Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

From What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success.

For a discussion about why “Other” is problematic as a category, see Sarah Dopp’s piece from November, 2010 “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context). She’s much smarter than I am about gender and identity, so I’ll point you there.

I, however, question the need to ask for a user’s gender at all. As Munroe said in his Google+ post:

They also (obviously) want to know more about you so they can serve ads; advertisers care about gender. But again, that’s no reason to make gender public.

Identity is a multi-faceted thing. One part of a person’s identity may well be subsumed or tempered by another aspect of it. Aside from perhaps personals ads, is there a reason to collect it at all?

By demographics, I am a married, college-educated, employed, black woman in my mid-30s. Those demographic datapoints suggest that I would care about working mother issues, Tyler Perry, and church. Ads served to me based on those assumptions, however, would miss their target. I am a child-free atheist and quite intent on remaining so. And no, I don’t like Tyler Perry.

About the only thing a gender field tells you is whether a person identifies as male, female, or neither. But if advertisers insist that they need to know gender so they can misfire ads, I propose using either or both of the following strategies:

• Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender
• Provide a preferred pronoun field

Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender

It’s a simple idea: put a text input field in the user interface. Users can enter what they wish. Then using a list of something gendered — male and female words (“dude” / “dudette”), names, perhaps closest connections — we can guess at the gender of the user in question.

Of course, this approach is problematic in that it is imprecise. Techie and tomboyish women may be misidentified as male. But I suspect such misidentification would actually make ads more relevant to those women.

Provide a preferred pronoun field

Even better: let the user set the pronoun he or she or ze or zir prefers. This settles questions such as those faced by xkcd where a bot or user interface needs to be grammatically correct. But it is not necessarily a definitive statment about gender.

And again: give users the option to make that data public, private, or leave it out altogether.

(Via The Mary Sue)

*Google has changed this (or will soon).

This generation of the middle classes has internalised the values of individualist aspiration, as zealously propagated by Tony Blair as by Margaret Thatcher. It does not look to the application of social justice to improve its lot. It expects to rely on its own efforts to get ahead and, crucially, to maintain its position.

From Peter Wilby’s column in The Guardian, Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage, published yesterday.

Design conferences are like a competition, and only the best of the best are allowed the privilege of sharing their wealth of knowledge and experience to teach us. Any other perspective is illogical. I will also ignore the fact that slaves were originally prohibited from competing in the Olympics.

That’s Faruk Ateş in his post from last week. In it, Ateş snarkily responds to some posts and Twitter comments about women and minority representation at conferences. His post is titled “Translation of General Misogyny to Uncomfortable Truth.” It’s a good’un.

That said, I will add my belated $.02:

• What may be equal treatment isn’t necessarily equitable treatment. In fact, equal is often decidedly inequitable. See: Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Ed.
• Why in these dichotomies are women and speakers of color posited as inferior? The phrase beginning “just because…” suggests you think it isn’t at all possible that a woman or person of color could be an excellent, but overlooked speaker. At the very least, it suggests that mediocrity is okay as long as someone white and male is engaging in it. It argues that being selected is conclusive evidence of speaker quality and not a function of who the organizers know (of).
• Why do we assume that white men aren’t chosen because their white male-ness appeals to other white men who make up a majority, but by no means the entirety of people in tech?

Translation: Faruk is spot on.

I am tired of people having this debate about the relative impact of pejorative words on their target minority group. If injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then the relative power of an antigay gay slur is irrelevant, it is simply a threat to human dignity, and that should appall us all.

That’s black and gay former NBA player John Amaechi in his New York Times blog post about Kobe Bryant and the other f-word (“faggot”). The whole post is excellent, but this paragraph jumped out at me.

But now some see a new “digital divide” emerging—with Latinos and blacks being challenged by more, not less, access to technology. It’s tough to fill out a job application on a cell phone, for example. … Fifty-one percent of Hispanics and 46 percent of blacks use their phones to access the Internet, compared with 33 percent of whites, according to a July 2010 Pew poll. Forty-seven percent of Latinos and 41 percent of blacks use their phones for e-mail, compared with 30 percent of whites. The figures for using social media like Facebook via phone were 36 percent for Latinos, 33 percent for blacks and 19 percent for whites.

From For minorities, new ‘digital divide’ seen in the Washington Post. (Log in may be required.)

Emphasis mine.

This is why it is so troubling that many companies are shifting to online-only applications, even for jobs — such as janitorial positions — where computer use and required computing skills are minimal. I remember sitting in the human resources office at Georgia Tech when a middle-aged (black) man to ask for a job application for a janitorial job and was told to sit at a computer (one set aside for such things) to fill out an application online. He didn’t know how. He walked out a few minutes later.

I tell this story to ask: who is excluded by your technical decisions?

Or “Why are Daily Mile‘s default avatars male?”

This is a pretty common — and I would guess, frequently wrong — assumption on the part of web site user interface designers. No, your users won’t all be male. Yes, many women and genderqueer people will be annoyed that you made such an assumption. No, “But we let people upload their own photo!” isn’t a defense.

It’s simple enough to use a gender-neutral avatar. Friendfeed uses a hand-drawn smiley face. Other sites use patterned avatars. You could even go the Mac OS X route and use clip art, chosen at random.

Design has an impact on your brand and the kind of community you wish to foster. Seeing a masculine avatar suggests to me that DailyMile.com — or at least the DailyMile.com team — is very a guy-centric, potentially macho place, with a blind spot around gender issues. That’s not such a favorable impression for a brand, and it’s not necessarily a community that I want to invest or take part in.

Worse still, there isn’t a way to change it — other than to upload a photo. (It doesn’t have to be of *you,* but a 4K one color JPG won’t work. A bourbon Manhattan photo, however, will . ) At the very least, give users an option.

The prison terms were suspended — not commuted — on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to Jamie, who is seriously ill with diabetes and high blood pressure and receives dialysis at least three times a week. Gladys had long expressed a desire to donate a kidney to her sister, but to make that a condition of her release was unnecessary, mean-spirited, inhumane and potentially coercive. It was a low thing to do.

From Bob Herbert’s New York Times column, For Two Sisters, the End of an Ordeal (log in required).

This.

It’s bad enough that they were sentenced to consecutive life sentences for their role in an armed robbery that yielded $11 (though the amount may have been as much as $200). I mean, since when do two first-time offenders get consecutive life sentences — not concurrent — for an armed robbery in which no one was hurt, and such a small amount of money was stolen? Since when do two first-time offenders get consecutive life sentences based on the testimony of their teenage accomplices — ones who were essentially threatened with rape and then received far lighter sentences in exchange for their testimony?

In Mississippi, armed robbery carries a sentence of three years to life in prison without parole. There was a lot of sentencing room available. And yet two first-time offenders get two consecutive life sentences based on the coerced testimony of teens.

Now one of the others convicted of this crime retracted his testimony in an affidavit. The sisters’ defense attorney was disbarred for conduct in an unrelated case. Even the prosecutor in the case thinks keeping them in prison is some B.S.

You would think this was a no-brainer for commuting a sentence. Again: first time offenders. Shaky testimony. Potentially incompetent defense. Harsher than necessary sentence. A governor who is rumored to be a 2010 GOP presidential candidate. A pardon might be too much — I mean never underestimate M-I-crooked-letter-crooked letter-I’s willingness and ability to f*ck over some Negroes — but a reduction in the sentence seems reasonable, fair, and just, right?

Apparently not to Governor Haley Barbour (R).

Barbour instead chose to suspend the sentence — that is, release the sisters from prison, but let their conviction and sentence stand. What’s worse, he has required Gladys Scott to donate a kidney to her ailing sister Jamie as a condition of their release.

Yes. Governor Barbour has required both of these sisters to undergo major surgery as a condition of their suspended sentence. Making major surgery a condition of release smacks of a time when black female bodies were subject to the whims of white owners (*cough*slavery*cough*), and later white men who just felt like it (*cough*Jim Crow*cough*).

The sense of privilege, entitlement and arrogance Barbour has displayed should outrage us all.

New Orleans was among metros with the largest decline in segregation among blacks and whites since 2000, due largely to the exodus of low-income blacks from the city after Hurricane Katrina.

One of the findings from a Brookings Institution review of census data as reported by the Associated Press in Black segregation in US drops to lowest in century.

Also see this recent ColorLines post, The Shrinking Black Middle Class.

[Via Negrophile]

A powerful talk.

But this isn’t about sex positivity. Look at the terms of the bet. How can any three men ever determine what “all women” like? At the moment that this becomes about generalizing female sexual practices under one banner, it no longer becomes about women, but about men’s idea and projection of who they would like us to be. Moreover, clearly Jay, Nas, and TJ the DJ are having a Lil Wayne moment, RE: they just “wanna fuck every girl in the world.” Because that’s the only way they could reasonably determine the truth of their statements.

That’s from crunktastic of the Crunk Feminist Collective in her post Why Jay Electronica Can Go Choke On His Own Words.

And many slaveholding Southerners begin to realize that that means that many whites cannot afford to gain entry into the slaveholding system any more. A book published in 1857 by a white South Carolinian, a deep racist named Hinton R. Helper, argued that non-slaveholding Southern whites ought to wake up to their economic exploitation by slaveholding whites.

That’s the kind of message that many slaveholding whites took to heart, and so they spoke about reopening the international slave trade with the idea that if you increase the supply, you lower the price.

The people most vociferously opposed to this were the residents of Virginia. The reason was self-serving. As of 1860, the second most important export of the commonwealth of Virginia was human flesh.

Virginians wanted to make sure that if white Southerners were going to buy slaves, they were going to buy slaves that bore the phrase “made in Virginia.”

This from a 2000 piece from the Southern Poverty Law Center titled White Lies.

Also worth reading? A piece from the University of Houston’s Digital History on The Old South: Images and Realities and the New York Times Disunion series.

It seems the Baracka Flocka Flames controversy has heated up since the October 26 publication of Prez N the Hood: A Hip-Hop Parody Stirs Up Issues in the New York Times (video below; article requires log-in).

America’s foremost old cranky black man, Stanley Crouch, had nothing nice to say about Baracka Flocka Flames in his recent column for TheRoot.com. He dismissed the video as ‘minstrelsy.’

That shouldn’t surprise you, of course. According to Crouch, anything hip-hop — even if it’s satirical or in parody form — is What’s Wrong With Negroes. Rather than rebut Crouch myself, I will point you to Bomani Jones’ post Stanley Crouch, I think I’m on to you….

Now I am one who thinks Baracka Flocka Flames’ “Head of the State,” is f#cking hilarious, bordering on brilliant. Part of the humor for me is that I imagine the Obamas are Grade-A sh#t-talkers behind closed doors. You see glimpses of this sense of humor when President Obama speaks. You saw it when Michelle Obama was cracking on her husband’s dirty sock habits. So I can totally see Barack Obama making off color jokes along these lines for sheer sh#ts and giggles.* Plus, James Davis does a killer job of imitating Obama’s diction, making every utterance of “nigga,” downright funny. But that’s not the only humor I see inreason I love this piece.

“Head of the State,” for those who don’t closely follow hip-hop, is based on Waka Flocka Flame‘s “Hard in the Paint.”

Yeah.

Let’s just say that if Stanley Crouch titled his next column “Waka Flocka Flame is What’s Wrong With Negroes,” I will heartily co-sign. Waka Flocka Flame not only has a stupid-a## name, but he has also said he’s in it for the money, not the craft. And if we’re talking about topical content, <ebonics>this n*gga just stay ig’nant</ebonics>. This video, as Jones points out, fits much more closely with Crouch’s idea of minstrelsy, or the performance of stereotype for commercial gain.

“Head of the State” plays off the imagery and lyrics of “Hard in the Paint,” and by doing so, I think it becomes a multi-layered, satirical critique of class and race stereotypes and hip-hop video tropes.

Let’s think about this: Barack Obama was largely raised in Kansas. He not only attended college, but has degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law — two Ivy League universities. Michelle Obama is similarly educated. So the idea of BHO unironically thug posing and rapping about his “main bitch,” and having his “own SK” is absurd. It is completely, utterly, and absolutely absurd.

And that absurdity makes “Head of the State” uncomfortable for the thinking viewer.

My second and third reactions were “Wow, this is rife with stereotypes, innit?” and “Sh*t, the tea baggers will have a field day with this.” And I suspect much of the criticism of “Head of the State,” from Crouch and others is related to W.W.W.P.T. — “What Will White People Think?” As Jones wrote, the truth is that, for better or worse, the mass media is America’s only introduction to black people.

But if you believe it’s plausible that a middle-class raised, currently upper-class, highly-educated black man, particularly the president of the United States would be chilling on the front steps of an abandoned house in a dangerous neighborhood, smoking Newports and dancing with a bottle of Smirnoff while surrounded by persons of questionable repute, I must ask who clings more tightly to the black-man-as-thug stereotype — you or Baracka Flocka?

And that’s why I love this “Head of the State,” video. It sticks a finger square in the eye of fake thug rappers who pimp gangster imagery for profit. And it sticks a finger in the eye of those who see Ivy League educated black people in the White House and manage to reduce them — and by extension all of us — to a narrow, negative stereotype.

Related:

Jay Smooth’s Raw Footage “I Forgot He Was Black.”

*Okay, raise your hand if an inappropriate HNIC joke has crossed your mind January 20, 2009.

Western thinkers must begin to recognize the difference between Islamism and Islam, or we are headed toward an ideologically defined battle with one quarter of humanity.

That’s the entire point of Newsweek’s Is It Islamic or Islamist?

I’ll add “jihad” and “Jihadism” to the mix. The political or social philosophies of Islamism and Jihadism (note my use of -ism and capitalization) are different from the religion of Islam and the concept of jihad. It’s comparable to equating Judaism and Zionism, with the added disadvantage that we are essentially using the same word for two different concepts.

So stop it.

And yet, black folks are determined to traffic in a politics of respectability that does little but make some of us tokens for a power structure that not all of us can access. … That said, I get the nihilism and “do you” mentality of so many black folks excluded from “proper” blackness. When you know that people think and treat you as though you are less than human why continually try to convince them otherwise? Why not just go for self?

From Moyazb’s piece, On ‘The Mean Girls of Morehouse’ over at Crunk Feminist Collective. That blog is so dope.