I will be talking about A Culture of Justice at Western Michigan University on campus, but broadcasting to their online students also. Anyone interested in participating will need to register...
The post Book Talk: “A Culture of Justice” @ W. Michigan U first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I will be talking about A Culture of Justice at Western Michigan University on campus, but broadcasting to their online students also. Anyone interested in participating will need to register...
The post Book Talk: “A Culture of Justice” @ W. Michigan U first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I will be delivering a talk on Zoom for the Anhui Institute of Information Technology in China on “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.”
The post “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.” @Anhui Institute of Information Technology first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I will be delivering a talk on Zoom for the Anhui Institute of Information Technology in China on “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.”
The post “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.” @Anhui Institute of Information Technology first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I’m pleased to report on two exciting invitations I’ve had to speak in the spring of 2019. For one of them, the Ron Messerich Distinguished Lecture that I delivered in February, I spoke on “Correcting Political Correctness,” a piece from my book in progress titled A Culture of Justice. On Tuesday, February 26th, I gave the talk at Eastern Kentucky University. While there, I had the pleasure of meeting with students in the journalism program, who interviewed me for Eastern Progress, their television program. I’m quite grateful to Mike Austin for inviting me to deliver this lecture. The attendance was great and the questions and comments offered after my talk were really rich and engaging. Here is the video interview:
The next trip I’m taking will be next week, when I’ll be heading to give three talks at Texas State University San Marcos. I’ll be talking at the local library about “Democracy and Public Philosophy,” from 4:30-6pm on Wednesday, March 13th. Then, on Thursday, March 14th, I’ll be talking about “Culture and Self Respect” from 2-3:00pm in the Alkek 250 Theater on campus. Friday morning, March 15th from 9-10am I’ll be talking about “Democracy and Leadership” in PS3301. More on that as it develops, but it is coming soon.
The post Talks in Spring 2019 first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.I recently read Keith et al’s excellent paper, Identifying civilians killed by police with distantly supervised entity-event extraction, which was presented this year at the conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, or, as it’s more commonly known, EMNLP.
The authors present an initial framework for tackling an important real world question: how can you automatically extract from a news corpus the names of civilians killed by police officers? Their study focuses on the U.S. context, where there are no complete federal records of such killings.
Filling this gap, human rights organizations and journalists have attempted to compile such a list through the arduous – and emotionally draining – task of reading millions of news articles to identify victim names and event details.
Given the salience of this problem, a Keith et al set out to develop a more streamlined solution.
The event-extraction problem is furthermore an interesting NLP challenge in itself – there are non-trivial disambiguation problems as well as semantic variability around indicators of civilians killed by police. Common false positives in their automated approaches, for example, include officers killed in the line of duty and non-fatal encounters.
Their approach relies on distant supervision – using existing databases of civilians killed as mention-level labels. They implement this labeling with both “hard” and a “soft” assumption models. The hard labeling assumes that every mention of a person (name and location) from the gold-standard database corresponds to a mention of a police killing. This assumption proves to be too hard and an inaccurate model of the textual input.
The “soft” models perform better. Rather than assume that every relevant sentence corresponds to a mention of a police killing, soft models assume that at least one of the sentences do. That is, if you take all the sentence in the corpus which mention an individual known to have been killed by police, at least one of those sentences directly conveys information of the killing.
Intuitively, this makes sense – while the hard assumption takes every mention of Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, or Philandro Castile to occur in a sentence mentioning a police killing, we know from simply reading the news that some of those sentence will talk about their lives, their families, or the larger context in which their killing took place.
For both assumptions, Keith et al compare performance between a convolutional neural net and a linear regression model – ultimately finding that the regression, with the soft assumption, out performs the neural net.
There’s plenty of room for improvement and future work on their model, but overall, this paper presents a clever NLP application to a critical, real world problem. It’s a great example of the broad and important impact NLP approaches can have.
Ally Lee Steinfeld had been missing since early September. Her body was found recently, mutilated and burned. She was 17.
Her death made Steinfeld at least the 21st transgender person killed in the United States this year. A record high of 22 murders were captured by the Human Rights Campaign last year.
We have to do better.
Steinfeld’s case is not being pursued as a hate crime. The sheriff overseeing the case told the Associated Press: “You don’t kill someone if you don’t have hate in your heart. But no, it’s not a hate crime.” That talking point was echoed by the prosecutor in the case, who told Time: “I would say murder in the first-degree is all that matters. That is a hate crime in itself.”
Perhaps this is accurate in a practical sense – in Missouri, where the crime took place, first-degree murder is punishable by execution or life imprisonment. A hate crime charge would be unlikely to add penalty.
Such comments, however, miss the point. A woman is dead. We have to do better.
Some advocates have even started to question whether hate crimes prosecution is an effective strategy. As one ACLU lawyer put it, “I worry that what hate crime laws do is narrow our focus on certain types of individual violence while absolving the entire system that generates the violence.”
And that’s the thing – it is a problem with the entire system. We are all culpable in perpetuating the gross transphobia of our society – through violent transphobic acts, through subtle jokes and misgendering, or by being complicit through silence while such hateful acts take place.
We have to do better.
Personally, I’m not prepared to abandon hate crime legislation just yet – whether adding to a punishment or not, ignoring the hate of a crime seems to implicitly indicate that while the crime may be punishable, the hate itself is sanctioned. But I’ve met a lot of good, smart lawyers who tell me that sometimes you have to sacrifice framing in the legal system – you go for the toughest penalty you can go for.
I do not know whether we can best accomplish our work through hate crime legislation or through other modes of advocacy. I only know that we have to do better.
We tell young women that they can be anything, that they can do anything. That they should shut down the haters and embrace their true selves. We tell women that it is their right in the 21st century to be the person they want to be. We tell them this is America. We tell them they are free.
Three months before she died, Steinfeld posted to Instagram: “I am proud to be me I am proud to be trans I am beautiful I don’t care what people think.”
We have to do better.
“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger,” says Audre Lorde in The Uses of Anger, her 1981 keynote talk at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference.
I have been thinking a lot about this piece recently. It feels sharply relevant today, 36 years after it was written.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger. An arsenal built from fear; from the constant slights and dismissals; from living and functioning in a world which takes us for granted, insists we are not enough, and half-heartidly feigns distress over the violence used against us. Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger.
I know I do.
Lorde argues this anger is a strength, that it has powerful, transformative uses. Anger, she argues, leads to change.
Importantly, in conflicts between the oppressed and their oppressors, there are not “two sides.” The anger of the oppressed leads to growth while the hatred of the oppressors seeks destruction. As Lorde writes:
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
Anger is the grief of distortions between peers. Anger arises when you and I fail to understand each other, when we fail to listen genuinely and to acknowledge each other’s experience. Anger arises when the world insists that your perceptions and experiences aren’t real.
It’s gaslighting on a societal scale.
But anger has it’s uses, Lorde says. “Anger is loaded with information and energy.”
Anger, articulated with precision and “translated into action in the service of our vision and out future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”
Anger at the distortions between peers creates space for us to clarify and remove those distortions; to genuinely accept the experiences of others.
This is particularly important in the context of gender because the experiences of women vary radically across numerous dimensions of race, class, and identity.
In order to successful use our anger, we must “examine the contradictions of self, woman, as oppressor.”
Lorde is diplomatic on the topic, recognizing that she, too – a lesbian woman of color – has at times taken on the role of oppressing other women. But drawing on my own identity, I’m inclined to be more direct here: white women, and particularly white cis women have played a long and important role in building and maintaining systems of white supremacy and cisnormativity.
We have suffered our slings and arrows, no doubt, and with good reason our personal arsenals are well-stocked with anger. Yet we, too, are oppressors. We have oppressed our sisters directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally. Recognizing this is, as Lorde describes, a painful process of translation. But is a process we must undertake; a process we must engage in order to radically change the systems of power, privilege, and oppression we are embedded in; the systems which oppress us and our neighbors.
Furthermore, Lorde argues that anger can bring out this change – guilt at our own complicity does nothing:
I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
Guilt is a proxy for impotence; for inaction. But anger is transformative. As Lorde writes:
…The strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform differences through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.
“On June 15, 2012, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that certain people who came to the United States as children and meet several guidelines may request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal,” reads the website for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Consideration of deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, has narrow guidelines as to whom is eligible: to qualify, you must have arrived in the US before the age of 16; you must have continually resided in the US for the past 10 years (since June 15, 2007); must be a student, high school graduate, or an honorably discharged veteran of the US armed services, and must not “pose a threat to national security or public safety.”
In short, DACA applies to people who have gone to American schools, contributed to American society, and who came to this country before they were even old enough to have a choice in the matter. They are students virtually indistinguishable from their classmates.
Many don’t even remember a time when they weren’t living in the U.S.
This is their home country.
There are many reasonable debates to have around immigration policy. We could talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which opens with the shockingly straightforward line:
Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof…
The Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, represents the first time ethnic exclusion was explicitly stated in U.S. immigration law; justified merely by the flimsy fear of colonizing Europeans that Chinese residents endangered “the good order of certain localities.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed as the Geary Act in 1892 and made permanent another decade later. Incidentally, the Geary Act also expanded the language used; targeting any “Chinese person or person of Chinese descent.”
In 1943, in the midsts of World War II and after 60 years of virtually banning Chinese immigration, the Magnuson Act allowed for limited Chinese immigration and provided a path to citizenship for persons of Chinese descent living in the U.S. It did nothing, however, to address issues such as California’s Alien Land Law, which barred non-citizens from owning property. The full repercussions of the Chinese Exclusion Act weren’t legally addressed until the Magnuson Act itself was repealed in 1965; after eighty-three years of explicit discrimination.
In relaxing restrictions on Chinese immigration, the Magnuson Act brought Chinese immigration guides inline with another U.S. immigration bill, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act.
This act, which introduced national-origin quotas, was designed to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity,” according the U.S. State Department’s Office of Historian. This act greatly restricted immigration of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and people from other Asian countries, most notably Japanese. Quotas were calculated in such a way as to have little effect on immigration from Western Europe.
The point of this history lesson is simple: the United States has a long history of racist, exclusionary immigration policies designed to favor that amorphous group of “people like us.” For all our talk of a melting pot and the American dream, where any child – any child – can grow up to succeed – we have long merely shrugged while endorsing policies with the clear message, we conquered here first.
There is so much I would change about U.S. immigration policy if I could. I find myself generally inclined to agree with Peter Singer’s argument that it is time to abandon the constructed narrative of a national community in favor of conceptualizing ourselves as members of a global community.
But the plan to end DACA, to end legal protections for over 800,000 people who have grown up in this country, goes beyond philosophical debates about what immigration is or ought to mean. It is straight up unconscionable. These are our friends and neighbors. They are members of our community.
Quite simply, in the most robust sense possible: this is their country, too.
There’s a certain narrative about deliberative democrats which paints them as hopeless idealists.
John Dewey is perhaps the quintessential example of this – he writes passionately about the “great community,” and was steadfast in his belief that humanity could and would achieve this sublime state. While broadly agreeing with critics such as Lippmann as to the modern problems of civil society, the optimism of Dewey’s solutions is notably divergent.
The problem, he argued, was not that average people did not have the capacity to properly govern themselves, but rather that civic infrastructure did not fully allow them to exercise this capacity. Given robust civic education and institutions which genuinely encourage and incorporate citizen participation, humanity could achieve great things. In short, we have the capacity to self govern, we simply need to trust ourselves.
This optimism is echoed in the works of Habermas, who writes prolifically about the power of ideal dialogue to build ideal societies. He envisions salons and coffeehouses where citizens engage in passionate debates about what is right and just. “Moral argumentation,” he writes in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, “serves to settle conflicts of action by consensual means.”
In short, citizens engaging in meaningful debate about moral issues will eventually come to agree on what is right. The solution which emerges from such a process is intrinsically moral thanks to the collaborative filtering of discussants and it is bolstered by the rich process of debate which led to the consensus.
The enthusiastic visions of Dewey, Habermas, and other pragmatists may be inspiring, but they rightfully earn a lot of skepticism. Is such ideal dialogue even possible? Perhaps our moral divisions are ultimately intractable.
Most troubling to me are the concerns raised by Sanders, Frasier, and others. These visions of the Great Society, and the roadmap for how we get there do not give proper care to the role of power.
In an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy – to borrow a phrase from bell hooks – it is not enough to encourage people to enter deliberation with an open mind. It is not enough to teach core civic values. The structural inequality of society will pervert deliberation amongst even well-meaning participants.
I am particularly fond of this critique from Sanders: “If we assume that deliberation cannot proceed without the realization of mutual respect, and deliberation appears to be proceeding, we may even mistakenly decide that conditions of mutual respect have been achieved by deliberators.”
Such false deliberation – which leaves those in power with a claim to moral consensus when none was achieved – is arguably even worse than a state with no deliberation and no appearance of legitimacy.
Fraser builds off Habermas, arguing that these rich conversations don’t happen merely in a single, mainstream public sphere. Rather, the public sphere as we encounter it is deeply restrictive – despite claims to the contrary, not everyone gets a voice. Thus, we also have counter-publics – smaller communities where those who are blocked from the mainstream can engage safely and fully in the sort of discussions Habermas envisions. The counter-publics can and do influence the mainstream, but they are constantly pushed to the fringes by a society which doesn’t want them.
These critiques of deliberation also point to a deeper challenge: dialogue only works when all parties are willing to enter and participate in good faith.
You can’t engage in dialogue with someone who wants to destroy you.
This concern is never satisfactorily addressed by Dewey or by Habermas. They both engage deeply with questions of manipulation, force, and instrumental action, but they seem content to believe that such problems can be dealt with effectively and are not too deeply interwoven into our social fabric.
A skeptic would argue that these concerns point to a sizable gap in their philosophy – if dialogue only works in ideal conditions, then dialogue necessarily cannot be enough.
In the face of racist, anti-semitic, and other harshly vitriolic rhetoric, other tactics are necessary. Dialogue could never be enough.
I imagine Dewey wouldn’t give up on his Great Community so easily, though. Perhaps he under appreciated the danger of hate groups, but he would have believed in humanity’s ability to navigate these waters. He would have believed that even the worst among us could learn to participate thoughtfully in productive dialogue.
Dewey’s vision seems impossibly far off these days. Few, if any of use, seem prepared to be citizens capable of constructing the Great Community. There are good reasons by skeptical of his claims.
But I’m not ready to give up on dialogue just yet, and here I think is where a network perspective can be valuable. As long as we have connections between all elements of our communities, dialogue may be possible. Perhaps every person cannot – and should not, for their own self-care – engage in dialogue with every other person. But if allies serve as the bridges, if those positioned to do have the difficult conversations with the hate-filled fringe, if we truly believe that no one is born to hate, perhaps then we could build the Great Community and, inch by inch, bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.
