I read some disabled people say that they did not want to be cured, that their disability was a part of who they were, I thought that perhaps Edmund felt that way too and was unable to communicate it. Julia Bascom, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, writes movingly of the fear and pain of being forced as a child to stop flapping her hands: “Not being able to talk is not the same as not having anything to say.”

Source: Adults with disabilities are the best resource for parents of children with disabilities.

They come into college quite damaged by school. And they perceive themselves as survivors in a battle. It’s particularly bad for writing because so much of writing is the ability to take a risk, to set a goal and risk failure.

Source: The Five-Paragraph Essay Must Die – Pacific Standard

What I’m realizing is, no matter how passionately I commit to being an ally, and no matter how unwavering my support is for NBA and WNBA players of color….. I’m still in this conversation from the privileged perspective of opting in to it. Which of course means that on the flip side, I could just as easily opt out of it. Every day, I’m given that choice — I’m granted that privilege — based on the color of my skin.

In other words, I can say every right thing in the world: I can voice my solidarity with Russ after what happened in Utah. I can evolve my position on what happened to Thabo in New York. I can be that weird dude in Get Out bragging about how he’d have voted for Obama a third term. I can condemn every racist heckler I’ve ever known.

But I can also fade into the crowd, and my face can blend in with the faces of those hecklers, any time I want.

I realize that now.

Source: Privileged | By Kyle Korver

Why don’t we know what PTSD looks like in autistic children? Why don’t we have a clear idea how many are experiencing it? I sense that this is because of the deeply problematic core belief in society that autistic distress is a ‘problem behaviour’ that is to be trained out of us. Looking at that list, anger, depression, aggression, irritability, panic, hypervigilance…. I’m mindful of how many behavioural-intervention checklists I see where those items are listed as ‘autism symptoms’ and the individual is relentlessly trained and rewarded for making their internal terror invisible to outsiders.

Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Autistic children – Are we helping them after trauma? PTSD. cPTSD.