I recently read an article in The New Yorker magazine [LINK] about how the stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj significantly exaggerated or conflated stories in his recent big stand-up comedy routines. In particular, these stories were about instances of racism or Islamophobia, including being the victim of police brutality, being part of a mosque that was infiltrated by an FBI agent, and being sent a mysterious powder that led to his child's hospitalization, that either didn't happen at all or were significantly exaggerated. As someone who has liked his work in the past and who could identify to some degree with his stand-up comedy material based on experiences as the child of immigrants from India, I found these allegations quite troubling, yet I also found myself struggling to articulate exactly why I found these allegations to be so troubling. This post is my attempt, in the current zeitgeist (as this is a very new story and new details could soon arise that would make this post irrelevant or incorrect), to make sense of these things. Follow the jump to see more.
Showing posts with label racial profiling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racial profiling. Show all posts
2022-10-02
Technological Restrictions on E-Books and Culture Wars on Books in 2022
Despite the long title, this post will be fairly short. This blog used to publish a lot more often (I had a lot more free time in high school & college) and focus a lot more on issues related to free software, free culture, and things like that, yet even after looking through posts on this blog from its early years (which, aligning with the stereotype of an adult looking through essays written in high school, made me cringe at the quality of writing even if I agreed with some of the basic opinions), I actually couldn't find any posts specifically about the effects of so-called digital rights management (DRM) on E-books.
In any case, I was motivated to write this because I recently listened to an episode [LINK] of a podcast associated with The Daily Show in which the guests discussed recent instances of conservative politicians in the US preventing public schools & libraries from teaching or carrying books that offend those politicians' cultural sensibilities. I distinctly remember reading in high school & college about warnings of the consequences of putting DRM on E-books, including making it easier to ban such books. At that time, I and many others felt it would be ridiculous for politically motivated book bans to take effect in the US especially given respect for the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Leaving aside whether such book bans from public schools & libraries technically violate that amendment if such bans don't go beyond those domains, it is disheartening to see a direct example of censorship so closely connected to technological restrictions that are politically motivated (not due to fundamental technical limitations). It will be interesting to see whether authors of banned books encourage or tolerate people scanning & sharing unauthorized PDF files of the books for free; this wouldn't be unprecedented, given that the huge markup of textbooks in the US compared to other countries has led many textbook authors to encourage students to buy cheaper editions from other countries.
2017-12-18
Book Review: "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly
I've recently read the book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. It weaves together the true stories of a few particular mathematicians, who happened to be black women (among a larger group of such female black mathematicians), who made extremely important contributions to the development of American warplanes in WWII and then spacecrafts during the 1950s and 1960s, including the crafts that took John Glenn to space and then the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. It highlights the skills of these women and their own personal lives, in conjunction with the broader social issues of that time.
The book is moderately long, but it is very well-written and engaging. I liked seeing the descriptions of these towns that flourished during the wartime years and the space race as bustling with life and energy, because with the trends of deindustrialization starting from a few decades ago, I haven't really been able to see descriptions such towns as much beyond shells of their former selves. This also ties in with the discussions of the military-industrial complex and how the formation of these towns during the wartime was a symptom of that phenomenon, which in turn meant that as wartime research facilities and organizations were often temporary, even if they hired black people, allowing them to economically advance to the middle class, those economic advancements became tenuous due to the temporary nature of such jobs, such that when the goal was met (whether it was winning the war or landing on the moon), those facilities would be closed and the employees there would be displaced with few, if any, alternatives available to them. Of course, pervading the book were descriptions of the explicit and implicit forms of institutionalized racism and sexism, whether at work in the form of barriers to career advancement or collegiality/free exchange of ideas, or in the context of daily life with respect to the civil rights movement, sit-ins, et cetera. Not only were those issues discussed in a broader context, but their impact on the specific protagonists of the book was detailed, showing how these women had to deal with so many struggles just to stay afloat while still trying to achieve the same goals to which any other family of any ethnicity would strive, namely, caring for spouses and children, putting food on the table, balancing work and family, and being able to raise children in a safe environment and educate them well; it really helped that the author so masterfully portrayed the mundanity of daily daily life for these women to show how stupid obstacles, like legalized segregation and institutionalized barriers to career advancement, could get in the way of the passion that these women had for STEM. It was also interesting to see that black communities like those in this book were acutely aware of how much more advanced the USSR and other communist countries were in terms of race and gender relations, and actively called out the US on its own failings in that regard (in the context of the US trying to ally with African and Asian countries that used to be European colonies), while these black women, despite being in the middle of such institutional bigotry, kept their heads held high and persevered in pursuit of their goals to contribute to STEM R&D. Related to that, it was also chilling to see how de facto segregation has persisted in education in many places through the US resulting in school facilities that in many poor places are no better than they were several decades ago, and also to see how many of the arguments for white parents sending their kids to private schools at that time were more explicitly about preserving racial segregation in education. Overall, I enjoyed this book thoroughly and would strongly recommend it to people for a clear and engaging account of how NASA and the social issues of the middle of the 20th century became intertwined.
The book is moderately long, but it is very well-written and engaging. I liked seeing the descriptions of these towns that flourished during the wartime years and the space race as bustling with life and energy, because with the trends of deindustrialization starting from a few decades ago, I haven't really been able to see descriptions such towns as much beyond shells of their former selves. This also ties in with the discussions of the military-industrial complex and how the formation of these towns during the wartime was a symptom of that phenomenon, which in turn meant that as wartime research facilities and organizations were often temporary, even if they hired black people, allowing them to economically advance to the middle class, those economic advancements became tenuous due to the temporary nature of such jobs, such that when the goal was met (whether it was winning the war or landing on the moon), those facilities would be closed and the employees there would be displaced with few, if any, alternatives available to them. Of course, pervading the book were descriptions of the explicit and implicit forms of institutionalized racism and sexism, whether at work in the form of barriers to career advancement or collegiality/free exchange of ideas, or in the context of daily life with respect to the civil rights movement, sit-ins, et cetera. Not only were those issues discussed in a broader context, but their impact on the specific protagonists of the book was detailed, showing how these women had to deal with so many struggles just to stay afloat while still trying to achieve the same goals to which any other family of any ethnicity would strive, namely, caring for spouses and children, putting food on the table, balancing work and family, and being able to raise children in a safe environment and educate them well; it really helped that the author so masterfully portrayed the mundanity of daily daily life for these women to show how stupid obstacles, like legalized segregation and institutionalized barriers to career advancement, could get in the way of the passion that these women had for STEM. It was also interesting to see that black communities like those in this book were acutely aware of how much more advanced the USSR and other communist countries were in terms of race and gender relations, and actively called out the US on its own failings in that regard (in the context of the US trying to ally with African and Asian countries that used to be European colonies), while these black women, despite being in the middle of such institutional bigotry, kept their heads held high and persevered in pursuit of their goals to contribute to STEM R&D. Related to that, it was also chilling to see how de facto segregation has persisted in education in many places through the US resulting in school facilities that in many poor places are no better than they were several decades ago, and also to see how many of the arguments for white parents sending their kids to private schools at that time were more explicitly about preserving racial segregation in education. Overall, I enjoyed this book thoroughly and would strongly recommend it to people for a clear and engaging account of how NASA and the social issues of the middle of the 20th century became intertwined.
2016-12-19
Book Review: "Identity and Violence" by Amartya Sen
I've recently been able to read the book Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen. It's a relatively shorter book, taking me ~3 hours to finish. The author focuses broadly on how personal identity is neither singular nor static, but is multifaceted, context-dependent, and dynamically evolving over time based on the choices people make. He further argues that a lot of sectarian strife (whatever identity the sect may encompass) occurs because people can be led to make one facet of their identity encompass their entire identity and to then act in destructive ways based on that. Additionally, he provides numerous examples of how facets that tend to be associated with individual cultures (whether ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other), with such shoehorning leading to detrimental stereotyping and unsupportable cultural fatalism, have in fact emerged over many such cultures across continents at various points in time, sometimes independently, while other times due to cultural contact and diffusion. With this, he suggests that a lot of the well-meaning efforts to integrate religious minorities into Western society, as well as efforts to reconcile religious or ethnic factions that have been at war in other countries, are misguided due to their single-minded focus on the same sorts of categorization that have led to such conflicts in the first place, and that instead, such efforts should appeal to the broad variety of identities that people hold dear to them and that make them feel whole.
Overall, I generally agree with the thrust of this book (further justifying the notion that Amartya Sen seems to capture my lay ideas about economics and society in a systematic and scholarly manner), and the numerous historical examples of cultural interaction, cultural diffusion, and the development of ideas such as democratic political participation and the protection of human rights across continents and across time periods of course jibes with things that I've learned in history classes in school and elsewhere. The book is a pretty solid read (despite a couple of minor typos that can easily be overlooked), and it brings forth many interesting ideas. I'm glad that I read it recently, given that issues of privilege, identity politics, and communal violence have been in the news lately; I would perhaps like to think that the author may have articulated ideas of privilege and "intersectionality" before those terms came into vogue in the last few years for people interested in social justice, but something the book makes clear is that these ideas of intersectionality, if not the particular jargon, are probably much older than just a few decades. Despite all of that, I do feel like there may be a few things missing in the discussion, and my question about those issues come after the jump.
Overall, I generally agree with the thrust of this book (further justifying the notion that Amartya Sen seems to capture my lay ideas about economics and society in a systematic and scholarly manner), and the numerous historical examples of cultural interaction, cultural diffusion, and the development of ideas such as democratic political participation and the protection of human rights across continents and across time periods of course jibes with things that I've learned in history classes in school and elsewhere. The book is a pretty solid read (despite a couple of minor typos that can easily be overlooked), and it brings forth many interesting ideas. I'm glad that I read it recently, given that issues of privilege, identity politics, and communal violence have been in the news lately; I would perhaps like to think that the author may have articulated ideas of privilege and "intersectionality" before those terms came into vogue in the last few years for people interested in social justice, but something the book makes clear is that these ideas of intersectionality, if not the particular jargon, are probably much older than just a few decades. Despite all of that, I do feel like there may be a few things missing in the discussion, and my question about those issues come after the jump.
2010-01-21
Of Tefillin and Terrorists
A lot of news outlets today have reported on a bomb scare involving a teenage Orthodox Jewish boy and his religious paraphernalia on a plane flight. The item in question is called a tefillin (sp?); his fellow plane passengers mistook it for a bomb. He was released without arrest after being questioned after landing.
My question is, are we going to start searching all teenage Jewish boys?
Oh, wait.
I am not in any way trying to imply displeasure at the inability to search teenage Jewish boys. Quite the opposite - I am expressing my disgust at the people who have seriously suggested strip-searching all young Muslim adult passengers in the wake of the failed Christmas Day bombing. They suggest that, yet they won't say anything about this kid. What hypocrisy.
I similarly don't like Franklin Roosevelt as much as some other liberals (I like him, but I don't love him) because of the internment of Japanese citizens following the Pearl Harbor bombing. I certainly do not condone that sort of thing, but relative to the failed Christmas Day bombing and its aftermath among the talking heads here, the internment had a tiny modicum of validity: the attack was by the Japanese government, and many Japanese families here had relatives still in Japan. Compare that to the fact that the Christmas Day bomber was part of an extremist group that is not part of a government operation (though some governments allow/accept/promote its existence in those countries).
People, let's stop discriminating against a race/ethnicity after one person commits a terrible crime (or comes really, really close). I would much rather see British security here, as they look for suspicious activity without racial profiling and without taking all things like toothpaste tubes and water bottles from people (as far as I know). That's how the planned hijackings from London in 2005 were averted before the planes could get off the ground; I remember news analysis saying that British Airways was so displeased with the US intelligence failure that it was about to implement its own standards in US airports to which it flew.
My question is, are we going to start searching all teenage Jewish boys?
Oh, wait.
I am not in any way trying to imply displeasure at the inability to search teenage Jewish boys. Quite the opposite - I am expressing my disgust at the people who have seriously suggested strip-searching all young Muslim adult passengers in the wake of the failed Christmas Day bombing. They suggest that, yet they won't say anything about this kid. What hypocrisy.
I similarly don't like Franklin Roosevelt as much as some other liberals (I like him, but I don't love him) because of the internment of Japanese citizens following the Pearl Harbor bombing. I certainly do not condone that sort of thing, but relative to the failed Christmas Day bombing and its aftermath among the talking heads here, the internment had a tiny modicum of validity: the attack was by the Japanese government, and many Japanese families here had relatives still in Japan. Compare that to the fact that the Christmas Day bomber was part of an extremist group that is not part of a government operation (though some governments allow/accept/promote its existence in those countries).
People, let's stop discriminating against a race/ethnicity after one person commits a terrible crime (or comes really, really close). I would much rather see British security here, as they look for suspicious activity without racial profiling and without taking all things like toothpaste tubes and water bottles from people (as far as I know). That's how the planned hijackings from London in 2005 were averted before the planes could get off the ground; I remember news analysis saying that British Airways was so displeased with the US intelligence failure that it was about to implement its own standards in US airports to which it flew.
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