
Our undergraduate program is racist - azhenley
https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/why-our-academic-major-is-racist-d42725592af7
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core-questions
Another day, another virtue-signalling post by someone who offers absolutely
nothing to solve any real problem. I feel compelled to take it apart, so here
goes.

Amy Ko, the author, says:

> As an administrator, I spend most of my time identifying the racist
> structures in our program and trying to dismantle them.

Interesting. So here we have a very privileged Asian-American woman working in
a reasonably prestigious university. She is absorbing a healthy middle-class
salary, paid for on the backs of student tuition, taxation, grants, and other
public money. Sometimes we wonder why university is so expensive - well, it is
no doubt in part due to the number of people like herself who are absorbing a
solid middle-class salary doing something that doesn't actually accomplish the
goals of the university nor serves the needs of the majority of the actual
students in her faculty, who pay her salary while receiving her contempt
simply for their genetic background. Highly ironic.

She goes on to detail a number of efforts that are in place to ensure that her
university does not simply use a meritocratic process of merely allowing the
best students in; ironically the effect of all of these efforts is massive
_underrepresentation_ by Asian-American students who perform excellently on
all measures and would occupy far more seats under a system that discounted
background and treated each person as an individual with the goal of
recruiting the best talent possible.

Let's go over her four racist structures.

> Students can’t join our undergraduate program until they’re admitted by the
> University of Washington. Therefore, we inherit any forms of racial bias
> embedded in that admissions process and all the structures that come before
> it.

This essentially denies the existence of her colleagues who are similarly
doing whatever they can to change the admissions process as a whole. They have
a difficult job, of course, because they have to somehow come up with an
admissions process that _looks_ fair while not _being_ fair, because it starts
with arbitrary expectations of what the student cohort should look like in
order to be "equitable" under some definition, and then develops selection
criteria after the fact.

Of course, as anyone who has looked at this knows, the net result is that
plenty of local people who have grown up assuming they'd be able to attend a
local university cannot, even if their grades are good enough, even if they're
not racist or offensive or badthinking people, merely because their skin is
the wrong color to correctly fill out a quota. Amazing.

> Somali refugees in our city arrive, there are many racist things they
> encounter. First and foremost, they are suddenly, for the first time in
> their lives, considered Black in America, and begin experiencing all of the
> individual racism that comes with that. Second, they must learn English, and
> quickly, and support their parents in navigating largely English-centric
> public and private worlds

Expecting refugees to learn the language of the country that has taken them
in, and is feeding and clothing them, is hardly racist. No doubt Amy Ko's
forebears, or she herself, had to learn English at some point as well in order
to be able to compete in America. You'll find that baby Americans also have to
learn it; and that it is a very tolerant language, where accents and poor
grammar are forgiven more easily than in virtually any other language. This is
not racist; it's just practical. Universities can hardly expect their
professors to all learn fifty languages in order to teach.

> Even if they do, which is far less likely than youth at schools near
> Microsoft, what are the chances that they’d ever hear about The Information
> School and our Informatics major?

Wherein we encounter the first of many instances of Ko employing the "soft
bigotry of low expectations". That's right, how could we possibly expect these
Somalians to hear about university? All of the outreach and advertising in the
world... but at the same time we expect potential students to write their
life's story of striving and volunteering down in order to have a chance at an
entrance. Should not the basic qualification of "seeking out post secondary
education" be a reasonable filter? Are we really going to pretend entire
communities simply don't know about university at all? If you manage to make
it through Grade 12 with grades high enough to get into university, how could
you possibly remain ignorant of this? If you do, are you really university
material? Some amount of selection filter is surely necessary, as it's not
like every single person in the city can pack into the lecture halls.

~~~
core-questions
Further:

> We’ve long been interested in recruiting students who have some prior
> experience with information technology, such as an internship, an in-depth
> project, or participation in an after school or summer program. These are an
> indicator that a student might understand what we teach, has an interest in
> what we might teach, and has invested time in that interest. But what seems
> like an innocuous indicator, is actually racist. How would Black students
> around Washington state access any of these extracurricular activities?

Another fantastic example of soft bigotry. Yes, Amy, how indeed would a Black
student access one of these things? It's not like you can buy a complete
computer for $25, or access reams of free information online, or in the
library, or at local clubs, or in your "chronically underfunded" school which
still somehow manages to have a computer lab.

> nearly all after school programs that would develop Black students’ interest
> in computing are prohibitively expensive

And yet if you look at the ranks of people who actually are talented within CS
and IT, the vast majority of them have a large component of their education
which is self-taught; these programs are wholly unnecessary to a person who
actually finds a keen interest in their heart for this discipline. Back in the
80s, plenty of people learned this with far less access (more expensive
computers, no Internet, having to survive off of library books and discarded
PC Magazines and so forth). To pretend like it's inaccessible to Black youth
today is to discredit them and to discredit the work of everyone who has
contributed their time to making so much information, code, and content freely
available.

> All of these inequities are due to racial bias in public and private
> investments in K-12 CS education

Asserted with no evidence. What can be asserted with evidence, of course, are
a hundred years worth of psychometric research that indicates a critical IQ
gap between population groups, that persists despite every effort in
education; but this is the most uncomfortable truth of our day, despite having
critical explanatory power that literally nothing Amy Ko says can even
approach.

> While most teachers may not see themselves as racist, I have heard high
> school CS teachers say “Well Black students don’t seem to be interested” or
> “My Black students don’t do as well in CS.”

What if this is simply a true statement? What if these teachers are trying
their honest, un-prejudiced, anti-racist best, and the result is the same?
What do we do then, if we still want to be good people that aren't driven by
hate, if we still want to give everyone a chance? What if it actually just
_doesn't work_, Amy? Because it sure seems like it doesn't.

> What do they experience in classes and the broader learning community? Many
> of our Black students have been quite clear to me that their experience is
> largely defined by who is in our community: mostly White and Asian students
> who’ve had a lifetime of privileged access to computers, to learning
> opportunities related to technology, to a social network that understands
> and values technology; and mostly White and Asian faculty (like myself),
> who’ve largely had the same privileges.

Say privilege again. Each time you do, you deny the hard work that someone has
done. The hard work of the parents and the grandparents of the people in her
geographic area, the people who have been their before her family, who have
paid taxes that helped to build and subsidize these schools for decades. Each
time you say it, you deny the work of the actual students involved, who don't
just cruise through their life absorbing everything for free; they too have
had to study, have had to sacrifice other opportunities. Because there cannot
be an infinite number of people in the school, Ko is essentially saying there
are students there who should not be, students who should be removed in order
to make room for others, on the basis of skin color, even despite their hard
work and commitment. Astounding.

~~~
core-questions
Further:

> They often have less shared cultural knowledge with their instructors,
> meaning they often encounter lectures, problem sets, and exam questions that
> use cultural references they may not know, unfairly resulting in lower
> grades.

Is this unfair? A culture exists - we cannot "de-culturalize" every single
thing in our society in the hopes that it somehow overcomes this problem. I
also find this to be a flimsy excuse, particularly when it comes to CS,
because most of the questions are very abstract and separated from culture or
normal human affairs. When they are phrased in cultural terms, more than
anything it is an attempt to use metaphor or parable to make an abstract topic
more accessible to people, not the other way around.

> But it’s not just students and faculty, but the content of classes as well.
> Despite abundant research from Black scholars on computing and information,
> most of what they will read is written by White men who say nothing of
> racism; most of the technologies they learn were made by White men that
> believe technology is neutral.

Yes, this is generally what White people believe. There have never been any
laws that prevented a Black person from buying a computer, from writing a
program, from posting on the Internet - in fact, we wouldn't even know if you
were white or black or any other flavour of person online unless you reveal it
and make that into the subject of discussion.

> Ignoring this is a kind of educational gaslighting, as if we’re saying the
> racism they’re experiencing doesn’t actually exist.

This sentence itself is gaslighting: she's establishing without evidence that
all of the White (and Asian, and Jewish, and so forth) contributors to
computer science are racist - through the omission of a racial narrative from
their textbooks! Once again, with this sort of view, it is shown that it is
simply impossible for a White person to be compliant; you can't be not a
racist; even if you've done your absolute best to never comment on the subject
whatsoever you're still 'gaslighting' people of color somehow, in a way you
cannot rectify. If you ask what you're doing wrong, you've just committed the
Kafakaesque sin of not knowing what you've done wrong, like a person in a
failed relationship arguing with their partner.

> The only way to explain these discrepancies in students’ in and out of class
> experiences is that the program is designed for the White and Asian students
> majority—by me, and my faculty.

No, that's not the only way. Again, asserted with no evidence; meanwhile it's
easy for anyone to see the anti-intellectual bent that is predominant amongst
the lower classes (you're "acting white" if you spend your time on the
computer, and so forth). This, coupled with the aforementioned psychometric
situation, makes it easy to predict the "in and out of class experience" of
someone who is barely staying above the water line in their program, who may
know they're only in their class because of an affirmative action or other
quota mechanism, and worse, who know that their peers know this, and will
never afford them respect because of their knowledge that you wouldn't be
there if it wasn't for such a program. Makes it even more difficult for the
Black person who actually does get into the program 100% on their own merits
without any requirement for the admissions program to bump them up for
diversity's sake, too.

~~~
core-questions
Last but not least:

> If you made it this far through this post without your head exploding in
> conservative rage, maybe you’ve already accepted your capacity for implicit
> anti-Black bias.

I have not. Let's look at what Ko is asking us to do:

> Hire clusters of Black faculty advancing race and technology discourse.

What is a "cluster"? Are we to hire these people specifically for their race?
Can "clusters" of other races be allowed? What is the requirement to be
allowed a cluster?

> Promote Black faculty into academic leadership. (A bit, but not enough.)

To the exclusion of others who have worked hard and deserve the position?
Again, will this not result in people acting like Black folks in these
positions have not earned them, even if they say nothing about it?

> Partner with anti-racist K-12 partners to build pathways for Black students
> to computing and information programs.

As opposed to all the racist K-12 partners who are ripping the computers out
of the hands of these children. And, of course, completely neglecting the
existence of White, Hispanic, Asian, Native, etc. populations who are also
completely capable of being below the poverty line and would likely benefit
from the same efforts.

> Ensure Black representation on advisory boards, while avoiding tokenism
> (We’ve completely failed so far).

You cannot ensure the representation of an identity group while not
tokenizing. Ensured representatives ARE tokens.

> Center Black scholarship in design, data, programming, and ethics courses,
> including scholarship about race and technology.

I don't remember spending a lot of time learning about Edsger Wybe Dijkstra's
Dutch background or centering discussion on that. I don't remember any
political content at all outside of my political and social classes, because
there was no time for that - it was an intent focus on the actual educational
content. Universities already have various social sciences departments that
provide Black history, Women's Studies, etc. as an attempt to handle this;
does this have to be inserted into every single class? Of course, the only
White studies are "critical whiteness studies" that seek to tear down the
accomplishments of White people, the opposite of the classes afforded to other
groups.

> Develop a code of conduct for classes that create safe space for civil
> discourse about race and technology.

I fear that "codes of conduct" are specifically written to exclude anything
like what I have written above.

> Ensure Black faculty and students have an excess of support to thrive.

Again, what about other groups? Here's a tough one: how much additional
support do you give a mixed-race person? There's no answer to this, much as
there's actually not some huge pool of "support" sitting around that hasn't
been allocated. The only way to do this is to simply say "give less support to
White people".

> Eliminate racially biased competitive admissions indicators like
> recommendations, extracurriculars, maybe even grades. Or do like some CS
> departments are doing: shift to a lottery. (We’ve made the most progress
> here, because I’ve been able to act unilaterally).

Oh great, yes, let's take our most difficult subjects and simply remove the
filters that have evolved in order to get the greatest chance of recruiting
students who have a chance at actually succeeding in the program, and just
switch to letting people in at random. Of course, if it was truly random over
the whole populace, you'd again start to approach 60% White or whatever the
pool of applicants looks like, and so you'll still likely need another
filtering mechanism to ensure that doesn't happen.

I'm so glad Ko can act unilaterally to change things like this with no insight
or input from the local community whatsoever.

Thanks, Amy, for your anti-White actions; I'm sure they'll make absolutely no
difference in the world besides the advancement of your own career.

