Searching for "unprofessional hairstyles" and "professional hairstyles" on Google Images exposes a stark racial divide in what's assumed to be appropriate for business settings. Spotted by @bonkamona, the results differ somewhat by platform or query wording, but the ethnic issue remains: professionals are pale-skinned, unprofessionals dark-skinned.
Google's algorithm is a trade secret, so it's hard to tell where the bias sits between engineering, traditional SEO efforts, link-tracking, etc. The top "professional" headshots link to pinterest boards and inane listicles, whereas the "unprofessional" shots are mostly to serious, aware discussion of the issue of ethnicity, hair and professional environments.
Freeman Vines is a luthier in Fountain, North Carolina. For half a century, he’s crafted beautiful guitars from wood taken from a tree used to lynch Black people. Vines deeply moving work is the subject of a new photography book, Hanging Tree Guitars, with tintype images by Timothy Duffy and essays by Zoe Van Buren […]
As part of NPR’s Throughline podcast episode on the history of racialized policing in America, they created a brief overview with Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
Grindr, a popular hookup app, yesterday announced it was removing its “ethnicity” filter. Announcing the change, Grindr said it had a “zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech” on its platform. It’s a problem Grindr long ignored, but something has forced its hand. The BBC’s Ben Hunte says because white users have started speaking out: […]
“The way to have power is to take it.” — Boss Tweed. We think an 18th-century political power broker probably had a different definition of power in mind when he made that statement, yet the sentiment still applies. We’ve all got devices all but falling out of our pockets and the need for power to […]
If the last 50 years of education have taught us nothing else, it’s that it often requires different tactics to best reach different learners. To pick up a foreign language, some students take best to the old-school high school language lab method, using heavy repetition, verb conjugation and grammar emphasis to embed a new language. […]
For those who want a career in video games, there’s no reason to sit around and wait. EA and Rockstar Games probably aren’t going to seek you out and knock on your door with a job opportunity. But if you’re an indie developer with a good idea and some passion, you can create a really […]
