To varying extents, we humans are familiar with humans’ racist tendencies toward one another. We may not be as aware that we can be racist toward robots too. A new study suggests that if robots have anthropomorphic features like eyes or a face, people will often look at the color of the machine and, if asked to, assign the robot a racial category. And when asked to respond to a threatening robot, humans are quicker to shoot black robots than white ones.
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You can get away with calling something “white trash” in polite company, on cable television and in the headline of a magazine article. An article in The New Republiconce posed the question of whether President Trump might be “a white trash icon.” For some reason, the term manages to come across as less offensive than most other racial slurs.
Yet “white trash” could be called the Swiss army knife of insults. It’s deft in its ability to demean multiple groups at once: white people and people of color, poor people and people who “act” like poor people, rural folks and religious folks, and anyone without a college degree.
So why does “white trash” still get thrown around without much pushback?
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Sex education in American public schools is routinely criticized by health experts as lacking in comprehensive information, using stigmatizing language, and increasing risks to students through abstinence-based programs. But for LGBTQ students, the stigma and risks associated with public school sex ed is even greater, because most schools simply ignore the topic of gender identity and LGBTQ sex ed in the curriculum, leaving many students physically and emotionally vulnerable.
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Melissa DePino didn’t take the infamous April video that showed two black men being handcuffed and ejected from a Philadelphia Starbucks—but she agreed to post it.
“I know these things happen,” the writer says, “but I’d never actually witnessed it myself. And when I saw it I thought ‘people need to see this.'”
So she uploaded and pressed “send.” It got millions of views, and people are still talking about it.
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Among the things 2018 will be remembered for is mainstream culture’s realization that white Americans use the police to challenge black entry into “white” spaces. Countless viral news stories detail how white people have called the police on black people for cooking, shopping, driving — basically for existing while black. A black body in a space presumed to be white is at best out of place and at worst a threat. This reality extends to less visible spaces, such as the historical archive. The archive, and black marginalization within it, has important implications for both scholarly and popular ideas about history.
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Income inequality – the gap in incomes between the rich and poor – has increased steadilyin the United States since the 1970s. By one measure, the gap between Americans at the top and the bottom of the income ladder increased 27% from 1970 to 2016. However, the rise in inequality within America’s racial and ethnic communities varies strikingly from one group to another, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
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Facebook has agreed to take steps within 90 days to limit what the Washington state attorney general’s office said was “unlawful discrimination,” by ending the ability of advertisers to exclude certain ethnic and other identity groups from seeing certain ads.
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Children’s books should feature more ethnic minority characters in central roles, a literacy charity has said.
The Centre for Literacy and Primary Education also said black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) characters should not be mainly defined by their struggle, suffering or “otherness”.
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Many of the public battles for transgender students have centered on the bathrooms they want to use. And according to a new paper, gender-neutral restrooms are the accommodation transgender and gender-nonconforming college students want most on their campuses. But there’s much more on their wish lists that would make them feel safe and comfortable.
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YOU PROBABLY KNOW BY now that many, many antibiotics are prescribed inappropriately – when they couldn’t possibly be of help – like for viral infections since the medications only treat bacterial infections. In fact, research finds tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotic prescriptionsare written each year in the outpatient setting, like doctors’ offices, alone.
While certainly there are some clinical judgment calls, factors associated with this glut of overprescribing often have little or nothing to do with what’s in the patient’s best interest. Even the time of day a patient sees a doctor (later in the day) has been linked to a greater likelihood that person will be prescribed an antibiotic. What’s more, research finds factors from the doctor’s age (older doctors tend to prescribe more antibiotics than younger ones) to patient demographics – including race and age – are linked to variations in inappropriate antibiotic prescribing rates.
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