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Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism: Collects a lot of criticisms of Google’s dominance, focused on the racist implications of taking the corpus as you find it, e.g., searching for “black girls” for a long time returned only porn on the first page. Only some people can live in a “filter bubble” where everything they see reinforces their own beliefs; racism and sexism come to people who don’t want them. Noble had to “take it as a given that any search I might perform using keywords connected to my physical self and identity could return pornographic and otherwise disturbing results,” and asks: “Why was this the bargain into which I had tacitly entered with digital information tools? And who among us did not have to bargain in this way?” Black Girls Code is nice, Noble argues, but it’s not black girls’ job to solve Silicon Valley’s racist exclusion and misrepresentation.
The problem is: what to do? Noble complains that Google directs searches to conglomerate news sources, but on YouTube that doesn’t happen and the results seem to be worse, leaning towards extremism and conspiracies, with a lot of racism. Past forms of information sorting were really bad too; Noble notes the history of racist Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress classifications (not just history, though more contested now). She also discusses how Dylann Roof was radicalized by reading online, starting from Wikipedia and going from there—searches for “black on white crime” lead to white supremacist sites, rather than to neutral crime statistics that would reveal that most crime is intraracial. Could anything other than human moderation stop this pattern? I just don’t know; Noble suggests developing public search engines so that corporate motivations wouldn’t control the data collection/surveillance, but (1) they’d still confront the problems of dealing with a racist corpus, and (2) I’m not so hot on government surveillance either. Another suggestion is a black-friendly search engine, and there are some moves towards that, but I don’t think that solves the problem for people who don’t know to seek it out in the first place—or people like Roof.
The last chapter of the book focuses on a small business owner who cares for black hair, and whose business was harmed by two neoliberal blows—a decrease in the number of African-American students because of anti-diversity policies, and the rise of Yelp, which represented an increased cost—they’d only give her prominence/keep other hairdressers off her page if she paid, even if the other places didn’t specialize in black hair—and also presented particular difficulties for her reviews, inasmuch as she perceived that her customers were less likely to use Yelp in the first place than white people, so their reviews of her place might be the only reviews those customers left on Yelp and thus were more likely to look fake to Yelp. “Black people don’t ‘check in’ and let people know where they’re at when they sit in my chair. They already feel like they are being hunted; they aren’t going to tell The Man where they are. I have reviews from real clients that they put into a filter because it doesn’t meet their requirements of how they think someone should review.” Not that she was all that fond of all her customers—she also complained about people who came into her business to photograph the products she used, then order them online for less. Again, search engines aren’t the only problem she’s facing; it’s a constellation of economic and social changes of which search engines are only a part, perhaps a minor part, though it’s certainly worth pointing out that the small producers are the ones from whom wealth can still be extracted by these larger companies like Yelp.
Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, ed. Katherine Anderson Howell: Written by scholars and their students, this collection explores various ways in which fandom can be used in the classroom. Among others I found instructive: Anna Smol writes about having students create fanworks of their choice, letting them express themselves in ways otherwise unavailable in a literature classroom, and Shannon Farley writes about using vids to teach criticism/deconstruction (although I have to say I disagree with her that the Doctor Who Handlebars vid isn’t a reading against the grain; she says it’s just saying what characters like Harriet Jones say in the show).
Rukmini Pande writes about using racebending and fancasting to create productive discomfort about race in students (and tells a striking story about how her class initially fan-cast a live-action Lion King with almost all white actors right after studying articles about Hollywood bias). “The students had so far been rather quiet, but they suddenly became a lot more vocal in arguing the fact that the exercise was a direct product of their own prejudice. One student said quite heatedly, ‘There are white people in Africa, too, you know!’ I agreed, and then pushed her to justify why this specific narrative—that of a royal family that seemingly drew from indigenous customs and languages—should be enacted by white people.”
Paul Booth writes about teaching different waves of fan studies that in some ways recapitulate students’ own journeys. Also, a teacher who used assignments on Tumblr found that “the community environment created by both the peer-to-peer elements and the low-stakes writing assigned on Tumblr became especially important to nonnative speakers of English enrolled in the class.” Feedback was also better: “Even when students knew the icons and usernames of their peers, the level of imagined anonymity that such usernames and icons afforded enabled the students to offer authentic opinions and lengthy reviews of their peers’ work that they otherwise would not have offered if forced to confront their peers face-to-face.”
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy: Depressing but important: white women did the day to day work of implementing and defending white supremacy throughout the 20th century. Initially, white women worked as registrars and social workers (classifying people by race and denying whiteness and other benefits to the undeserving) and teachers (ensuring that children learned the naturalness of white supremacy and the tragic consequences of northern intervention into the South’s peculiar institution). They implemented segregation and white supremacy at the local level, even if we mostly remember the male politicians who purported to lead the charge.
Later, when desegregation became a legal mandate, white women worked on electoral politics and popular culture to fight back. Southerners made white allies all over the country, building the foundations for a larger movement of white backlash that would use deracialized language to fight government “overreach.” Claiming the special right to defend domesticity and intimacy—especially against interracial sex—white women insisted that they were working for the good of (white) children, thus justifying their public participation. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited North Carolina in 1942 and lunched with black men and women, rather than just sweeping in and out of a black college like a benevolent better, no white woman would host her overnight: she was an existential threat. White motherhood required policing against interracial sex, which was inherently suggested by interracial dining. They also blamed Eleanor Roosevelt for rumors about how WWII would get black women out of white women’s kitchens and force white women to be subordinate to black women. In a standard move, they made her an outside agitator: “By naming these underground activities ‘Eleanor Clubs,’ white southern women were able to recast what was black women’s rising labor independence and more generally an emerging, powerful civil rights campaign as the work of a white female authority figure.”
White segregationist women led the charge to leave the Democratic party because, unlike white men, they didn’t have “party perks and election deals” to lose when charging it had betrayed its racist ideals. They adopted a domestic anti-communism linking segregation, anti-United Nations activism, oversight of white children’s education, “and the policing of seemingly benign outsiders polluting communities with incindiary ideas.” Of course, anything homegrown, like student activists at UNC, was misguided and misled—turns out those attacks on UNC for liberalism go a ways back (“North Carolinians never intended to pay taxes ‘on a nest for Muscovite fledglings’”) though they’ve recently undergone a resurgence. And in the end, the protection of white children/white womanhood was about sex: one of McRae’s central subjects, a political activist/newspaper writer, ends up screaming at her slightly more liberal editor, “I hope all your daughters have n---- babies,” which is pretty much what the segregationist position reduced to. McRae points out that white women spent less time on scaremongering about rape than white men did—they were more concerned about consensual interracial sex. Segregation was always about the fear that intimacy would be unencumbered by racial hierarchy: “When Pat Watters’s lone black second grade student stood in line for his hug on the last day of school, Watters remembered being stunned that a black seven-year-old would expect a hug just like his white classmates.”
The lessons of massive resistance also point to the limited potential of compromise: a number of McRae’s subjects started out as Southern white “liberals” in the sense that they condemned lynching and advocated for limited amounts of equality, for example in improving black schools. But after Brown declared desegregation to be the law of the land, they stopped their protectiveness, refusing to condemn the murder of Emmett Till. And when parents kept their children out of school or closed down schools, they taught their children “that preserving whiteness and racial segregation mattered more to their parents than a high school diploma, a college scholarship, or even Friday night football.” And, McRae notes, white children “who heard the shouts of ‘school choice’ in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s became the parents on the left and the right who witnessed and supported the rise of ‘school choice’ in the 1990s.”
The problem is: what to do? Noble complains that Google directs searches to conglomerate news sources, but on YouTube that doesn’t happen and the results seem to be worse, leaning towards extremism and conspiracies, with a lot of racism. Past forms of information sorting were really bad too; Noble notes the history of racist Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress classifications (not just history, though more contested now). She also discusses how Dylann Roof was radicalized by reading online, starting from Wikipedia and going from there—searches for “black on white crime” lead to white supremacist sites, rather than to neutral crime statistics that would reveal that most crime is intraracial. Could anything other than human moderation stop this pattern? I just don’t know; Noble suggests developing public search engines so that corporate motivations wouldn’t control the data collection/surveillance, but (1) they’d still confront the problems of dealing with a racist corpus, and (2) I’m not so hot on government surveillance either. Another suggestion is a black-friendly search engine, and there are some moves towards that, but I don’t think that solves the problem for people who don’t know to seek it out in the first place—or people like Roof.
The last chapter of the book focuses on a small business owner who cares for black hair, and whose business was harmed by two neoliberal blows—a decrease in the number of African-American students because of anti-diversity policies, and the rise of Yelp, which represented an increased cost—they’d only give her prominence/keep other hairdressers off her page if she paid, even if the other places didn’t specialize in black hair—and also presented particular difficulties for her reviews, inasmuch as she perceived that her customers were less likely to use Yelp in the first place than white people, so their reviews of her place might be the only reviews those customers left on Yelp and thus were more likely to look fake to Yelp. “Black people don’t ‘check in’ and let people know where they’re at when they sit in my chair. They already feel like they are being hunted; they aren’t going to tell The Man where they are. I have reviews from real clients that they put into a filter because it doesn’t meet their requirements of how they think someone should review.” Not that she was all that fond of all her customers—she also complained about people who came into her business to photograph the products she used, then order them online for less. Again, search engines aren’t the only problem she’s facing; it’s a constellation of economic and social changes of which search engines are only a part, perhaps a minor part, though it’s certainly worth pointing out that the small producers are the ones from whom wealth can still be extracted by these larger companies like Yelp.
Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, ed. Katherine Anderson Howell: Written by scholars and their students, this collection explores various ways in which fandom can be used in the classroom. Among others I found instructive: Anna Smol writes about having students create fanworks of their choice, letting them express themselves in ways otherwise unavailable in a literature classroom, and Shannon Farley writes about using vids to teach criticism/deconstruction (although I have to say I disagree with her that the Doctor Who Handlebars vid isn’t a reading against the grain; she says it’s just saying what characters like Harriet Jones say in the show).
Rukmini Pande writes about using racebending and fancasting to create productive discomfort about race in students (and tells a striking story about how her class initially fan-cast a live-action Lion King with almost all white actors right after studying articles about Hollywood bias). “The students had so far been rather quiet, but they suddenly became a lot more vocal in arguing the fact that the exercise was a direct product of their own prejudice. One student said quite heatedly, ‘There are white people in Africa, too, you know!’ I agreed, and then pushed her to justify why this specific narrative—that of a royal family that seemingly drew from indigenous customs and languages—should be enacted by white people.”
Paul Booth writes about teaching different waves of fan studies that in some ways recapitulate students’ own journeys. Also, a teacher who used assignments on Tumblr found that “the community environment created by both the peer-to-peer elements and the low-stakes writing assigned on Tumblr became especially important to nonnative speakers of English enrolled in the class.” Feedback was also better: “Even when students knew the icons and usernames of their peers, the level of imagined anonymity that such usernames and icons afforded enabled the students to offer authentic opinions and lengthy reviews of their peers’ work that they otherwise would not have offered if forced to confront their peers face-to-face.”
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy: Depressing but important: white women did the day to day work of implementing and defending white supremacy throughout the 20th century. Initially, white women worked as registrars and social workers (classifying people by race and denying whiteness and other benefits to the undeserving) and teachers (ensuring that children learned the naturalness of white supremacy and the tragic consequences of northern intervention into the South’s peculiar institution). They implemented segregation and white supremacy at the local level, even if we mostly remember the male politicians who purported to lead the charge.
Later, when desegregation became a legal mandate, white women worked on electoral politics and popular culture to fight back. Southerners made white allies all over the country, building the foundations for a larger movement of white backlash that would use deracialized language to fight government “overreach.” Claiming the special right to defend domesticity and intimacy—especially against interracial sex—white women insisted that they were working for the good of (white) children, thus justifying their public participation. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited North Carolina in 1942 and lunched with black men and women, rather than just sweeping in and out of a black college like a benevolent better, no white woman would host her overnight: she was an existential threat. White motherhood required policing against interracial sex, which was inherently suggested by interracial dining. They also blamed Eleanor Roosevelt for rumors about how WWII would get black women out of white women’s kitchens and force white women to be subordinate to black women. In a standard move, they made her an outside agitator: “By naming these underground activities ‘Eleanor Clubs,’ white southern women were able to recast what was black women’s rising labor independence and more generally an emerging, powerful civil rights campaign as the work of a white female authority figure.”
White segregationist women led the charge to leave the Democratic party because, unlike white men, they didn’t have “party perks and election deals” to lose when charging it had betrayed its racist ideals. They adopted a domestic anti-communism linking segregation, anti-United Nations activism, oversight of white children’s education, “and the policing of seemingly benign outsiders polluting communities with incindiary ideas.” Of course, anything homegrown, like student activists at UNC, was misguided and misled—turns out those attacks on UNC for liberalism go a ways back (“North Carolinians never intended to pay taxes ‘on a nest for Muscovite fledglings’”) though they’ve recently undergone a resurgence. And in the end, the protection of white children/white womanhood was about sex: one of McRae’s central subjects, a political activist/newspaper writer, ends up screaming at her slightly more liberal editor, “I hope all your daughters have n---- babies,” which is pretty much what the segregationist position reduced to. McRae points out that white women spent less time on scaremongering about rape than white men did—they were more concerned about consensual interracial sex. Segregation was always about the fear that intimacy would be unencumbered by racial hierarchy: “When Pat Watters’s lone black second grade student stood in line for his hug on the last day of school, Watters remembered being stunned that a black seven-year-old would expect a hug just like his white classmates.”
The lessons of massive resistance also point to the limited potential of compromise: a number of McRae’s subjects started out as Southern white “liberals” in the sense that they condemned lynching and advocated for limited amounts of equality, for example in improving black schools. But after Brown declared desegregation to be the law of the land, they stopped their protectiveness, refusing to condemn the murder of Emmett Till. And when parents kept their children out of school or closed down schools, they taught their children “that preserving whiteness and racial segregation mattered more to their parents than a high school diploma, a college scholarship, or even Friday night football.” And, McRae notes, white children “who heard the shouts of ‘school choice’ in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s became the parents on the left and the right who witnessed and supported the rise of ‘school choice’ in the 1990s.”
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