July 24th has officially been designated Self-Care Dayand although you might be inclined to snicker at such a twee, made-up festivity, this may be one holiday we should take time to truly mull over this year. Given the social challenges that continue to test us globally and individually, looking internally to better ourselves and our communities doesnt hurt, especially now.

Its clear that the worlds of self-care and wellness are tied up in a persons social, racial, and economic standings. So notable beauty brands and businesses have stepped up to ensure inclusion and diversity within their organizations and for their clients. New York City retail beauty space Knockout Beautys founder Cayli Cavaco is one of themher business has expanded the products it stocks to include more Black-owned brands. It has been proven that diversity in a population makes us more creative and more innovative, so I have always sought a diverse community of clients, Cavaco said. Expanding to include more black founders is a natural, yet intentional, extension of our mission. In an ongoing effort to provide much-needed visibility and inclusion, we have profiled below some of the most standout, exceptional beauty products essential for this summer from our favorite Black-owned beauty entrepreneursall of which are available at Knockout. Treat yourself on this day of self-care, which, in 2020, should include a healthy dose of introspection.

This lightweight, daily moisturizing cleanser from beauty veteran Lesley Thorntons skin care line Klur is a favorite among beauty junkies for its non-greasy formulation, which effectively removes makeup while not stripping your skin of essential oils. Dandelion is the star ingredient here, which acts as a regenerative healing component for skin while maintaining an essential moisture balance on the surface.

Brooklyns most in-demand oculofacial plastic surgeon, Dr. Chaneve Jeanniton, spent four years researching the perfect scientific formulation to create this powerful collagen-boosting growth factor serum. The peptide serum uses cultivated growth factors from human adipose (fat) cells, which are then sorted to ensure the highest-quality growth factors to promote glowing, plump skin as well as lactic acid to help gently refine the surface.

Hyper Skin was formulated as a skin savior specifically for women who suffer from acne scarring, melasma or sun-damaged skin. Founder and beauty industry alumni Desiree Verdejo created Hyper Skin out of a skin care necessityshe often came into contact with high-end beauty products that failed to address skin issues that persist during hormonal shifts.The Hyper Clear Vitamin C Serum uses gentle but high-grade, effective ingredients such as kojic acid, turmeric and Bearberry.

The brainchild invention of Yale scholar Adiya Dixon Wiggins, Yubi is the intelligently designed, grip-less makeup applicator created not just to provide the convenience of time with its handheld fingertip application, but an end to streaks and unblended makeup fiascos. Another plus: the vegan bristles help reduce bacterial growth or product absorption to provide clean beauty with each application.

A legit last -all-day lipstick. Leave it to Harvard Business grad and Stanford Fellow, Aishetu Fatima Dozie, to create a calculated lipstick formulation that is applied initially as a liquid, then turns matte but still manages to stay on creamyall day. Just launched from this vegan, cruelty-free liquid lipstick line is also the Power Woman Essentials colors named for the five essential attributes that embody powerful women: wisdom, faith, courage, bravery, and of course, hustle.

These on-the-go makeup wipes created by former Hollywood makeup artist Lauren Napier are individually packaged. Each satchel gently removes summer grime accumulated on skins impurities with no filmy residue left behind. Aside from containing soothing aloe and chamomile, Napiers line is rich with good karma: all wipes are ethically manufactured under solar energy, recyclable, cruelty free and Napier has partnered with the Foundation for the Handicapped, employing disadvantaged and disabled adults for her products.

An ideal solution to treat skin blemishes, especially during summer when skin tends to be oilier and clogged. Rose MD Blemish Control Booster helps control skin inflammation and breakouts with two main anti-inflammatory ingredients, niacinamide and turmeric. This treatment also uses gentle fruit acids (malic acid, lactic acid and citric acid) to help exfoliate and unclog the pores.

Related: Essential Summer Hair Treatments Prescribed by Celebrity Hair Experts

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The Must-Have Summer Products From Black-Owned Beauty Brands - W Magazine

Kate Starbird, University of Washington

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned an infodemic, a vast and complicated mix of information, misinformation and disinformation.

In this environment, false narratives the virus was planned, that it originated as a bioweapon, that COVID-19 symptoms are caused by 5G wireless communications technology have spread like wildfire across social media and other communication platforms. Some of these bogus narratives play a role in disinformation campaigns.

The notion of disinformation often brings to mind easy-to-spot propaganda peddled by totalitarian states, but the reality is much more complex. Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals.

As a researcher who studies how communications technologies are used during crises, Ive found that this mix of information types makes it difficult for people, including those who build and run online platforms, to distinguish an organic rumor from an organized disinformation campaign. And this challenge is not getting any easier as efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19 get caught up in the political machinations of this years presidential election.

Rumors are, and have always been, common during crisis events. Crises are often accompanied by uncertainty about the event and anxiety about its impacts and how people should respond. People naturally want to resolve that uncertainty and anxiety, and often attempt to do so through collective sensemaking. Its a process of coming together to gather information and theorize about the unfolding event. Rumors are a natural byproduct.

Rumors arent necessarily bad. But the same conditions that produce rumors also make people vulnerable to disinformation, which is more insidious. Unlike rumors and misinformation, which may or may not be intentional, disinformation is false or misleading information spread for a particular objective, often a political or financial aim.

Disinformation has its roots in the practice of dezinformatsiya used by the Soviet Unions intelligence agencies to attempt to change how people understood and interpreted events in the world. Its useful to think of disinformation not as a single piece of information or even a single narrative, but as a campaign, a set of actions and narratives produced and spread to deceive for political purpose.

Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected from what was then Czechoslovakia and later became a professor of disinformation, described how effective disinformation campaigns are often built around a true or plausible core. They exploit existing biases, divisions and inconsistencies in a targeted group or society. And they often employ unwitting agents to spread their content and advance their objectives.

Regardless of the perpetrator, disinformation functions on multiple levels and scales. While a single disinformation campaign may have a specific objective for instance, changing public opinion about a political candidate or policy pervasive disinformation works at a more profound level to undermine democratic societies.

Distinguishing between unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation is a critical challenge. Intent is often hard to infer, especially in online spaces where the original source of information can be obscured. In addition, disinformation can be spread by people who believe it to be true. And unintentional misinformation can be strategically amplified as part of a disinformation campaign. Definitions and distinctions get messy, fast.

Consider the case of the Plandemic video that blazed across social media platforms in May 2020. The video contained a range of false claims and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Problematically, it advocated against wearing masks, claiming they would activate the virus, and laid the foundations for eventual refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Though many of these false narratives had emerged elsewhere online, the Plandemic video brought them together in a single, slickly produced 26-minute video. Before being removed by the platforms for containing harmful medical misinformation, the video propagated widely on Facebook and received millions of YouTube views.

As it spread, it was actively promoted and amplified by public groups on Facebook and networked communities on Twitter associated with the anti-vaccine movement, the QAnon conspiracy theory community and pro-Trump political activism.

But was this a case of misinformation or disinformation? The answer lies in understanding how and inferring a little about why the video went viral.

The videos protagonist was Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who had previously advocated for several false theories in the medical domain for example, claiming that vaccines cause autism. In the lead-up to the videos release, she was promoting a new book, which featured many of the narratives that appeared in the Plandemic video.

One of those narratives was an accusation against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, Fauci was a focus of criticism for promoting social distancing measures that some conservatives viewed as harmful to the economy. Public comments from Mikovits and her associates suggest that damaging Faucis reputation was a specific goal of their campaign.

In the weeks leading up to the release of the Plandemic video, a concerted effort to lift Mikovits profile took shape across several social media platforms. A new Twitter account was started in her name, quickly accumulating thousands of followers. She appeared in interviews with hyperpartisan news outlets such as The Epoch Times and True Pundit. Back on Twitter, Mikovits greeted her new followers with the message: Soon, Dr Fauci, everyone will know who you really are.

This background suggests that Mikovits and her collaborators had several objectives beyond simply sharing her misinformed theories about COVID-19. These include financial, political and reputational motives. However, it is also possible that Mikovits is a sincere believer of the information that she was sharing, as were millions of people who shared and retweeted her content online.

In the United States, as COVID-19 blurs into the presidential election, were likely to continue to see disinformation campaigns employed for political, financial and reputational gain. Domestic activist groups will use these techniques to produce and spread false and misleading narratives about the disease and about the election. Foreign agents will attempt to join the conversation, often by infiltrating existing groups and attempting to steer them towards their goals.

For example, there will likely be attempts to use the threat of COVID-19 to frighten people away from the polls. Along with those direct attacks on election integrity, there are likely to also be indirect effects on peoples perceptions of election integrity from both sincere activists and agents of disinformation campaigns.

Efforts to shape attitudes and policies around voting are already in motion. These include work to draw attention to voter suppression and attempts to frame mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud. Some of this rhetoric stems from sincere criticism meant to inspire action to make the electoral systems stronger. Other narratives, for example unsupported claims of voter fraud, seem to serve the primary aim of undermining trust in those systems.

History teaches that this blending of activism and active measures, of foreign and domestic actors, and of witting and unwitting agents, is nothing new. And certainly the difficulty of distinguishing between these is not made any easier in the connected era. But better understanding these intersections can help researchers, journalists, communications platform designers, policymakers and society at large develop strategies for mitigating the impacts of disinformation during this challenging moment.

Kate Starbird, Associate Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs lessons from the pandemic - TheStreet

Gerhard Apfelthaler and Loredana Carson, Your Turn Published 5:09 p.m. PT July 25, 2020

Out of the blue on July 6, the Department of Homeland Security informed more than 1 million international students in the U.S. that their student visas wouldexpire if theywere not able totake in-person classes in the fall. At the same time,many universities were pulling back in-person class offerings as the number of active COVID-19 cases continued to rise at an alarming rate.

Thankfully, on July 14, DHS retracted this decisionafter awave of lawsuits filed against the department on behalf of multiple institutions of higher education including Harvard, MIT, the UC system and at least 179 other schools that joined together to protest the plan. It isnt often thatso manycolleges and universities agree on a single approach,sosuchunification is worth noting.To understandwhy they moved so fast and so furiously to get this regulation overturned, it isimportant to understand the role of the international student populationinthe higher education landscape.

In addition to providing domestic students with a global learning experience, international studentscontributetremendouseconomicvalue to every sector of the U.S.economy.The Institute of International Educationplaces the contributionat$45billion annually.Education isour countrysfourth largest service sector export, and international students are responsible foran estimated500,000 American jobs. Most arehigh-paying jobs thataredesperately neededbecausetheunemployment ratenowexceedsGreat Recessionlevels.

In California,160,000international studentscontributeabout $7billionto the economyannually, supporting more than 74,000 jobs.Inthe Greater Los Angelesregion,there aretens ofthousands of international students.If these students had been forced toreturn to their home countries,the result would have beenvisible in theimmediate negative economic effects.

TherecentDHSturmoilonly added to a series of actions that havecreatedlong-term damage toourreputationas a country where futures can be built.Travelbans,visa restrictions, the suspension of H-1B visasandthe threat of not allowing international students to gain experience in Optional Practical Trainingpositions have allcreatedan overwhelming negative national message that international students are not welcome in the U.S.This is despite the fact thattheir presence enhances our campus communities and supportscompanies throughout the country, especially in Californias high-tech sector. International graduates with highly specialized degrees in many areas are desperately needed in the U.S, which doesnt graduate enough domestic students inscience,technology,engineering andmathematics.

Whilemany highlyqualifiedinternational students return to their home countries after graduation,othersstay and support the U.S. economyat the local, regional and national levels.According to studies based on U.S.Census data, immigrantsaretwice as likely to start new businesses than people born in the U.S., andthey account for more than 40% of new businessesin states such as California, New York and New Jersey.

Other countries are much more intentional in their messaging to their international student population,and the competition over international students has greatly intensified. The U.S. market share of global enrollment dropped from roughly 30% in 2010 to about 20% in 2019. This drop has accelerated since 2016 due in part to tighter immigration practices and the federal governments constant negative rhetoric regarding international students. The U.S has become a less attractive destination for international students, while other countries such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have succeeded in attracting more of them.

If there is any good to have come from this debacle, perhaps the conversationcan continue,and the higher education community can remain united in framingthe role of the international students as positive and valued instead of something to dismiss at a moments notice. Clearly, they do matter, and their presence is welcome. Its time for the national rhetoric to become more inclusive and less divisive on this important issue.

Gerhard Apfelthaler isprofessor anddean andLoredana Carsonis alecturerat the School of Management at California Lutheran University.

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Guest column: The U.S. war on international students needs to end - VC Star

Connections between Black communities in Seattle and Vancouver, BC include the family of Jimi Hendrix; his maternal grandparents, Ross and Nora Hendrix, lived in Vancouver, BC, and his father Al was born there. (Public Domain)

A neighborhood in downtown Vancouver, B.C. was wiped off the map more than 50 years ago for a freeway project, but a group there is working to keep its legacy alive and to help rebuild a new community in its place.

And part of that community legacy has a deep connection to one of Seattles most famous residents.

Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. are similar cities in many ways. Both have struggled to manage growth and address problems of homelessness, as well as long histories of systemic racism.

In Seattle, redlining and other practices restricted where people of color could rent or buy homes, creating a large de facto Black neighborhood in the Central Area. The same was true in Vancouver, where the Black population was proportionately smaller than Seattle generally comprising about 1%.

Members of Vancouvers Black community lived almost exclusively in a place called Hogans Alley, a several square block area in the Strathcona section of the city. Unlike Seattles Central Area, Hogans Alley was demolished around 1970 to make way for two elevated roadways known as the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

Those viaducts, which were part of a freeway project that was never fully completed, are now slated to be torn down.

In the past few years, there has been a lot of community interest about what will go in their place once the viaducts are gone. In June, Black Lives Matter demonstrators blocked traffic on the viaducts to call attention to the fate of the long-ago residents of Hogans Alley and to Vancouvers somewhat hidden Black history.

Stephanie Allen is a founding board member and current board member of a community organization called the Hogans Alley Society.

Were a not-for-profit organization that was formed in response to a real need to look at redressing the displacement of a Black community that happened in Vancouver, Allen said. And we kind of came together at a time when the City of Vancouver was looking at redeveloping an area of downtown, and a big component of that redevelopment is the removal of a bit of a segment of highway called the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

A half-century ago, those viaducts were built right over what used to be a several-block long neighborhood called Hogans Alley, scattering residences and businesses to the wind.

The Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts were built during urban renewal, which we know happened across a lot of North American cities and that had devastating impacts on a lot of racialized and Black communities, as it did here in Vancouver, Allen said.

Allen says Vancouvers Black community grew in Hogans Alley more than a hundred years ago because it was near the railroad terminus the current Vancouver railroad station is just a few blocks away. For many Black people in Canada and the United States, working for the railroad was one of the only well-paying jobs available.

Allens description of racism in Canada echoes much of the American Pacific Northwest, but it has its own specific realities.

The first-hand accounts are very similar, Allen said, of descriptions of racism in Canada in the not-too-distant past. People wouldnt call you the n-word outright to your face, but they wouldnt allow you to live in their neighborhoods or they wouldnt rent places to you. Theres a Canadian anti-Black racism that doesnt really show up in the in the legal structures and the formality of it like weve seen in the Southern states, but it is in this empowerment exclusion from aspects of the formal society, and in an unwillingness to accept that there are these kinds of racial inequalities that show up in Canada.

Its a color-blindness that Canadians use, she continued. We absolutely use our veneer of politeness to hide some of the more structural and systemic racism that really has its most violent impacts on Indigenous and Black communities.

Part of that racism fueled urban renewal efforts that targeted voiceless communities, such as where Black and Indigenous people lived. And because the destruction was so complete, its almost as if when the neighborhood disappeared, the history of Hogans Alley pretty much disappeared, too. Other than a handful of books and countless personal memories, that history was practically invisible for most of the past 50 years.

Part of the reason why the disappearance could seem so complete is the numbers.

Stephanie Allen says while Seattle and Vancouver have similarities, the Black community in Vancouver has always been smaller, likely because of a Canadian law that was passed in 1911.

Our then-prime minister, who was Wilfrid Laurier, his cabinet passed an order to ban Black migrants from coming to Canada, Allen said. And while it was overturned not long after, there was a very institutionalized immigration policy in Canada that kept Black migration from coming here. It was very intentional.

So I think what happened, too, is that that stunted the growth of the community as well, she added.

Though the Black community was small, theres at least one deep connection between Hogans Alley and Seattle, and thats the family of legendary guitarist and rock legend Jimi Hendrix.

Jimis father Al was born in Vancouver, and came to Seattle in 1940 to find work. Seattle Washington Hall, specifically, at a Fats Waller concert is also where Al Hendrix met Lucille Jeter, who would later become Jimis mom.

But when it comes to Vancouver, BC, Jimi isnt the only star of the Hendrix family.

Stephanie Allen says that the mother of Al Hendrix Jimis grandma Nora Hendrix was a community leader in Vancouver in her own right. She was born in Tennessee in 1883, and arrived in Vancouver in 1911 before the exclusion law was passed after spending time in Chicago and then traveling Seattle.

In Seattle, Nora and her husband Ross were performers at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the worlds fair held on the University of Washington campus.

Nora Hendrix is featured in a 1977 oral history collection called Opening Doors in Vancouvers East Endin which she describes her life in Hogans Alley.

Allen says that Nora Hendrix worked at several of the iconic restaurants in the neighborhood most of which were owned and operated by Black women and shes considered a founder of the AME Fountain Chapel Church, the first Black church in Vancouver and an important community gathering place. Nora Hendrix was on the board of directors of the church; in this capacity, she helped recruit preachers, and she was a member of the church choir her entire life.

Stephanie Allen says that Nora Hendrix was such a pillar of the community, Hogans Alley Society and another Vancouver non-profit named a 52-unit supported housing complexafter her.

Its been a real heartwarming story that even though she had this really famous grandson who did come here and spend some time with his grandmother, she really is our hero here in Vancouver because of what a significant member and contributor to the community that she was, Allen said.

And that famous grandson Jimi Hendrix helped put his hometown of Seattle on the map decades ago.

Seattle-based writer and historian Charles R. Cross, author of the landmark Hendrix biography Roomful of Mirrors, says that though he doesnt think it should be over-emphasized, Jimi did have a special connection to Vancouver, B.C.

And a lot of that was because of Nora Hendrix who coined Jimis family nickname of Buster, by the way.

He ended up going to Vancouver and staying with his grandmother in 1962, Cross said. That says a lot about the adult Jimi Hendrix, that he would pick his grandmother over [spending time with] his dad [in Seattle].

Jimi ended up in a band in Vancouver for a while called Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers talk about a hometown sounding name, Cross said. Jimi was the rhythm guitar player, so he wasnt the lead guitar player of that band. The lead guitar player Jeopardy question one day, maybe was Tommy Chong of the later stoner duo Cheech & Chong.

Charles R. Cross says that it was a car trip by Jimi and his family from Seattle to Vancouver in 1968 when Jimi was at the height of his fame and had skipped riding the band bus to head to a performance at the Pacific Coliseum that led to a troubling racist episode in Skagit County.

He stops with the family in Mount Vernon, of all places, at essentially a Dennys, and theyre going to eat lunch and they were not served, Cross said. I mean, it almost makes me want to cry, frankly, to tell you that story, because Seattle presents itself in many ways as if its a more progressive place.

The idea that at that point in 1968, that any restaurant in Washington state would not serve a family because they were Black just makes me sick to my stomach, Cross said.

Charles says that eventually a kid in the restaurant recognized the famous musician and asked Jimi for an autograph. Finally, Cross says, the staff grudgingly gave the Hendrix family menus.

If Jimi felt more welcome in Vancouver, perhaps it was because of how he had been treated in his hometown.

We essentially ran Jimi Hendrix out of town because he was Black, so he had mixed feelings about Seattle, says Charles R. Cross, pointing to dubious arrests of Hendrix that led him to leave town by choosing to join the Army rather than go to jail.

He was proud to have been from here, Cross said. But there was a part of Seattle at that point that [because of] his race still put many barriers up to what life was. It didnt put barriers up to who Jimi was as a creative person, but it put barriers up to how he could sustain himself and survive as a human being with dignity in a world where a Dennys in Mount Vernon is not going to serve him.

In Vancouver, Stephanie Allen and her group want to do more than just share the history of Hogans Alley they want to restore the community, and get more units of affordable housing built where Hogans Alley once stood.

As they continue to work to restore the legacy of that lost neighborhood, the Canadian federal government has been supportive, but the City of Vancouver has not been as forthcoming as yet.

They havent shared any updates with us lately, so were not clear when the actual highway structures will eventually fall, Allen said. Were just hopeful that they would work with us in negotiating through all the preambling parts of this and setting the terms and conditions, so that when those highway structures do fall and when this redevelopment can take place that were well positioned to move it forward.

And while the Hogans Alley Society works to put that long-ago neighborhood back on the map, future historians might note that it was a grandmother and grandson who helped put their respective communities there on those maps in the first place.

Editors note: Special thanks to Ralph Bevins for research assistance with this story.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattles Morning News and read more from himhere. If you have a story idea, please email Felikshere.

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Jimi Hendrixs little-known connection between Seattle and Vancouver, BC - MyNorthwest.com

After months of Black Lives Matter protests and violent police response, Americas faith in the police has been shaken, and so has its faith in police shows. If the cancellation of Cops is any indication, networks now think audiences are less willing than ever to tolerate idealized portrayals of the police in popular media. But the excavation of copaganda hasnt stopped at cop shows: Critical viewers have pointed out that the superhero genre may also be culpable, which isnt too surprising, considering the genres similarities to police fiction.

At their most conventional, cop shows and superhero stories both run off the assumption that crime is a persistent threat to society, and an equally persistent force is needed to punish criminals and maintain order. Whether that force wears a badge or a cape is a minor detail. What remains is that audiences have to accept the necessity of this kind of force for these kinds of stories to work.

The Golden Age of superhero comics started while the U.S. was still recovering from the Great Depression and Prohibition eras. Action Comics #1, featuring Supermans first appearance, was published while the intentional homicide rate was just starting to come down from its highest peak in the century up to that point. It isnt hard to see why 1930s children and adults alike would want to escape into stories where the excesses of lawlessness were curbed by strongmen in tights. The Golden Age of superhero movies, on the other hand, is occurring while violent crime in America has been in sharp decline for almost three decades. Police and prisons have an unprecedented amount of power, and the communities with the highest levels of police presence are also the ones being harmed the most.

None of these trends are being reflected in current American movies and TV. When modern superheroes arent rehashing the original 1930s vision of rampant domestic crime (like how every other week on The Flash, Barry Allen employs his speedster abilities to arrest yet another costumed criminal in Central City), theyre playing on audiences post-9/11 fears by having the Avengers fight terror overseas (Hydra cells in Lagos!) or from outer space. (Chitauri attack-bombers in Manhattan!)

In each of these examples, superheroes do the work of law enforcement, only its more palatable because the criminals are supervillains, aliens, robots, and gods rather than everyday people. But even considering the genres fantastical remove, the superhero-movie formula largely hasnt transcended that of the police procedural: A subversive element threatens a peaceful, ordered society. A trustworthy force arrives to eliminate the subversive element, through carceral or lethal means. Finally, order is re-asserted without the status quo needing to be changed.

The parallels between superheroes and police dont necessarily valorize police. In superhero stories, cops are often portrayed as incompetent, corrupt, or resentful because caped vigilantes infringe on their monopoly on violence. But superhero stories do legitimize the function of police: to punish people, often without any oversight or accountability, in the name of order.

America is going through a cultural shift that may lead to fiction about the police fading in popularity, just as Westerns did. But the superhero genre in spite of its parallels with cop fiction isnt in the same danger of becoming irrelevant. Thanks to the expansive flexibility of science-fiction/fantasy and the work of thoughtful comics creators, superhero stories are actually in a pretty good position to resist the pro-police, pro-prison themes which have, Hydra-like, infiltrated modern Western media. With that in mind, here are five main approaches to making superhero stories that dont legitimize the police.

Film and TV examples: Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Woman, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Justice League, Arrowverse crossover events, Avatar: The Last Airbender

Comic-book examples: Thor, Wonder Woman, Fantastic Four, every DC and Marvel crossover event, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitelys All-Star Superman, Jonathan Hickmans House of X/Powers of X, Tom King and Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle

Many superhero stories have avoided the thorny politics of policing by avoiding the pretense of realism altogether. These stories dont usually take place on Earth and if they do, its an Earth with so many fantasy elements that it hardly resembles our own. The heroes in these stories share more with pulp adventurers and ancient mythological figures than they do with vigilantes. Some of them are straight-up gods, like a certain blonde Asgardian who isnt ashamed to brag about it. The conflicts of these stories arent inspired by the news. Instead, they reach into fantasy conventions like prophecies, dynastic struggles, mortality vs. immortality, opposing armies at war, apocalypse, and other topics that lie way out of the average police departments jurisdiction.

The hazard with mythic superhero stories is that some lean on the genres escapism as an excuse to not examine its deeper implications. A clear example of a mythic superhero story that updates the genres conventions for the modern day is Taika Waititis Thor: Ragnarok. That film flourishes in fantastical settings and tropes without giving an easy pass to monarchies and colonialism.

Any story with an increasing number of superpowered individuals naturally trends toward mythic status, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its Infinity Saga both show. For interconnected cinematic universes, this is a virtuous cycle: Crossovers encourage mythic stories, and mythic stories can provide a buffer from the politicized contexts which might alienate global audiences.

Comic books have been engaging in mythic storytelling since the inception of the superhero genre, but much of our modern cosmic superheroes a debt to Jack Kirby. Kirby was the architect for the space operas of both the Marvel and DC universes, and one of his characters, Mister Miracle, recently had a mythic yet achingly human miniseries by Tom King and Mitch Gerads. Its a run that reminds us why we create and look up to mythical figures: As humans, were always at war with our own selves, so we use larger-than-life characters to play out the emotional conflicts we couldnt contain otherwise. But the biggest reminder of Mister Miracle is that the battles within us can be just as big as any apocalyptic conflict.

Film and TV examples: Watchmen (HBO), Marvels Jessica Jones, Super, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

Comic-book examples: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen, N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbells The Far Sector, Robert Moraless Truth: Red, White & Black

The moral absolutism of police procedurals is part of what makes them so easy to digest. Thats true of all propaganda. Alan Moore once called D.W. Griffiths Ku Klux Klan-romanticizing epic Birth of a Nation the first American superhero movie. That films self-righteous portrayal of its masked vigilante heroes (read: hooded Klansmen) is decried for its open, enthusiastic racism today, but its very self-righteousness is what made it powerful enough for audiences to follow in the films footsteps and revive the Ku Klux Klan.

The usual absolutism of superhero stories can be circumvented if the creators and audience are willing to tolerate grey areas. Stories with complex moral frameworks have a defense against propagandistic themes, pro-police or otherwise, slipping in undetected.

Moore has often exorcised his suspicion of superheroics in his work. Thats why Watchmens questions about power and accountability remain potent 30 years later. The HBO series continued Watchmens complex moral tradition in several ways, including by depicting American law enforcements white-supremacist history, and dramatizing the trauma and deep-seated resentment which motivates even the most just vigilantes.

Most recently in comics, N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbells The Far Sector has been exploring what it means to be a Black cop through the context of an interstellar murder investigation. Green Lantern Jo Mullein struggles between doing whats right and stepping over her bounds while trying to keep the peace on the incredibly alien City Enduring.

Both Watchmen and The Far Sector are successful because they use complex worlds to make people reflect critically on their lived-in surroundings. This should always be the main impetus behind telling a morally ambiguous superhero story; without a sociopolitical backdrop, these stories risk becoming needlessly nihilistic (like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) or silly (like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).

Film and TV examples: Logan, Black Panther, Birds of Prey

Comic-book examples: Action Comics by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Captain America by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ironheart by Eve Ewing, Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Saladin Ahmed

Everyone has heard a variation on the joke that Bruce Wayne could do a lot more for Gotham if he put his billions toward social programs instead of fancy gadgets for breaking muggers arms. But imagine if superhero films took this kind of observation to heart.

Superhero stories can get so carried away with crime-fighting that they forget what real-world heroism actually looks like. (It rarely resembles comics supervillain battles or wars on organized crime.) Some stories have avoided this trap by presenting heroes whose work centers around community-building, problem-solving, activism, and progress rather than policing and stasis.

In Eve Ewings current Ironheart run, Riri Williams is an armored avenger who avoids interring the poor, young gangbangers of Chicago in the needlessly cruel criminal justice system when she can help it, and who also opens up her headquarters, turning it into an after-school community center.

A different side of this can be seen in the latest Captain America run, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. When Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released in 2014, the film was criticized for soft-pedaling its socio-political commentary by blaming Americas moral decline on a fictional terrorist organization. Coates pulls no punches by pitting Steve Rogers against an American populace and government thats genuinely embracing Hydras ideology.

In comics, Cap has a long history of protesting real-world political developments. And comic-book writers have an even longer history of writing heroes as agitators. Action Comics #1 features The Man of Steel challenging corrupt lobbyists and thwarting an unjust death sentence.

Progressive superhero narratives are much more common in comics than they are in film and TV, because the massive corporations which control these IPs arent trying to support any revolutions. (After Action Comics became a hit, Siegel and Shuster were forced to tone down Supermans social crusading.) In spite of corporate reluctance, though, a groundswell of demand is making studios cater toward audiences who have been demanding social relevance over pure fantasy. Logan offers a dystopia to fight back against. Black Panther mostly works as a paean to Black liberation. And then theres Cathy Yans Birds of Prey, a work with punk sensibilities that amplify its feminist themes.

Film and TV examples: Doctor Strange, Megamind

Comic-book examples: She-Hulk by Charles Soule and Javier Pulido, The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson

Superhero stories cant unwittingly justify police violence if they dont center violence at all. And, if they implicitly make the case that violence isnt the answer, and they also add more variety to the genre.

Its natural to assume that where there are superheroes, there are antagonists getting punched. But this isnt always the case. As cathartic as action-packed splash pages can be, there are a variety of stories which have had no trouble staying compelling even though theyve passed on the typical action.

Charles Soule and Javier Pulido made a legal satire out of She-Hulk. Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Waltas The Vision is a haunting family drama. Readers of Sandman, Swamp Thing, and Shade, the Changing Man wont forget their metaphysical ruminations. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is funnier than any of the studio comedies released last decade.

It isnt realistic to expect Hollywood to start turning out non-action-centric tentpoles, but if theres one lesson to take away from Joker, its that audiences are ready for the occasional cape film that doesnt end with a fistfight. Doctor Stranges non-combat resolution was so refreshing that people didnt care that the rest of the movie was magic Iron Man.

These four approaches shouldnt be interpreted as mutually exclusive. Some of the listed stories take multiple approaches. And these tactics also shouldnt be taken as foolproof against pro-police messaging. The surest way to dismantle police propaganda is by platforming creators from the communities most affected by police brutality.

In her essay on police abolition, Mariame Kaba wrote, As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. Superhero media has participated in this indoctrination, but hopefully by now, the superhero fan and creator communities have bigger imaginations. A little bigger than a Batman spin-off about the Gotham City PD.

Read more from the original source:

5 ways to fix the police problem in superhero movies and comics - Polygon

Equality and inclusivity at work requires effort by everyone.

Our country has a huge issue with systemic racism, and it has been swept under the rug for far too long. This toxic problem has permeated pretty much every single aspect of life, but it is notably present in the workplace, along with other forms of discrimination. Research from McKinsey showed that ethnic and racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals and women were less likely to pursue a job opportunity because they didnt feel the company was inclusive enough. These populations have also experienced more microaggressions while at work. In addition, white people still dominate positions of leadership and get paid more, on average. For example, the average hourly wage for Black people is $21.05. For white people, its $28.66a startling 27% difference.

This is just the tip of the inequality iceberg, and there is, unfortunately, much more where that came from. Transforming our workplaces wont be easy, but we desperately need change. Frankly, we needed it decades ago. And for this to occur, for us to be able to break down the complex webs of structural oppression, we need to start at the top.Leaders have a responsibility to create a culture in which every single person has equal access to opportunity and feels wholly accepted and celebrated for exactly who they are. Its not just the right thing to doits whats going to set your team up for success, or failure. After all, its only when people feel they are able to be who they are that they can perform at their best.

I asked six incredible leaders, all of whom have been committed to diversity for some time, what theyve been doing to create even more inclusive environments in 2020. Heres what they had to say.

1. Centering A Company Objective Around Diversity And Inclusion

Carrie Siu Butt, CEO, Simple Health

At healthcare company Simple Health, Carrie Siu Butt has always been committed to building a diverse team. This moment in time has been something I have been working towards for my entire career, she said. But with renewed urgency, her team recently established a new company-wide objective for the third quarter of 2020 with a focus on diversity, inclusion, equity and social justice.To meet it, theyre leveraging a five-pronged approach:

This objective will be evaluated with the same level of scrutiny as our revenue and Ebitda objectives, Butt shared. Ill be holding my team accountable, and both my team and my board will be holding me accountable in return.

2. Making Inclusion More Than Just Rhetoric

Kerel Cooper, SVP Global Marketing, LiveIntent

For Kerel Cooper, its imperative that marketing platform LiveIntent backs up words with actionbecause its simply not enough to say youre diverse and inclusive.Near the beginning of 2019, a group of LiveIntent employees (including Cooper) spearheaded an employee resource group called BID, which stands for Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity. The ultimate goal was to bring the company together and share in each others unique day-to-day experiences, explained Cooper. Hes proud to report that BID has seen great success, and theyve expanded it to include a newly-formed Executive Committee, for which Cooper serves as chairman.[The Executive Committees] purpose is to continue to mature and oversee our D&Is success by providing opportunities for all employees to come together to share and educate each other both internally and externally, Cooper said.Cooper is also the co-founder of Minority Report Podcast, which focuses on diversity within media, business and technology and highlights people of color, diverse backgrounds, women and the LGBTQ community.

3. Increasing And Prioritizing Diversity In The Hiring Process

Tina Hsiao, COO, WePay, A Chase Company

We take pride in the culture weve built at WePay, shared Tina Hsiao. Jennifer [Aubert Parker, Chief Revenue Officer] and I are both diverse members on WePays leadership team; Jen is Black and Im Asian. We recognize we have the opportunity to bring our diverse perspectives together, and we continue breaking barriers and making diversity and inclusion a priority at our company.WePay has a strong set of diversity and inclusion efforts, including:

4. Creating Opportunities For The Communities They Serve

LaShunda Leslie-Smith, Executive Director, Connected Communities, Inc.

LaShunda Leslie-Smith is the executive director of a small nonprofit that focuses on revitalizing neighborhoods and breaking the cycle of poverty. And shes well aware that her organizations huge endeavor simply cant be accomplished without dismantling structural racism and being intentional about equity at every level. To do their part, the Connected Communities team makes sure to have a staff that reflects the population they serve by hiring from their neighborhood. In addition, they also have a Resident Ambassador program, for which they recruit, train and pay a living wage to residents who provide critical context expertise. This ensures that the voices and desires of those most impacted by Connected Communities work are heard and reflected in the organizations actions.In her free time, Leslie-Smith facilitates conversations around race equity through a weekly live stream show in which she challenges listeners to be active anti-racists.

5. Getting The Whole Team Involved

Karsten Vagner, People VP, Maven Clinic

At Maven Clinic, a telehealth company for women and family, We asked the company for volunteers to help build our diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, shared Karsten Vagner. To his delight, almost half of the employees wanted to participate, and theyre all committed to holding themselves accountable to long-term change. Together, the staff organized working groups focused on areas like education, partnerships, member experience, hiring and other areas of Maven Clinics business. They now have a 12-month roadmap with measurable OKRs built by our employees that will make our team, culture, and product more diverse and inclusive, Vagner said.

6. Learning By Doing

Diana Marie Lee (Co/lead CEO), Samuel Gonzlez (Co-lead Creative Strategist) and Ruth Jeannoel (Wellness Consultant), Sweet Livity

Sweet Livity, a minority- and women-owned B-corp is helping other organizations transform in a holistic way. We dont offer one-off skills-building workshops because they dont lead to culture change, shared Diana Marie Lee. Instead, the organization works to curate action-based, experiential learning that helps you transform, supports you to change your mind (the first step to changing your behavior).

Some of the specific ways Sweet Livity does this include:

As these leaders show, there simply arent one or two easy solutions to dismantling systemic discrimination and creating a culture that feels inclusive and equitable to all. Every company or organization must have different approaches and initiatives that reflect their own issues, values, and employee base. The important part, though, is prioritizing this workand ensuring that diversity and inclusion are woven into the fabric of our organizations from here on out.

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6 Innovative Leaders Share What They're Doing Behind The Scenes To Create Truly Inclusive Cultures - Forbes

This article by Kate Starbird is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned an infodemic, a vast and complicated mix of information, misinformation and disinformation.

In this environment, false narratives the virus was planned, that it originated as a bioweapon, that COVID-19 symptoms are caused by 5G wireless communications technology have spread like wildfire across social media and other communication platforms. Some of these bogus narratives play a role in disinformation campaigns.

The notion of disinformation often brings to mind easy-to-spot propaganda peddled by totalitarian states, but the reality is much more complex. Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals.

As a researcher who studies how communications technologies are used during crises, Ive found that this mix of information types makes it difficult for people, including those who build and run online platforms, to distinguish an organic rumor from an organized disinformation campaign. And this challenge is not getting any easier as efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19 get caught up in the political machinations of this years presidential election.

Rumors are, and have always been, common during crisis events. Crises are often accompanied by uncertainty about the event and anxiety about its impacts and how people should respond. People naturally want to resolve that uncertainty and anxiety, and often attempt to do so through collective sensemaking. Its a process of coming together to gather information and theorize about the unfolding event. Rumors are a natural byproduct.

Rumors arent necessarily bad. But the same conditions that produce rumors also make people vulnerable to disinformation, which is more insidious. Unlike rumors and misinformation, which may or may not be intentional, disinformation is false or misleading information spread for a particular objective, often a political or financial aim.

Disinformation has its roots in the practice of dezinformatsiya used by the Soviet Unions intelligence agencies to attempt to change how people understood and interpreted events in the world. Its useful to think of disinformation not as a single piece of information or even a single narrative, but as a campaign, a set of actions and narratives produced and spread to deceive for political purpose.

Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected from what was then Czechoslovakia and later became a professor of disinformation, described how effective disinformation campaigns are often built around a true or plausible core. They exploit existing biases, divisions and inconsistencies in a targeted group or society. And they often employ unwitting agents to spread their content and advance their objectives.

Regardless of the perpetrator, disinformation functions on multiple levels and scales. While a single disinformation campaign may have a specific objective for instance, changing public opinion about a political candidate or policy pervasive disinformation works at a more profound level to undermine democratic societies.

Distinguishing between unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation is a critical challenge. Intent is often hard to infer, especially in online spaces where the original source of information can be obscured. In addition, disinformation can be spread by people who believe it to be true. And unintentional misinformation can be strategically amplified as part of a disinformation campaign. Definitions and distinctions get messy, fast.

Consider the case of the Plandemic video that blazed across social media platforms in May 2020. The video contained a range of false claims and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Problematically, it advocated against wearing masks, claiming they would activate the virus, and laid the foundations for eventual refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Though many of these false narratives had emerged elsewhere online, the Plandemic video brought them together in a single, slickly produced 26-minute video. Before being removed by the platforms for containing harmful medical misinformation, the video propagated widely on Facebook and received millions of YouTube views.

As it spread, it was actively promoted and amplified by public groups on Facebook and networked communities on Twitter associated with the anti-vaccine movement, the QAnon conspiracy theory community and pro-Trump political activism.

But was this a case of misinformation or disinformation? The answer lies in understanding how and inferring a little about why the video went viral.

The videos protagonist was Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who had previously advocated for several false theories in the medical domain for example, claiming that vaccines cause autism. In the lead-up to the videos release, she was promoting a new book, which featured many of the narratives that appeared in the Plandemic video.

One of those narratives was an accusation against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, Fauci was a focus of criticism for promoting social distancing measures that some conservatives viewed as harmful to the economy. Public comments from Mikovits and her associates suggest that damaging Faucis reputation was a specific goal of their campaign.

In the weeks leading up to the release of the Plandemic video, a concerted effort to lift Mikovits profile took shape across several social media platforms. A new Twitter account was started in her name, quickly accumulating thousands of followers. She appeared in interviews with hyperpartisan news outlets such as The Epoch Times and True Pundit. Back on Twitter, Mikovits greeted her new followers with the message: Soon, Dr Fauci, everyone will know who you really are.

This background suggests that Mikovits and her collaborators had several objectives beyond simply sharing her misinformed theories about COVID-19. These include financial, political and reputational motives. However, it is also possible that Mikovits is a sincere believer of the information that she was sharing, as were millions of people who shared and retweeted her content online.

In the United States, as COVID-19 blurs into the presidential election, were likely to continue to see disinformation campaigns employed for political, financial and reputational gain. Domestic activist groups will use these techniques to produce and spread false and misleading narratives about the disease and about the election. Foreign agents will attempt to join the conversation, often by infiltrating existing groups and attempting to steer them towards their goals.

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For example, there will likely be attempts to use the threat of COVID-19 to frighten people away from the polls. Along with those direct attacks on election integrity, there are likely to also be indirect effects on peoples perceptions of election integrity from both sincere activists and agents of disinformation campaigns.

Efforts to shape attitudes and policies around voting are already in motion. These include work to draw attention to voter suppression and attempts to frame mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud. Some of this rhetoric stems from sincere criticism meant to inspire action to make the electoral systems stronger. Other narratives, for example unsupported claims of voter fraud, seem to serve the primary aim of undermining trust in those systems.

History teaches that this blending of activism and active measures, of foreign and domestic actors, and of witting and unwitting agents, is nothing new. And certainly the difficulty of distinguishing between these is not made any easier in the connected era. But better understanding these intersections can help researchers, journalists, communications platform designers, policymakers and society at large develop strategies for mitigating the impacts of disinformation during this challenging moment.

Kate Starbird, Associate Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Disinformation Campaigns Are Murky Blends of Truth, Lies and Sincere Beliefs - Snopes.com

Gabriel Rochelle, Path of the Spirit Published 2:40 a.m. MT July 19, 2020

Fr. Gabe Rochelle(Photo: Courtesy photo)

I think of liberalism as the mutual sharing of opinions in a democratic process. I think of liberalism as engaging in common labor in the hope that government might be able, with the least amount of intervention, to work for the betterment of all people, especially economically.

My liberalism is grounded in the belief that most people would rather work together for common cause than be at constant strife. My liberalism explores each social issue that arises on its own merits, based on an ethical position that is not merely pragmatic or politically motivated.

My liberalism affirms freedom of religion and of the press. My liberal views grew out of my Christian commitment and, because of that, I invested time, effort and money in civil rights and other movements, including opening our house as a shelter for victims of domestic violence in a community which had none. It fueled involvement in bicycle programs meant to aid marginal people where Ive lived.

That was decades ago. Seems like a lifetime, some days.

Our society moves toward further polarization. Depending on which crowd you happen to find yourself in at any given moment, it is now dangerous to express opinions and beliefs that do not coincide with the politically correct views of either the right or the left. Extremism has become the new norm; debate and dialogue are ground into the dirt. Welcome to the era when the self-appointed leaders of social movements push us to conform or suffer the consequences.

That freedom of religion thing I mentioned a few paragraphs back? Thats going off the table as more and more Christians believe they are forced underground or into silence. I know of people in university settings who fear for their jobs, should they make clear public statements about, say, their opposition to abortion on Christian grounds. The thought police are alive and well, seeking adherence to a list of proper behaviors and attitudes.

I am reminded of the classic statement of German Lutheran Bishop Martin Niemller about the Nazi regime: First they came for the Jews, but I wasnt a Jew; then they came for the communists, but I was not a communist You know the rest: by the time they came for me, there was no one left.

Rod Dreher, a conservative Christian critic, wrote a popular book called The Benedict Option. This recalls the move made by Benedict of Nursia way back at the turn of the sixth Century; namely, to reimagine and reinvent society by establishing a community of shared belief. St. Benedict envisioned his community as a school as well as a center for prayer. This new Option would be, therefore, not monasticism straightforward, but rather the gathering of intentional communities in which the principle story of the faith and its implications for all of life reigns supreme.

To some extent, we might compare such communities with the Amish and old order Mennonites, the Hutterite and Bruderhof movements, and the conservative end of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. All these movements sought, and continue to seek, ways to negotiate their relationship with the larger society that allow them to remain free to exercise their faith and, perhaps more importantly, their behavior and ethics in a society which largely rejects them.

In, but not of the world: thats the long-standing word among Christians in every time, in every culture. We dont belong to the world or a particular culture. Never did. Never will. As the first letter of Peter says, we are resident aliens, strangers in a strange land. Its time to stop pretending we are anything other than that.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is pastor of St Anthony of the Desert Orthodox Mission, Las Cruces. The church web site is http://www.stanthonylc.org. We welcome folks in ordinary times. Send an email if youd like to learn more.

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I have never had a harder column to write - Las Cruces Sun-News

A protest calling for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the U.S., as well as the ending of ICE's contract with McHenry County, is scheduled for this Saturday in Woodstock.

At the rally, set for 2 p.m. in the historic Woodstock Square, several speakers will inform the public about immigration, detention centers and human rights violations, according to a news release.

Organizers are asking people to wear masks and bring signs, and also call McHenry County Board Chairman Jack Franks and ask him to bring the county's ICE contract to a vote.

Through an agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service, McHenry County earns $95 a day for each ICE detainee housed at the jail.

Why would I want to contribute to a culture of us and them?" Alli Carroll, one of the protest organizers, said in a statement. The ICE presence does not reflect the views of our community and is an unwelcome presence. We can no longer profit off of human fear and misery.

In a news release, organizers said the U.S. "has created a vehicle for fear, racism, xenophobia, and internal terrorism" in ICE.

Sandia Davila, who also is part of the movement to eliminate ICE, said friends of hers have been deported.

It makes me wonder whos next? It could be a student who stops attending school; it could be a neighbor," Davila said. "Because of the intentional invisibility of the immigrant community, people just go missing. This is not public safety. The immigrant community should not live in fear.

Protest organizers argue that money the federal government gives to ICE could be used for different purposes, such as improving schools, establishing cleaner and more efficient public transportation systems, offering public services for the poor, lowering the cost of post-secondary education and providing small-business loans.

We have so many needs in our community, protest organizer Tony Bradburn said.

As previously reported by the Northwest Herald, McHenry County Board member Carlos Acosta pointed out during a July 16 County Board meeting that the number of ICE detainees in the McHenry County Jail has been declining recently.

When we accept ICE inmates or detainees, thats up to ICE, we have no influence on the number thats coming or going, McHenry County Sheriffs Deputy Sandra Rogers said. The assumption is, during this pandemic, that theyre not moving around as often.

Sponsoring organizations of Saturday's protest include Activists for Racial Equity (Crystal Lake and Surrounding Communities), Elgin in Solidarity with Black Lives, Standing up Against Racism (Woodstock), McHenry Direct Action, Warp Corps of Woodstock and Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist: Social Justice.

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Protest to abolish ICE scheduled for Saturday in Woodstock - Northwest Herald

Young adults from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn., and the Diocese of Bismarck, N.D., attend Mass with U.S. bishops at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome Jan. 15, 2020. The U.S. Catholic Church will convene a yearlong intercultural process with young adults and ministry leaders July 25. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

WASHINGTON The U.S. Catholic Church will convene a yearlong intercultural process with young adults and ministry leaders July 25.

Called Journeying Together, the initiative aims to explore the Catholic Churchs engagement with young people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and mobilize U.S. Catholics on issues and concerns related to culture and race in the United States, according to a July 22 news release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCBs Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church is leading the initiative, with the involvement of several USCCB secretariats Catholic Education, Evangelization and Catechesis, and Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. They will be joined by the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry.

Due to health concerns created by the novel coronavirus, the initiative will primarily take place online from July through next May. Plans call for a live gathering to take place next summer, pending health and safety directives.

It is based on Pope Francis call for encounter and dialogue in his 2019 apostolic exhortation Christus Vivit, (Christ Lives) on the 2018 Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment.

The pope urged parishes and dioceses to rethink their young and young adult programs and to make changes based on what young people themselves say they want and need. Youth ministry cannot be elitist or focused only on the teens and young adults already active in the churchs life, he said.

He also called on Catholic youth to reach out to other young people, to not be afraid to mention Jesus and to invite friends to church or a church-sponsored activity.

The Journeying Together process will feature intracultural and intercultural digital gatherings and conversations with young adult delegates and key ministry leaders from different cultural communities, including African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, European Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, and Native Americans, as well as immigrant groups, migrants and refugees.

Delegates, who include bishops, young adults and local ministry leaders, will seek to involve their peers in the dialogue and mobilization aspects of this yearlong experience, the news release said.

The conversations will be facilitated by young adults in response to Pope Francis encouraging young people to be protagonists in the churchs mission of evangelization.

This dialogue comes at an incredibly important time in our nations history where we find ourselves engaged in a serious conversation about race and racism, with calls for meaningful and lasting social reform, a movement led in large part by young people across the country and around the world, said Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Perez, chairman of the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church.

The COVID-19 pandemic also has affected communities of color most significantly, he said in a statement. Over the course of the next year, it is my hope that we can have honest conversations on these and other issues impacting young people and on how we can move ahead on the important questions of race, culture and community.

Organizers of the initiative have been very intentional about making sure every cultural family has their voice represented and a seat at the table as we journey together, he added. The bishops are looking forward to learning from the young people and those who accompany them.

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Journeying Together will focus on churchs engagement with young people - The Record

University of Maryland (UMD) researchers across multiple colleges collaborated with other international leaders in wildlife conservation to produce an expert assessment and recommendations for vulture poisoning control efforts in Southern Africa. Vultures act as nature's most critical scavengers, working as ecosystem garbage disposals and disinfectors to maintain animal, environmental, and human health alike. With global vulture populations declining, diseases that have previously been under control can potentially reemerge as threats and contribute to the spread of global disease (a top-of-mind issue during the COVID-19 pandemic), while also negatively impacting overall biodiversity. To address rapidly declining African vulture populations, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC, funded by the National Science Foundation through UMD) has gathered an interdisciplinary and international group of scientists with the goal of saving Africa's vultures. Findings from their latest publication highlight the issue of illegal vulture poisonings in Southern Africa from a conservation and criminology perspective, recommending a more coordinated and holistic approach to regulation, education, and enforcement to engage local communities and maximize conservation efforts.

"This work is vital," says William Bowerman, chair of Environmental Science and Technology in the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources (AGNR) at UMD and a lead organizer for the SESYNC effort. "We could lose African vultures completely in just a few years. But we have faculty from across UMD and Cornell University, Birdlife International, the Peregrine Fund, Endangered Wildlife Trust, and many others working to solve this international problem collaboratively. We have issues of chemical poisoning, but also lead and other contaminants, habitat loss, poaching and vulture trade for belief and medicinal use, and other factors that contribute to why populations are declining so quickly and why we need so many different experts."

Focusing on vulture poisoning with this new paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation, the team at UMD includes faculty members in Environmental Science and Technology, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Anthropology, and a new faculty member in Geographical Sciences (College of Behavioral & Social Sciences, BSOS). Meredith Gore, currently with Michigan State University, is the lead author on this paper and will officially join UMD in August. "I call myself a conservation social scientist - humans are my species, and my habit is to collaborate," says Gore. "When I was invited to work on this SESYNC project, I had no previous exposure to vultures, but I do a lot of work in Africa, and the human factors in vulture conservation are very complex and dynamic. As a group of experts, we could really leverage our diversity to think about this problem in a different way."

While expert elicitation and "desk assessment" exercises like this paper are common practices in both criminology and conservation, these thought processes had never before been combined and applied in the context of African vulture poisoning to try to make recommendations and ultimately improve control and conservation efforts.

"The use of a criminology framework is relatively new for conservation," says Jen Shaffer, assistant professor in Anthropology, BSOS. "Conservation policies have long focused on identifying direct causes for species loss, culminating in the creation of protected areas for species, as well as policies with incentives and punishments. More recently, there have been efforts to assess and address indirect or underlying causes of species loss, such as poverty, food insecurity, and lack of access to necessary resources. In our research, we captured both direct and indirect causes of African vulture loss, but extended this work to identify a wider range of cultural and physical factors in the environment that promote poisoning. This allowed our group to identify specific tactics that would discourage people from participating in the crime of vulture poisoning."

"We formulated a range of strategies and tactics to prevent poisoning from occurring in the first place, along with limiting the impacts if a poisoning event occurred," adds Jennifer Mullinax, assistant professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR. "For example, we suggested an education campaign on the human health risks from the common poisons used, and a Wildlife Poisoning Response Planning and Training intervention. This effort is a great example of having a large stakeholder group, including local constituents, come up with simple to complex ideas that could be implemented by local agencies or non-profits to directly impact vulture poisoning."

The need for more coordinated education and training efforts was a key finding from the study, since according to Gore, many people, particularly locals, don't always see poisoning as a crime. Often, this is done to protect livestock from larger animals and predators, with the poison not even intended for vultures. However, intentional poisoning by poachers can also be a factor.

"Bringing vulture population declines from intentional poisoning to light in the scientific community raises a heightened awareness of poaching, not only from the targeted animals (such as elephants) that are killed, but the secondary impact on other species such as vultures, and how all that impacts the socio-ecological-economic health of many peoples and nations," says Reggie Harrell, professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR.

In addition to bringing awareness and recommendations to the scientific community, the information from this paper is already on the ground and in the hands of those who can use it, says Gore, being disseminated by Andre Botha, co-author and Vultures for Africa program manager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, also a major organizer of the SESYNC initiative. "A key finding from this work is that there are a lot of existing solutions on the ground, they just aren't being combined, coordinated, or used holistically to maximize the benefit. In addition to thinking about ways we can incentivize and enable compliance, for example by restricting access to chemicals being used illegally while still providing access to those who need them for legal reasons, we were able to help identify the places where resources could be implemented first and make recommendations on how to prioritize existing efforts."

Given the complicated nature of vulture poisonings in Africa, combining criminology with community engagement was paramount to this work, Gore adds. "Criminology uses situational crime prevention to prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes and riots in sports stadiums. We used those same situational crime techniques and applied them to vulture conservation. However, we added an additional dimension - engaging communities - based on participatory action research and conservation, which we know and do really well at land grant universities."

Gore and the team emphasize the importance of this information being adapted to local communities and used on the ground for real change. "At the end of the day, we're just experts," says Gore. "That's important, but we look at problems differently than local people do, so the work that we did needs to be interpreted on the ground in a local context."

Shaffer adds, "From an anthropological perspective, I think that our findings underscore how sustainable strategies to reduce and eliminate wildlife crime require local cultural context and community involvement. Our work also serves as a model of how the problem of African vulture poisoning can be addressed elsewhere on the African continent."

"This is a really serious problem," stresses Gore. "Vultures are ecosystem engineers, and as their population decreases, the second order impacts can harm ecosystems and people. It's urgent, dynamic, and also really complex. Why should people in Maryland care about what's happening in Southern Africa? Because it all relates to environmental health. And socio-environmental health relates to socio-environmental security. And global security is national security as the [COVID-19] pandemic has shown us. What starts someplace else impacts us here in the U.S. and in Maryland."

However, Gore and the team are inspired by the collaborative nature of the work, with all team members emphasizing the power of and role of collaborative team science in addressing these major global concerns. "I do think there is a role for scientists to play," says Gore. "We do have something to offer here, and we should be engaging on global issues the way we are through SESYNC."

Lars Olson, professor in Agricultural & Resource Economics, AGNR, adds, "This project is an excellent example of how interdisciplinary team science can produce collaborations that are greater than the sum of the parts and help address the conservation of endangered species subject to multiple threats."

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UMD addresses African vulture poisoning with global disease and biodiversity implications - Science Codex

The Johnson Financial Group has locations throughout southern Wisconsin, including this bank location in Kenosha.(Photo: Johnson Financial Group)

Talk about humble beginnings.

What was to become the Johnson Financial Group started out 50 years ago as a bank with three employees working in a double-wide trailer.

The company has since grown into a financial services firm that employs 1,200 and offers banking, wealth management and insurance services through its Johnson Bank, Johnson Wealth Inc. and Johnson Insurance Services, LLC.

And, in 2020, the companylanded on the list of Top Workplaces for the first time.

The growth and the recognition as a Top Workplace comes from staying true to its founding values, said Jim Popp, Johnson Financial Group CEO.

Jim Popp is CEO of Johnson Financial Group.(Photo: Johnson Financial Group)

"Fifty years ago, our founder, Sam Johnson, envisioned a bank with stronger capabilities than the small banks, while maintaining a more personal and truly local feel than the large banks," Popp said. "Today, were the largest privately held bank in Wisconsin, but that value proposition remains the same.

"We strive to do whats best for our customers, our associates and the communities we serve."

A group of workers at Johnson Financial Group are shown during an employee appreciation event at the company's headquarters in Racine.(Photo: Johnson Financial Group)

Popp joined Johnson Financial Group in 2017 as president of Johnson Bank, taking over as CEO in January 2018. Prior to joining Johnson Financial Group, Popp worked for nearly 30 years at JP Morgan Chase & Co. where he led teams throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Johnson Financial Group has $12 billion in assets under administration and annually makes $2 million in charitable contributions.

The company is headed by Helen Johnson-Leipold, who is chairman and a member of the fifth generation of the Johnson family.

Johnson Financial Group competes in a world of giant banks and financial services companies.

Helen Johnson-Leipold, Johnson Outdoors(Photo: Johnson Outdoors)

That suits Popp just fine.

"We like to say we know Wisconsin businesses because we are one," he said. "Our roots are here, our focus is here, our decisions are made here. We have a vested interest in having Wisconsin be as strong and vibrant as possible for our business and our families."

Local, private ownership has its advantages.

"As a well-capitalized, privately held bank, we can make decisions with a long-term view," Popp said. "That allows us to be very intentional and focused as we invest in our people, facilities, technology and the communities we serve."

That local, private ownership has also allowed the company to position itself as a destination employer and Top Workplace.

"We continue to hire and make ourselves an employer of choice for prospective candidates," Popp said.

Despite a tight pre-pandemic job market, the company continued to hire.

"We have been very fortunate to be able to attract some very strong talent in all of our businesses in the past few years," Popp said. "Our size, scope of service, private ownership and commitment to local communities has been a compelling recruiting tool."

Despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the company remains on a growth trajectory.

"We continue to add new associates across all of our businesses and markets," Popp said. "Our business has grown nicely."

Despite job losses across some sectors of the economyas a result of the pandemic, JFG is looking for people.

"In fact, it feels like we are managing our hiring process similarly now as before the pandemic," Popp said. "We are constantly evaluating our business needs to ensure that we have the people with the right skills and talent needed to meet the needs of those businesses.

"Were connecting with candidates by phone, through virtual interviews and conference calls with a focus on flexible scheduling," he added.

Popp said the company is well-positioned to continue growing.

"As we celebrate our 50th year, were certainly proud of the company that we have become," he said. "When we look to the future, we see great opportunity to grow our banking, wealth and insurance businesses in the state of Wisconsin."

Contact Joe Taschler at (414) 224-2554or jtaschler@gannett.com. Followhimon Twitter at @JoeTaschler orFacebook atfacebook.com/joe.taschler.1.

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Johnson Financial Group growing, still hiring on its 50th anniversary year - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Archbishop Perez chats with missionaries from FOCUS after a July 19 Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. In a July 22 U.S. bishops announcement on Journeying Together, a new pastoral initiative to engage youth, Archbishop Perez called for honest conversations on race and culture with young people from diverse backgrounds. (Photo by Sarah Webb)

By Catholic News Service Posted July 23, 2020

WASHINGTON (CNS) The U.S. Catholic Church will convene a yearlong intercultural process with young adults and ministry leaders July 25.

Called Journeying Together, the initiative aims to explore the Catholic Churchs engagement with young people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and mobilize U.S. Catholics on issues and concerns related to culture and race in the United States, according to a July 22 news release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCBs Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church is leading the initiative, with the involvement of several USCCB secretariats Catholic Education, Evangelization and Catechesis, and Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. They will be joined by the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry.

Due to health concerns created by the novel coronavirus, the initiative will primarily take place online from July through next May. Plans call for a live gathering to take place next summer, pending health and safety directives.

It is based on Pope Francis call for encounter and dialogue in his 2019 apostolic exhortation Christus Vivit, (Christ Lives) on the 2018 Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment.

The pope urged parishes and dioceses to rethink their young and young adult programs and to make changes based on what young people themselves say they want and need. Youth ministry cannot be elitist or focused only on the teens and young adults already active in the churchs life, he said.

He also called on Catholic youth to reach out to other young people, to not be afraid to mention Jesus and to invite friends to church or a church-sponsored activity.

The Journeying Together process will feature intracultural and intercultural digital gatherings and conversations with young adult delegates and key ministry leaders from different cultural communities, including African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, European Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, and Native Americans, as well as immigrant groups, migrants and refugees.

Delegates, who include bishops, young adults and local ministry leaders, will seek to involve their peers in the dialogue and mobilization aspects of this yearlong experience, the news release said.

The conversations will be facilitated by young adults in response to Pope Francis encouraging young people to be protagonists in the churchs mission of evangelization.

This dialogue comes at an incredibly important time in our nations history where we find ourselves engaged in a serious conversation about race and racism, with calls for meaningful and lasting social reform, a movement led in large part by young people across the country and around the world, said Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Perez, chairman of the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church.

The COVID-19 pandemic also has affected communities of color most significantly, he said in a statement. Over the course of the next year, it is my hope that we can have honest conversations on these and other issues impacting young people and on how we can move ahead on the important questions of race, culture and community.

Organizers of the initiative have been very intentional about making sure every cultural family has their voice represented and a seat at the table as we journey together, he added. The bishops are looking forward to learning from the young people and those who accompany them.

***

For more information about Journeying Together, visitwww.usccb.org/journey2020.

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Archbishop Perez calls for 'honest conversations' with youth on race, culture - CatholicPhilly.com

CEDARBURG Bank First has announced the completion of the remodel at its office in historic district Cedarburg. A remodel of the facility, located at W61N529 Washington Ave., began in October of 2019 and the official reopening date is set for Monday. Bank First established itself in the Cedarburg community with the acquisition of Partnership Bank in July 2019. We are extremely pleased with the outcome of the Cedarburg project, said Mike Molepske, chief executive officer of Bank First.

Cedarburg is a beautiful community, rich in history. We were very intentional with our plans for the office and sought to preserve the historic and artistic aspect of the downtown district while emulating the style of other recently renovated and constructed Bank First offices.

Bank First is committed to the communities it serves, not only providing beneficial financial solutions, but also developing meaningful relationships with its customers and community members.

We are grateful to our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve them in Cedarburg and the surrounding area. We value the relationships we have built and look forward to better serving our customers as we continue to grow, said Vince Cameranesi, senior vice president - business banking.

As with recently updated Bank First offices, the Cedarburg office will also feature creative works from local artists. Members of the community are welcome to stop by during next week to view the works and celebrate the grand reopening with special offerings. Bank First will also host a ribbon cutting ceremony with the Cedarburg Chamber of Commerce on Monday at 11 a.m.

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Bank First lobby to reopen Monday after extensive remodel - Greater Milwaukee Today

Throughout his long career in tech, Blacks In Technology executive director Peter Beasley heard programmers use the terms master and slave to refer to development branches or databases many times.

Did I, Peter Beasley, start a movement or make a big deal about it? No, I didnt do that. But I personally tried not to use those words, he said. I would never use them.

Did that make his job harder?

Im going to say yes, he said. Not the words themselves, but the fabric theyre a part of.

A Black technologist could work, thrive, and even lead at an organization that uses those terms, Beasley said. But the presence of words like whitelist, blacklist, master and slave would serve as constant reminders and reinforcers of the racist structures that make a workplace less welcoming for Black people.

Many technologists like Beasley are fed up with both the words and the fabric they represent. In the wake of the most recent wave of #BlackLivesMatter protests against police violence and systemic racism, some notable companies and open-source projects announced the decommissioning of terms with offensive connotations.

I personally tried not to use those words. I would never use them.

Some of these efforts like the decision by the Jenkins governance board to replace three terms came from the top down. Others came from engineers themselves. Twitter developer Regynald Augustin, along with his colleague Kevin Oliver, successfully lobbied to replace a variety of terms, including man hours, grandfathered, dummy value and sanity check.

Linux, GitHub, Apple and Google Chrome and Go are among the other projects that recently announced terminology deprecations.

The problem of racist terminology in the workplace isnt new. But the commitments from large companies and projects may signal shifting dynamics for developers, both in and outside the codebase.

More on Tech and RaceWhy Racial Bias Still Haunts Speech-Recognition AI

Terminology changes have met mixed reactions.

Many replies to Augustins Twitter announcement were vitriolic. A note from Go developer Filippo Valsorda on the commit to replace whitelist/blacklist and master/slave acknowledges ongoing arguments about the changes:

Im not trying to have yet another debate, Valsorda wrote. Its clear that there are people who are hurt by [the terms] and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.

Others, like writer and actor Kerry Coddett, criticized the broader pattern of name changes in response to #BlackLivesMatter.

Yall removing racist symbols when were asking to remove racist systems, she tweeted. We are not having the same conversation right now.

But just because the impact of language changes isnt immediately clear doesnt mean those changes arent significant, Peta Hoyes said. Hoyes is COO and a partner at Tag1 Consulting, a firm that helps optimize websites built with the open-source Drupal framework.

I agree wholeheartedly that we should address the issues, not just the words but the words are still important because they have real effects, she said.

She thought of tennis star Serena Williams, who in 2015 was named Sports Illustrateds Sportsperson of the Year. The honor sparked a social media debate over which contender deserved the award more: Williams or American Pharoah, a Triple-Crown-winning horse.

The argument was absurd. But the dehumanizing language sports enthusiasts used to discuss Williams performance had seeded the racist debate long before it flared up, Hoyes said.

As a Black woman who exists in that air, there are a lot of things I shove to the side because I dont have that time in the day. I have to pick my battles.

By themselves, words are symbols. But you cant divorce words from their contexts, Hoyes said. If technology organizations are homogeneously white and male, that context may be lost on many. But as spaces become increasingly diverse, some language hits differently. Tech workers should take the time to listen to their peers and examine the historical and cultural contexts of the language they use, she added.

This is the air we breathe, for all intents and purposes. When your diversity starts to reflect the actual population, people start to realize, This air works for me, but it might not work for other people, Hoyes said. As a Black woman who exists in that air, there are a lot of things I shove to the side because I dont have that time in the day. I have to pick my battles.

Hoyes said that Black employees, especially Black women, face constant decisions about whether or not to address racism in the workplace, weighing their time, energy and security against the severity of the incident. Thats what makes it especially important for white colleagues to think critically about language at work, as well as interactions, protocols and systems.

In that sense, terminology changes are indeed small because theyre the tip of an iceberg.

Some technical terminology changes are coming from project leadership; others happen when developers like Augustin push for new company-wide language.

But not all are the result of organized efforts. Some changes happen line by line, merge by merge.

For instance, Python officially deprecated master/slave from its codebase in 2018. But before that happened, community members were already chipping away at terms they found offensive.

In 2017, Python core developer Mariatta Wijaya found herself helping out with a GitHub bot that flagged pull requests from accounts that hadnt signed the projects Contributor License Agreement. Since some pull requests come from automated processes, they needed a way to exempt those requests and prevent them from being flagged Wijaya was asked, via a GitHub issue, to create a whitelist.

When I implemented the bot, I made a conscious decision, Wijaya said. I didnt want to use the term whitelist.

So, she did a Google search for alternatives and settled on allowlist instead.

When she implemented the feature, she didnt call attention to the terminology swap. The developer whod opened the issue accepted her contribution, and nothing more came of it.

I dont know if he noticed. I never asked him about it, she said.

When I implemented the bot, I made a conscious decision. I didnt want to use the term whitelist.

In that way, Wijaya changed the terminology in one project quietly and unilaterally. For huge codebases such as Python, that approach to project-wide change would, admittedly, be slow going. But, particularly in open-source communities, more sweeping changes can lead to stronger blowback.

When a Python developer opened an issue the following year requesting that all instances of master/slave be replaced, that request was eventually accepted. But it also prompted ideological and personal attacks. The core developer involved with that change asked that Wijaya not share his name.

It harks back to a common critique of open-source communities: The anonymity, written messages and no-holds-barred technical debates enable abusive speech. Thats why the Contributor Convent, a document outlining the bounds of acceptable behavior in open source, exists. Many projects have adopted the Covenant. But for some people, both the Covenant and recent terminology changes are unwelcome signs of shifting demographics and the tightening of unlimited speech.

When discussions about terminology changes surfaced in the Linux community in early July, for example, some detractors directed death threats at Coraline Ehmke, the author of the Contributor Covenant, even though she wasnt directly involved in the changes, Ehmke told Built In.

While the removal of terms like master/slave specifically targets anti-Black racism, these terminology changes are part of a larger effort to make open-source spaces more inclusive. In a 2017 GitHub survey of open-source contributors the sole formal source for data on open-source participation 16 percent of respondents identified as racial or ethnic minorities. Three percent identified as women. Those imbalances have led to a variety of programs, including internships and mentorship programsaimed at boosting participation from people in underrepresented groups.

Wijaya herself became a Python core developer after being mentored by the languages creator, Guido Van Rossum. Her hope is that by increasing access to mentors and removing barriers to entry, open-source communities will continue to diversify.

It takes individuals [in the community] making an effort themselves, she said. But if the leadership sets an example, people at the bottom who admire the leaders start doing the same.

Alex Earlis a member of the Jenkins governance board, which helps guide the project and make important decisions.

After George Floyds death at the hands of police made national news, the board decided it was time to move forward with terminology changes theyd been considering for years, Earlsaid. Theyd started the process of removing slave back in 2016, but since then, contributors had reached out with concerns about other terms master, whitelist and blacklist.

They started a thread in Google groups to poll the community on the best replacement terms. Contributors spent two weeks throwing out suggestions.

I encourage Jenkins contributors to participate in this effort, one wrote. It is not something we could change in a minute, but we could do a gradual cleanup and improve the overall documentation while doing so.

I personally think without the slave context, master is pretty accurate, another weighed in. To be absolutely honest, if it has more syllables than the current, people are super likely to stick with the existing wording.

Next, the governance board will collect the proposed replacement terms and list them in an online poll for the community to rank. The board will use those rankings to determine the final replacements.

We can go in and make pull requests to their code to update those terms, but it is a long process.

According to Earl, the considerations are many. Jenkins is an international community, so the replacement terms will need to work well in English as well as other languages. Theyll also have to make sense contextually some terms may need one replacement for web interfaces and another for server applications, for instance.

Then comes implementing the changes. Editing the user interface and documentation are as simple as executing a find-and-replace. But replacing terms in the source code itself creates challenges. New class names may interact poorly with older versions of Jenkins or with the projects 1,500 user-created plug-ins, Earlsaid. And the creators of those plug-ins could continue using the old terms, if they chose.

We have to find ways to encourage those people to make the changes, he added. We can go in and make pull requests to their code to update those terms, which is something weve done with the replacement of the term slave over the past few years. But it is a long process.

Words matter. Language constructs our reality, as Beasley and Hoyes noted. Whether or not we notice it, its the air we breathe.

Does that mean that codebase changes will translate into better representation and more opportunities for Black developers?

No, Earlsaid. Is it going to solve all the worlds issues that we changed a term from slave to agent? Absolutely not. People have to actually get up and do something. We should be consistently looking for ways to include contributors from all different walks of life. And if we can help specifically some of these groups who are marginalized and oppressed, I think that's awesome.

Is it going to solve all the worlds issues that we changed a term from slave to agent? Absolutely not. People have to actually get up and do something.

Terminology isnt enough companies and projects must purposefully diversify, Earlsaid. But efforts shouldnt stop there, either. Whats equally important as bringing in more minority participants, Beasley noted, is making sure theyre supported once they arrive.

Its great that theres a focus on terminology and coding, but who gets promoted when two people walk in the room? he asked. How do we treat differences and diversity and allow all ideas to come forward?

Beasley and Hoyes shared some ways they believe individual developers can build on codebase changes to fight racism and create more opportunities for Black technologists:

Black founders are frequently passed over for venture funding. That leads to fewer Black founders and more white founders recruiting from their personal and professional networks, which often include people who look like themselves.

Thats systemic racism, Beasley said it goes beyond any single person, interaction or institution. To counteract it, the industry must work from the top, with who gets venture funding, as well as the bottom, with who gets invited to interview.

Hoyes described an incident when a client seemed visibly threatened by her presence and authority. Her white colleagues witnessed the interaction, and commented on it later.

Sometimes, its best to call out racist interactions in the moment. (We call out peoples behavior when it affects clients, Hoyes said. Why not when it affects people of color?)

Other times, its better to debrief about the behavior after the fact, Hoyes said. Black employees shouldnt have to wonder if anyone else noticed what happened.

Its very comforting when someone says, I saw what that person did, she said. Thats half of it, bothering to acknowledge it. That makes my environment so much more hospitable. You cant put it on people of color to point it out all the time.

Everyone has implicit bias. But some people exhibit intentional bias in the workplace when they say racist things, harass Black employees, prevent them from earning promotions or leading projects or knowingly allow others to do the same.

Those people should lose their jobs, Beasley said. Campaigns against sexual harassment and assault have led to many public changes in company leadership, he added a real anti-racist movement would likely do the same.

Its not cool to allow those secrets to persist, because they will just keep going on, he said. We have to be okay talking about race. We have to get intentional. We have to out the bad people.

Its great that theres a focus on terminology and coding, but who gets promoted when two people walk in the room?

When Black employees show up ready to do their best after racist violence occurs in your city, state or country, thats a testament to their excellent job performance, Hoyes said. Dont let them start the day without acknowledging what happened in your companycommunications.

Pay close attention to who gets to talk and who tends to jump in.

Leaders at Blacks In Technology consistently hear from companies that say they want to hire more Black people, Beasley said. But the conversation cant end there. Do those new Black employees feel supported enough to stay at the company? Do they get promoted?

Blacks In Technology has an onboarding program for companies senior leaders, in which new executives meet with a roundtable of Blacks In Technology representatives to discuss some of the challenges Black employees experience in the workplace. It also has a mentorship program that connects young people of color with professional mentors from the organizations network.

They may feel isolated, they may feel alone, they may not feel comfortable talking to the HR department, Beasley said. They may not feel the solidarity of others saying, Youre not alone, baby girl, its happened to me too.

More on Tech and RaceThe Advertising Industry Cant Stay This White

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Terms Like 'Slave' and 'Master' Finally Have Their Reckoning. It's Good, but It's Not Enough. - Built In

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned an infodemic, a vast and complicated mix of information, misinformation and disinformation.In this environment, false narratives the virus was planned, that it originated as a bioweapon, that COVID-19 symptoms are caused by 5G wireless communications technology have spread like wildfire across social media and other communication platforms. Some of these bogus narratives play a role in disinformation campaigns.The notion of disinformation often brings to mind easy-to-spot propaganda peddled by totalitarian states, but the reality is much more complex. Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals.As a researcher who studies how communications technologies are used during crises, Ive found that this mix of information types makes it difficult for people, including those who build and run online platforms, to distinguish an organic rumor from an organized disinformation campaign. And this challenge is not getting any easier as efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19 get caught up in the political machinations of this years presidential election.Rumors, misinformation and disinformationRumors are, and have always been, common during crisis events. Crises are often accompanied by uncertainty about the event and anxiety about its impacts and how people should respond. People naturally want to resolve that uncertainty and anxiety, and often attempt to do so through collective sensemaking. Its a process of coming together to gather information and theorize about the unfolding event. Rumors are a natural byproduct.Rumors arent necessarily bad. But the same conditions that produce rumors also make people vulnerable to disinformation, which is more insidious. Unlike rumors and misinformation, which may or may not be intentional, disinformation is false or misleading information spread for a particular objective, often a political or financial aim.Disinformation has its roots in the practice of dezinformatsiya used by the Soviet Unions intelligence agencies to attempt to change how people understood and interpreted events in the world. Its useful to think of disinformation not as a single piece of information or even a single narrative, but as a campaign, a set of actions and narratives produced and spread to deceive for political purpose.Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected from what was then Czechoslovakia and later became a professor of disinformation, described how effective disinformation campaigns are often built around a true or plausible core. They exploit existing biases, divisions and inconsistencies in a targeted group or society. And they often employ unwitting agents to spread their content and advance their objectives.Regardless of the perpetrator, disinformation functions on multiple levels and scales. While a single disinformation campaign may have a specific objective for instance, changing public opinion about a political candidate or policy pervasive disinformation works at a more profound level to undermine democratic societies.The case of the Plandemic videoDistinguishing between unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation is a critical challenge. Intent is often hard to infer, especially in online spaces where the original source of information can be obscured. In addition, disinformation can be spread by people who believe it to be true. And unintentional misinformation can be strategically amplified as part of a disinformation campaign. Definitions and distinctions get messy, fast.Consider the case of the Plandemic video that blazed across social media platforms in May 2020. The video contained a range of false claims and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Problematically, it advocated against wearing masks, claiming they would activate the virus, and laid the foundations for eventual refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine.Though many of these false narratives had emerged elsewhere online, the Plandemic video brought them together in a single, slickly produced 26-minute video. Before being removed by the platforms for containing harmful medical misinformation, the video propagated widely on Facebook and received millions of YouTube views.As it spread, it was actively promoted and amplified by public groups on Facebook and networked communities on Twitter associated with the anti-vaccine movement, the QAnon conspiracy theory community and pro-Trump political activism.But was this a case of misinformation or disinformation? The answer lies in understanding how and inferring a little about why the video went viral.The videos protagonist was Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who had previously advocated for several false theories in the medical domain for example, claiming that vaccines cause autism. In the lead-up to the videos release, she was promoting a new book, which featured many of the narratives that appeared in the Plandemic video.One of those narratives was an accusation against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, Fauci was a focus of criticism for promoting social distancing measures that some conservatives viewed as harmful to the economy. Public comments from Mikovits and her associates suggest that damaging Faucis reputation was a specific goal of their campaign.In the weeks leading up to the release of the Plandemic video, a concerted effort to lift Mikovits profile took shape across several social media platforms. A new Twitter account was started in her name, quickly accumulating thousands of followers. She appeared in interviews with hyperpartisan news outlets such as The Epoch Times and True Pundit. Back on Twitter, Mikovits greeted her new followers with the message: Soon, Dr Fauci, everyone will know who you really are.This background suggests that Mikovits and her collaborators had several objectives beyond simply sharing her misinformed theories about COVID-19. These include financial, political and reputational motives. However, it is also possible that Mikovits is a sincere believer of the information that she was sharing, as were millions of people who shared and retweeted her content online.Whats aheadIn the United States, as COVID-19 blurs into the presidential election, were likely to continue to see disinformation campaigns employed for political, financial and reputational gain. Domestic activist groups will use these techniques to produce and spread false and misleading narratives about the disease and about the election. Foreign agents will attempt to join the conversation, often by infiltrating existing groups and attempting to steer them towards their goals.For example, there will likely be attempts to use the threat of COVID-19 to frighten people away from the polls. Along with those direct attacks on election integrity, there are likely to also be indirect effects on peoples perceptions of election integrity from both sincere activists and agents of disinformation campaigns.Efforts to shape attitudes and policies around voting are already in motion. These include work to draw attention to voter suppression and attempts to frame mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud. Some of this rhetoric stems from sincere criticism meant to inspire action to make the electoral systems stronger. Other narratives, for example unsupported claims of voter fraud, seem to serve the primary aim of undermining trust in those systems.History teaches that this blending of activism and active measures, of foreign and domestic actors, and of witting and unwitting agents, is nothing new. And certainly the difficulty of distinguishing between these is not made any easier in the connected era. But better understanding these intersections can help researchers, journalists, communications platform designers, policymakers and society at large develop strategies for mitigating the impacts of disinformation during this challenging moment.

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

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Commentary: Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs lessons from the pandemic - Press Herald

China could play a pivotal role in halting trade in trees crucial for West African ecosystems made more fragile by climate change.

In 2019, the Gambia Africas smallest country was the third largest source of highly prized hongmu, a group of rosewood species used in China to make antique-style furniture and art. Yet the endangered rosewood species Pterocarpus erinaceus, native to West and Central Africa, has been nearly extinct in the Gambia since 2011.

It was an open secret that most of this rosewood timber, known locally as keno, is in fact illegally harvested and smuggled from neighboring Senegal. An investigation by NGO the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has shed new light on the scale and workings of the shadowy trade.

Its Cashing-in on Chaos report, published in June, revealed that the Gambia exported approximately 1.6 million rosewood trees between June 2012 and April 2020. According to EIAs findings, most of these exports are in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), under which P. erinaceus has been listed since 2017.

Our three-year investigation brings unprecedented evidence to show how extensive the crisis is and the magnitude of the illegal trade between Senegal and the Gambia, says Kidan Araya, Africa program campaigner at EIA Global, based in Washington DC.

The trafficking has already contributed to political instability in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, where the illegal logging has been concentrated.

EIAs undercover interviews with traffickers confirmed rumors that rebels from the armed separatist group, the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), derive most of their income from the illegal trade. Tens of thousands of people have been internally displaced by the long-running conflict for independence.

The Senegambia rosewood trade is on a par with conflict diamonds, says Naomi Basik Treanor, a senior manager of NGO Forest Trends. The nature of the conflict in Senegal and the very porous borders makes this trade very hard to contain, she adds.

Addressing the rosewood crisis was a diplomatic priority for the Gambias current president Adama Barrow when he came to power in January 2017. His predecessor, the notoriously corrupt and ruthless dictator Yahya Jammeh, had controlled the rosewood re-export trade through a parastatal company, Westwood Gambia Limited, through which tens of millions of dollars worth of keno was shipped to China, reports EIA.

Barrow imposed a re-export ban in February 2017 and agreed to a joint enforcement initiative to combat the trafficking with the president of Senegal, Macky Sall, in 2018.

However, EIAs investigation shows that despite these measures, imports have increased. Between February 2017 and April 2020, China imported 329,351 tons of rosewood from the Gambia. This is more than China imported in 2015 and 2016 (241,254), during the last two years of Jammehs regime, when rosewood trafficking was a well-known matter of state, says the report.

Observers in Casamance and Gambia agreed with EIAs findings. Immediately after the departure of Yahya Jammeh and for the first year after the Gambias ban, the trafficking really reduced, but now it is back in full force, says Ansumana Sanneh of NGO United Purpose (UP), which works with partner organizations in the Casamance on community projects to protect the forests.

Musa Mballo, chair of one of UPs partners in Velingara department, Casamance, says the traffickers are now not only MFDC rebels, but are coming from Gambia and across Senegal, basing themselves within forest communities and preying on the lack of economic opportunities, especially for youths, to involve people in the trade.

The natural resources belong to everybody, but then part of the community is profiting, others see they are making quick money and feel disadvantaged. It may be only three or four people who are doing it, but the destruction is huge, he adds.

The environmental impacts of the deforestation are already being felt. Before this phenomenon, you always had shade in the forest, but now the sun and wind have a lot of negative effects. Now the forest fruits people used to eat are not growing, adds Mballo.

P. erinaceus or keno is embedded in the regions savannah and semi-arid forests, says conservationist William Dumeno at the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana. It is one of the few species that can survive in these conditions, supporting the wildlife and socio-economic activities. If you remove it, then youre tampering with the stability of the fragile ecosystems.

Since 2015, the trees have been relentlessly targeted by traffickers, as West Africa has taken over from Southeast Asia as the worlds top hongmu-producing region, notes EIAs report.

Over-exploitation will have long-term consequences, says Dumeno, who is currently researching causal links between illegal rosewood logging in Ghana and climate change.

Southern Senegal is quite a dry, savannah atmosphere. A large area of landscape has been depleted. People are going to experience rising temperature and drying up of river bodies from loss of tree cover. You can see from aerial images this is a land thats going to suffer a lot from exposure because of the removal of these trees, he adds.

Despite growing awareness of these issues, cross-border trafficking continues apace, with bribes greasing palms at the many military and police checkpoints along the route, sources told China Dialogue.

In the Gambia, the situation is very secretive, says Seeku Janku, chair of the All Gambia Forestry Platform. They use big trucks like refrigerated containers to smuggle the timber in at night and put it into a warehouse.

Janku is part of a network of civil society organizations across Senegal and the Gambia campaigning against illegal logging and rosewood trafficking. Activism is risky, the government will distance themselves from you. To get information from them is really difficult, and the traders recruit boys who will attack you, he says.

EIAs investigation exposes how Gambias current administration has been unable to decisively break with the systemic corruption of the past regime.

Some of the old schemes that were established during Jammehs time have been either revived or are still existing and are being used by politicians. This investigation found that a main avenue to smuggle the timber is through parastatal companies, says Araya.

Westwood Gambia Ltd, which is expected to be investigated for war crimes by NGO Trial International, has been succeeded by another Gambian company named Jagne Narr Procurement and Agency Services that is used to smuggle the wood, which is shipped from the port of Banjul to China.

EIAs investigations found that the CITES export permits required to prove that the timber has been legally and sustainably sourced were also fraudulently issued in Gambia or not issued at all. Lamin Dibba, the minister of environment, climate change and natural resources (MECCNAR) was named by multiple traffickers as a key figure in the scheme. Dibba did not respond to EIAs inquiries.

The report also highlights a significant discrepancy of $471 million between Gambias reported timber exports and imports declared by trading partners from 2010 and 2018. Its intentional because China is receiving this and they know its rosewood. Theres massive underreporting, says Araya.

EIA is calling for the Gambia to suspend rosewood trade totally. There have been multiple statements from Barrow, but corruption is overpowering any political will to try to ban rosewood exports, she adds.

China, as the largest importer of West African hongmu, could play a pivotal role in halting the trafficking and EIA has called on China to seize all containers of Gambian rosewood landing in its ports in line with the recently adopted Chinese Forest Code. We hope that the Chinese authorities take our evidence and use it to stop the illegal trade, says Araya.

Unlike most countries that are importing timber, China does not yet have in place measures to prohibit or exclude the import of illegal timber, explains Basik Treanor.

She hopes that China will use its recently revised forestry law, which includes a nationwide ban on processing illegally sourced domestic timber, to apply to imported timber as well. That ultimately is what China needs to do at scale to really confront this crisis, she says.

Excerpt from:

Rosewood Trafficking Worsens in the Gambia - Earth Island Journal

Following the murder of George Floyd, junior African American studies and legal studies major Zach Steward decided he wanted to do more to support Black and brown students at the University of Massachusetts.

He created a Google document to address racial injustices at the University which he called Action Steps. The 17-page document has been shared with around 300 individuals and organizations, thus, founding the UMass Racial Justice Coalition.

BIPOC student input drove everything, said rising senior and food science major Emily Steen, who worked closely with Steward throughout the process. By bringing all these people to a single document and letting them express themselves freely, it really gave the base for the rest of our work.

The document of action steps soon transitioned into meetings of students who wanted to join the coalition.

Were not an RSO, were not an organization, were not aiming to become one, Steen said. What we are is a safe place for organizations and students with shared ideas and ideals for what UMass should be like to come together.

Racial Justice Coalition works to empower BIPOC voices, not only in decision making rooms but making sure that theyre part of the process from the beginning. Having dialogues which really empower students to speak up for what they need, we shouldnt have to come together and spend six weeks drafting demands. It should be something that admin constantly seeks, student input. Who are they working for? The students.

The coalition, which was founded seven weeks ago, held frequent meetings with members asking individuals what would make them feel safer and happier at UMass. These conversations soon transitioned into task forces made up of students who worked on specific issues at the University. After identifying what they wanted to work on, task forces discussed how to address purpose, guidance, accountability and deadlines.

The demands, created by each task force, are split into five sections: Demands for Action Against Racism, Demands for Academic Equity, Demands for Preventing Racism, Demands for Healing Amidst Racism and Demands for Divesting from UMPD.

The demands for action against racism include updating many procedures which are already in place including the Fight Hate page on the UMass website and implementing guidelines for emergency floor meetings following an act of hate. The coalition also seeks to establish [a] racial justice hearing board. The idea behind the racial justice hearing board is to create a group of students who bridge communication between the students and administrators.

Brandon Barker, a senior dance and finance major, elaborated on their need for the racial justice hearing board saying, thats something where [administrators] have to just give a sliver of their power over to us. Theyre not living the UMass experience.

Demands for academic equity include increasing funding for academic resources and recruitment for BIPOC students, increasing hiring of BIPOC faculty, staff, peer advisors and teaching assistants across all academic departments and granting tenure for BIPOC, women and/or LGBTQ+ faculty at the same rate as their white, straight or male colleagues across all academic departments.

The demands also included a commitment to freezing tuition and fees while gradually pursuing a debt-free model.

BIPOC students are disadvantaged by first of all attending UMass, said Sara Mckenna, a senior Spanish and legal studies student. UMass doesnt offer a substantial amount of aid so that detrimentally affects people who are coming from backgrounds where their parents cant necessarily help them pay. But also, having a debt-free model in our sights is a good way to make sure that the college is accessible to everyone, and as a state college, it really should be already.

The demands for preventing racism have three parts: changing the common read for incoming students to required reading by W.E.B. Du Bois as a part of a new Du Bois Legacy Project, implementing a social justice general education requirement for all undergraduates and requiring anti-racist training for all students, faculty and staff.

Mckenna said that these three parts work together. I like to think of it as like we start students off with that common read and they go into the anti-racist training and then they continue on to that symposium. And then at some point, whether its their freshman, sophomore, whatever year it is, they continue with that social justice gen ed.

Demands for healing amidst racism include increasing hiring of BIPOC counselors and accessibility of mental health and crisis centers, monitoring the safety and accessibility of all cultural centers and the Stonewall Center, and empowering students voices with CMASS.

Jennie Chang, a social thought and political economy and legal studies double major said she has been apprehensive to go the Center for Counseling and Phycological Health. Chang said she has asked herself, whether or not I really want to take the time to like reach out to CCPH, especially if I feel like theyre not going to understand my culture or my own identity, my own backgrounds, like why Im thinking this way. The demands for healing amidst racism considered meeting these personal needs of students.

Members of the RJC also explained the demand to disinvest in the University of Massachusetts Police Department. They call for reinvestment of funds into other resources, disarming UMPD and removing their presence from all residential areas.

Economics and anthropology student Jessica Dale explained how the funding of UMPD could be invested in services such as the Center for Women and Community and the CCPH. She said that police are part of an institution that normalizes harm toward Black, indigenous and people of color. [Police] cannot be such a normalized institution on campus, because the scope of power right now is so broad and makes students feel unsafe, largely, Dale said.

From their research and conversations, the RJC created two petitions: one petition for individuals at UMass and another for organizations to sign in support. The finalized list of demands, which was presented to the University on Monday, was completed with another organization, UMass for Black Lives, which has also been working to demand racial justice at the University.

UMass for Black Lives was founded when Wayne Barnaby, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience and behavior, reached out to graduate student leaders in the interdepartmental graduate programs and microbiology to see who would be interested in creating a petition with action items for each level of the UMass campus to commit to. The group then developed a petition to post on Change.org. The petition currently has over 3,000 signatures.

According to Barnaby and Lian Guo, a Ph.D. candidate in organismic and evolutionary biology, UMass for Black Lives serves as a way to hold not only our leadership but also ourselves accountable for making the changes that are possible within our purview for safer, more supportive communities here at UMass Amherst.

Every so often, we find ourselves as a national, state and local community in a heightened sense of awareness around the trauma and injustice affecting the Black American community. Too many times is this awareness met deafening silence from our community leaders, Barnaby and Guo said in an email. We recently arrived upon one of these moments due to the unjust killings of George Floyd, Sean Reed, Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee and too many others to name within just this past year. And yet again, the grief and pain found in the Black Community was met with delayed or no action from our campus and academic leadership.

After identifying their similar goals and valuing each others work, the RJC and UMass for Black Lives decided to work together to hold the University accountable in creating an actively anti-racist campus.

Although the co-creators of the UMass for Black Lives petition sought input from both undergraduate and non-CNS voices, we believe that the RJC brings a robust and well-rounded undergraduate perspective from different colleges on campus. We see the demands of the RJC and this petition as being two sides of the same coin, Barnaby and Guo said in an email.

They continued: The RJC demands focus mainly on actions the central administration can take (top-down), while the demands from UMass for Black Lives focus mainly on incentivizing actions that each college, department and program leadership should take to change their own communities (bottom-up). Of course, there is overlap. We believe both sets of actions are necessary to create a truly supportive and anti-racist UMass community.

When it comes to accountability, both organizations articulated specific expectations of the University.

Barnaby and Guo said, If the University administration truly believes in the values and campaigns like Hate Has No Home at UMass that they promote surrounding inclusion and equity, then we expect them to invest in the future of this campus by acknowledging and completing the actions that the community is asking for. This includes incentivizing college, department and program leadership to create their own action list fitting to the needs of their program and holding them accountable to making progress on those actions by revisiting the document on an at least yearly basis. We would also expect them to support and amplify the Racial Justice Coalition as a crucial step towards mending a broken system that undervalues the necessity of our BIPOC community members.

They continued, via email, saying, We call on upper administration, specifically Chancellor Subbaswamy and Provost McCarthy, to do essentially three things: 1) Create significant institutional, campus wide changes, 2) Implement and create accountability for a set of customized action items for every department and program, and 3) To use their power and influence to speak up and out to Massachusetts officials about implementing early stage vigilance structures in the judicial pipeline knowing that they have the support and unification of the rest of the Flagship Campus.

The RJC addressed similar concerns. In the introduction, we do have a set date for them to respond to the demands by. Its one of those things where we wanted to be intentional in what we were demanding and wanted to be intentional in what we were bringing to the table, Steward said, adding that the RJCs demands were inspired by demands from 1970, 2008, 2014 and 2018 which, according to Steward, were never met.

The RJC has also met repeatedly with University administration as they have worked on their demands. In these conversations with admin, theyve all been very supportive of our work, Steen said.We just need to make sure that they implement it and that we can see a change.

Representatives from RJC expressed how University administrators were surprised by what they were hearing from students, which Steen articulated.

These conversations with admin tend to be surprising for them, he said. When we say that students are unhappy with certain things or certain responses from the past. They are genuinely surprised when we bring some of these things up.

Epstein said that there is a disconnect between students and administrators, which may lead them to be surprised by student testimonies. They said this disconnect is due to a lack of transparency from administrators and a lack of accessibility to them.

And at least with my experience with them, at times, it seems that they forget that theyre not working for [Subbaswamy]. Theyre not working for these corporations. You know, theyre working for the students. And I think students dont realize that, they said.

Both groups expressed concerns about UMass recruiting students who are not supported by the University.

We emphasize that it is immoral to recruit diverse students to a campus which does not sufficiently support their academic and personal wellness. While diversity is important, UMass must keep true to their word in creating a safe, inclusive space for BIPOC students, Barnaby and Guo said. Implementing action plans at smaller academic community levels will help change the culture at UMass, and the administration must be the ones who incentivize and establish accountability for those action plans.

Steen said administrators dont know what students go through. Thats not their fault, per se, but it is their duty to listen to us now that were speaking up, and were here and were not going to be overlooked.

When asked for comment, the University directed the Massachusetts Daily Collegian toward UMasss plan to combat racism for the fall, created by Nefertiti Walker, interim vice chancellor for the Office of Equity and Inclusion.

Steward and Steen were asked if they were hopeful that the University would meet their demands.

It all comes back to money and ego, Steward said. They will do what they can to save face in light of the current circumstances of the world and, in particular, of our country. But when push comes to shove, they will continue to put the lives of again cis-hat, straight white men, before the lives of any and all minority students and they will continue to put money and status before the lives of a quality education for all.

Ive talked to older professors at UMass who are really impressed with the movement thats going on right now. This level of tension has been met before, but this is the first time that theres really a lot of white allies and theyve noted that as optimism, like theres an actual change thats going on, Steen said.

Steen continued, Zach and I know this isnt new, this isnt didnt start in June 2020. This has been our entire lives and this will be our entire lives moving forward. That being said, we do need to paint the success of BIPOC students, faculty and staff at UMass as success for the entire community. It will strengthen our community, we are asking for an anti-racist campus if UMass does not, you know, implement our demands, what does that say about UMass?

The demands were submitted on Monday. Steen said, We expect a detailed line-by-line response by July 30, complete with measurable action steps. We will continue to work with the community to address additional needs and hold UMass administrators accountable for ensuring the safety and success of all BIPOC.

Cassie McGrath can be reached at [emailprotected] or followed on Twitter @cassiemcgrath_.

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UMass Racial Justice Coalition and UMass for Black Lives present demands to the University - The Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin

After the video of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day shook America, news clips continued jolting us by broadcasting live images of demonstrations for change across the nation and beyond with thousands of people hitting the streets, mostly in larger cities.

Rural citizens also have been showing their support for the cause through rallies, marches, demonstrations and community discussions.

Their actions arent often covered on the evening news, but they are making news in places like Cresco, Spencer, Mingo, Maquoketa, Mount Vernon, Panora, Marshalltown, Creston, Evansdale, Sheldon, Belle Plaine, Forest City and Boone.

Altogether, this may be the largest protest movement the United States has ever seen, with an estimated 5,000 protests and related events, large and small, having taken place across America since May 26 an average of 140 or so a day.

Between 13 to 26 million people of all backgrounds in the United States (4 to 8 percent of the overall population) have taken part.

Demanding more than simply justice for Mr. Floyd, they are seeking empathy and, what logically follows, equal treatment for racialized and other dehumanized groups across the land. Black lives matter, too. Brown lives matter, too. According to recent research, three-quarters of Americans believe racial discrimination is a serious problem, a 25-point jump from five years ago.

The continued presence of systemic/structural racism in America is seen and felt by many as confirmation that the lives of racialized groups here dont matter. As a democracy, the majority could have prioritized ending the systems and structures that keep racism alive. Whether we like it or not, as a whole, weve chosen not to do so via our collective voices and votes.

For many of us, the current situation demands serious self-reflection. Its forcing us to ask ourselves important but difficult questions. As the saying goes, its uncomfortable to be uncomfortable. Here are some questions I hear many have been asking themselves perhaps you are, too.

What is systemic or structural racism? Do I believe it exists in America?

What is privilege? Am I privileged? If so, how has that manifested itself in my life? For example, would I panic or not when going 5 miles an hour over the speed limit when I am close to being late for a job interview? How might that differ from a member of a racialized group?

Do I truly believe that all lives matter? If so, do my actions align with that belief?

Here are some things you can do as individual citizens:

Look inward. Reflect. Seek to learn and understand the root causes of our current societal problems.

Have honest and respectful conversations about the above questions with family, friends and others.

Take action on a local level to improve our community for everyone. Even small acts can have large repercussions. Thoughts, intentions and prayers are not enough to move the needle for our neighbors who have been, often very quietly, suffering.

Leaders of organizations play an important role. If you have a leadership role in a small or large business, non-profit, educational institution or government entity, what are you doing to drive change in your organization and community? Healthy, vibrant and diverse workplaces help create healthy, vibrant and diverse communities. As you look ahead and strive to maximize the potential of your workforce and community, here are a few related high-level diversity, equity and inclusion action steps we are sharing with our clients that you might find useful, as well:

Assess your organization and community. Create a strategy with a clear diversity statement and robust long-term goals. Where does your organization and community need to be in order to adapt and thrive in the fast-changing world we live in? What barriers exist that prevent your organization and community from getting there?

Learn about and address unconscious bias in your workplace.

As you assess your organization and community, create a safe environment for others to share their thoughts and feelings. Ask for honest feedback. Listen. Be honest, respectful and transparent in your sharing. Trade silence for empathy, even if it comes at the cost of not knowing what to say.

Take ownership and be intentional about driving these conversations. It is not always easy to be vulnerable with people you lead or barely know, but it is a must if you want to build or restore trust.

Determine the right tactics to achieve your goals and begin implementing them. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. This work is definitely not just a quick class or a one-time social event. How will you achieve your long-term goals? What are your next steps? Be agile, as situations do change.

Educate yourself about the issues from multiple perspectives. It is your job to seek varied and valid sources of information.

Watch our recent webinar for additional information on the important work of diversity and inclusion during the COVID-19 era.

Reimagine what tomorrow could be.

Claudia Schabel is president of Schabel Solutions, a consulting firm that offers strategic solutions on how to build inclusive workplaces to attract and retain talent. Schabel lived in Brazil and Japan before relocating to Des Moines, where she has lived for two decades. She has 15 years of experience as a diversity, equity and inclusion strategist with Fortune 100 and 500 companies. In her work, Schabel advocates for social justice and equitable policies. She serves as a commissioner on the City of Des Moines Civil and Human Rights Commission, the director of diversity on Iowas Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) State Council, the advocacy chair of the Iowa Chapter National Women Business Owner (NAWBO), and a trainer/facilitator for the Iowa Network Against Human Trafficking and Slavery.

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Yes, it's uncomfortable to be uncomfortable, but take action, drive change - Carroll Daily Times Herald

The global pandemic has fueled a rise in misinformation circulating on social media.

Since the early days of COVID-19, Facebook and other platforms have been full of memes and posts challenging testing results and even alluding that the whole virus story is a conspiracy.

Click to listen to the story:

Peter Adams is with the News Literacy Project. Theyve created tools for students to evaluate news stories.

He says the rapidly evolving nature of the pandemic, where new data is being released constantly, has created an atmosphere where misinformation can easily spread.

Adams said countless people have been duped -- or watch as their friends and family are duped -- by conspiracy theories on their feed. And for those who want to wade into comments and dispute claims -- he said its important to note that misinformation isn't just something meant to reinforce someones beliefs but to exploit those beliefs.

People around you falling for misinformation vote in your communities, they vote in statewide and national elections, they can have an effect on you whether you get fooled or not, said Adams. So, everyone should care.

He says its not just misinformation about the pandemic, but also the Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 Election.

He says it can spread quickly in part because people often trust friends more than they trust the media or government.

Your friends and family actually view you, because you're their friend because you're their family member, as a sort of credible source, he said. And, you know, you really want to protect their interests and not share things that are false.

Adams said it doesnt help matters that elected officials, like the president, have spread misinformation regarding the pandemic.

Adams says people should learn to separate scrolling from intentional news consumption.

And its time to break the habit of thinking that just because something looks well-produced, its credible. With anything, he said, its smart to slow down and check to see if claims are backed up by evidence and if other reputable outlets are saying the same thing.

Adams says even though younger people may be on different platforms, like TikTok, the hallmarks of misinformation -- false contrasts and evidence-free claims -- are the same.

Link:

Social Media Has Seen A Rise In Misinformation During COVID-19. How Can You Learn To Spot It? - WNIJ and WNIU