IVYPAC is a group of politically-savvy women from across the United States working to help elect Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters to Congress. In 2018, they endorsed Lauren Underwood, who won a stunning upset against a four-term GOP incumbent. So especially since there’s such broad agreement Black women are a major force in the Democratic Party, IVYPAC’S announcement of a Twenty State GOTV Push for Senator Kamala Harris (the only AKA sister running for President in 2020) is another good sign for the Harris.
Here’s what I get from Google News if I do a search for “ivypac kamala harris”
Higher Heights is the largest online political organization dedicated to harnessing, organizing and mobilizing Black women’s political power, with over 90,000 members. They’ve been building out the #BlackWomenVote campaign for over a year — and, most political analysts would agree, Black women are a major force in the Democratic Party.
So even though Higher Heights endorsement of Sen. Kamala Harris wasn’t the only significant endorsement that was announced last week, it’s a pretty big deal.
Here’s what I get when I search Google news for “Kamala Harris endorsements”:
And here’s what I get from doing the same search on reddit:
Kamala Harris is empirically mentioned less often than other candidates, even when there is every reason to center her in a news story.
Yeah really. And of course it’s not just Harris; Higher Heights is also getting erased here.
In my next post, I’ll look at another significant endorsement from last week. First, though, here’s Kamala Harris talking with Zerlina Maxwell and Jess McIntosh on Signal Boost on SiriusXM Progress. The tweet has a short video, and a link of to SiriusXM for the full discussion.
Missed @ZerlinaMaxwell & @jess_mc‘s chat with @KamalaHarris from this week? Especially the part where she talked about the ongoing media erasure of her campaign?
DRAFT! Feedback welcome!
Please do not share widely yet!
Black Womxn For, a group of 100 Black women, gender non-conforming, and non-binary, and queer folk, endorsed Elizabeth Warren on Thursday. Since as is generally acknowledged Black women are the reliable base of the Democratic party, and one of the biggest questions about Warren’s campaign is whether she can appeal to Black voters in general, this is a pretty big deal.
The top stories throughout the day on Google News and reddit’s r/politics throughout the day were about Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Trump and Bill Barr, Tom Steyer, Rudy Giuliani, Trump, Jim Jordan, …
Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.
Sure, these are all legitimate news stories, but so is an endorsement from 100 activists from a demographic that’s the Democrats’ strongest supporters — and Warren quite rightly describes as “the backbone of our democracy. So not showing this story is a great example of the dynamics Safiya Noble describes in Algorithms of Oppression. Algorithms privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way. The Nexus Today is a news aggregator that focuses on amplifying marginalized voices … and guess what, the top stories on the politics page on Thursday were about the Black Womxn For endorsement. I would love to say this is because of a brilliant algorithmic breakthrough, but no, actually it turns out that even straightforward techniques work well.
It’s almost like the Googles and Reddits of the world don’t even try.
Community voting for the 2019 SXSW conference begins today, so I wanted to let people know aboutTo Save Tech, #ListentoBlackWomen , a panel proposal by Shireen Mitchell of Stop Online Violence Against Women, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble of USC (author of the excellent Algorithms of Oppression), and me.
The disinformation, hacking, harassment, recruiting to extremist causes that we saw online during the 2016 elections highlight patterns Black women have long called attention to. So do the algorithmic biases of search algorithms, facial recognition software, and ad targeting; and the woefully inadequate responses of big tech companies including their tendency to look to AI as a magic tech solution. Listening to Black women is a path for the tech industry to get beyond its history of aiding hate, racists, sexists, nativists, and anti-LGBTQ+ bigots, and move in the direction of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion within the industry.
Vote for it on the SXSW site. You’ll need to create an account to vote; once you do, the VOTE UP button is on the left-hand side.
Leave a comment saying why you’re voting for it. To leave a comment, you’ll need to log in separately via Twitter, Facebook, or Disqus… I hate software. Still, comments are doubly helpful: the selection committee takes them into account; and, if other people see that somebody has commented, they’re more likely to comment themselves.
Share it with your friends and colleagues who might be interested, in email or on social networks.
SXSW says that community voting counts for about 30% of their decision. Since white guys have historically been overrepresented at SXSW (and Black women historically underrepresented), and most voters are past attendees, there’s a built-in bias against panels like ours. So even though it’s inconvenient, your support is greatly appreciated.
The good news is that once you’ve created the account and logged in, it’s easy to support multiple proposals! There are quite a few others that are interesting (and in many cases great complements to ours). For example:
Having said all that, here’s a bit more background about our proposal.
The origin for this specific proposal was a Twitter Moment that Shireen put together a few months ago called Hacking of 2016 would have never happened had folks #ListenedToBW. All three of us have focused on the underlying issues in our presentations and writings. To get an idea of where we’re coming from, as well as the videos on the SXSW page, check out
And while you’re at it, look around the SXSW site for other interesting panels featuring Black women – and vote them up so that SXSW attendees can listen to them as well 🙂
Torn Apart / Separados visualizes the geo-spatial, financial, and infrastructural dimensions of immigrant detention in in the wake of the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. The map above is just one of their visualizations of the locations of ICE facilities and private detention centers, based on aggregating and cross-referencing publicly available data.
With this information, perhaps our communities will begin to see the magnitude of the threat to human dignity occurring on our watch and the complex machinery driving government policy. Perhaps rather than feeling helpless, we can recognize that we have skills to tread these troubled waters, particularly in collaboration with each other.
It’s an important project. The data’s extremely useful for activists, advocates, and journalists. If you have the skills and a bit of time to help, Torn Apart / Separados offers a chance to make a huge impact in a humanitarian crisis. Here’s a few links with more information:
Danica Savonick’s Torn Apart/Separados Hackathon & HASTAC Meet-up Recap describes the design sprint and hackathon at the Digital Humanities 2018 conference in Mexico City, and includes a list of short- and long-term project ideas.
Lindsay McKenzie’s Digital humanities for social good, on Inside Higher Ed, has some excellent context for how Torn Apart / Separados and other digital humanities projects and other rapidly produced and highly topicalare challenging perceptions of the field.
Our mathematical analysis demonstrates the existence of an algorithmic glass ceiling that exhibits all the properties of the metaphorical social barrier that hinders groups like women or people of colour from attaining equal representation.
One would a priori expect similarity metrics, usually the basis of recommender systems, to contribute to sustaining disparities among various groups. We show much more: using empirical evidence from newly collected data on Instagram and a rigorous analysis of mathematical models, we prove that prominent recommender algorithms reinforce the rate at which disparity grows.
The first couple of sections of the paper are a quick read, after which it gets into some heavy-duty math. Fortunately, Kim Martineau’s How Social Networking Sites May Discriminate Against Women on Columbia News, is a good summary; and Adrian Collyer, on the ACM’s The morning paper, walks through the paper in detail.
The underlying dynamic here of homophily — people’s tendency to prefer to interact with people similar to themselves — isn’t new. Neither is the idea of a “glass ceiling” in social media,* or realization that algorithmic recommendations reflect societal biases.** What’s important about this paper is both the formal model and the experimental results showing bias amplification.
Most alarming is that male journalists amplify and engage male peers almost exclusively, while female journalists tend to engage most with each other. The significant support for claims of gender asymmetry as well as evidence of gender silos are findings that not only underscore the importance of further research but also suggest overarching consequences for the structure of contemporary political communication.
