Study provides evidence of AI’s alarming dialect prejudice

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

Interesting study, just adding to the challenges of using AI to evaluate speech:

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him, The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him. – Dr Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady

While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-4 have been trained to avoid answers that overtly racially stereotype, a new study shows that they “covertly” stereotype African Americans who speak in the dialect prevalent in New York, Detroit, Washington DC and other cities such as Los Angeles.

In “AI generates covertly racial decisions about people based on their dialect” published in Nature at the end of August, a team of three researchers working with Dr Valentin Hofmann at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle shows how AI’s (learned) prejudice against African-American English (AAE) can have harmful and dangerous consequences.

In a series of experiments, Hofmann’s team found that LLMs are “more likely to suggest that a speaker of AAE be assigned to less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death”.

The study, the authors write, “provides the first empirical evidence for the existence of dialect prejudice in language models: that is, covert racism that is activated by features of a dialect (AAE).”

The study states: “Using our new method of matching guise probing, we show that language models exhibit archaic stereotypes about speakers of AAE that most closely agree with the most negative human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded, dating from before the civil rights movement.”

Developed in the 1960s at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, “guise probing” allowed the isolation of attitudes held by bilingual French Canadians towards both Francophones and Anglophones by having subjects pay attention to language, dialect and accent of Francophones and Anglophones on recordings and asking the subject to make judgements about these individuals’ looks, sense of humour, intelligence, religiousness, kindness, and ambition, among other qualities.

A new racism emerges

Hofmann and his co-authors begin their discussion by placing the AI’s covert racism in a historical context that is quite separate from other problems with machine learning such as hallucinations, that is, when an AI system makes things up.

Instead, they map the appearance of covert racism onto the history of American racism since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and 1877, to a greater or lesser degree, the national government enforced the Amendments to the US Constitution that ended slavery and granted civil rights to the freedman.

This effort was abandoned in 1877 and, soon, white supremacist state governments in the South began instituting Jim Crow laws that stripped the freedmen of their civil rights and created a legal regimen of peonage that was slavery in all but name.

In the 1950s, the civil rights movement and Supreme Court decisions such as the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education (which ruled that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional) set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal laws that dismantled the legal structures of Jim Crow.

However, Hofmann et al write, “social scientists have argued that, unlike the racism associated with the Jim Crow era, which included overt behaviours such as name calling or more brutal acts of violence such as lynching, a ‘new racism’ happens in the present-day United States in more subtle ways that rely on a ‘colour-blind’ racist ideology”.

This ideology (which the Supreme Court of the United States endorsed when it ruled that affirmative action admissions programmeswere unconstitutional) allows individuals to “avoid mentioning race by claiming not to see colour or to ignore race but still hold negative beliefs about racialised people”.

“Importantly,” the authors argue, “such a framework emphasises the avoidance of racial terminology but maintains racial inequities”.

Two lines of defence

According to Dr Craig Kaplan, who has taught computer science at the University of California and is the founder and CEO of the consulting firm iQ Company, which focuses on artificial general intelligence (AGI), when AI reproduces the racist assumptions contained in the texts the systems were trained on, developers typically first try to further filter and curate the data on which the systems were trained.

“Some of these systems are trained on three Library of Congresses’ worth of information that could include information from books like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that contain racist stereotypes and dialogue.

The first line of defence, then, is to try to curate the data. But, it’s impossible for humans to sort reliably and filter every instance of racial stereotype. There’s so much data that it’s a losing battle,” he said.

The second line of defence is a technique known as Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) which uses humans to question the LLMs and correct them with feedback when the LLMs’ responses are dangerous or inappropriate.

Unfortunately, Kaplan explained, it is impossible to question LLMs on every topic, so bad actors can always find ways to get into an LLM to provide dangerous or inappropriate information. As fast as bad responses can be addressed, new ways of “jailbreaking” the LLMs emerge.

Kaplan characterises RLHF as “Whack a Mole”, a child’s game in which the aim is to keep hitting the mole that pops up.

“In this game … you tell the model that when it says African Americans are less intelligent and so forth, the system gets whacked. This is called reinforcement learning with human feedback (HF). But it’s impossible to anticipate every potential racist response that the LLM might generate,” said Kaplan.

Part of the reason RLHF won’t work is because of the way AI systems work.

“How LLMs represent anything, including African Americans, is a ‘black box’, meaning it is not transparent to us,” Kaplan told University World News.

“We don’t know how the information is represented or understood by the LLM. LLMs have maybe 500 billion parameters or a trillion parameters – far too many for a human to really grasp. We don’t know which exact combination of parameters, which are just numeric values, might represent erroneous concepts about African Americans.

“We simply have no visibility into that,” he said.

Though Hofmann and his co-authors do not speculate as to what is happening in the ‘black box’, their statistical analysis shows that HF (the same as RLHF) training perversely increases the dialect prejudice.

“In fact we observed a discrepancy between what language models overtly say about African Americans and what they covertly associate with them as revealed by dialect prejudice.

This discrepancy is particularly pronounced for language models trained with human feedback, such as GPT4: our results indicate that HF training obscures the racism on the surface, but the racial stereotypes remain unaffected on a deeper level,” the study states.

Striking and dangerous assumptions

The different assumptions made because of dialect are striking.

Prompted by the (Standardised American English, SAE) sentence “I am so happy when I wake up from a bad dream because they feel too real” the LLM said the speaker is likely to be “brilliant” or “intelligent” and not likely to be “dirty”, “lazy” or “stupid”.

By contrast, the AAE sentence “I be so happy when I wake up from a bad dream cus they feelin’ too real” led the LLM to say the speaker was “dirty”, “lazy” and “stupid”.

The authors draw attention to the fact that race is never mentioned; “its presence is encoded in the AAE dialect”.

However, they continue, “we found that there is a substantial overlap in the adjectives associated most strongly with African Americans by humans and the adjectives associated most strongly with AAE by language models, particularly for the earlier Princeton Trilogy studies”.

The Princeton Trilogy was a series of studies that investigated common American racial stereotypes held by Americans. Accordingly, speakers of AAE were recommended by various LLMs for jobs like cleaner, cook, guard or attendant.

By contrast, speakers of SAE were recommended for jobs like astronaut, professor, psychiatrist, architect, lawyer, pilot and doctor.

Criminal justice experiments

If anything, what Hofmann et al found in their two criminal justice experiments is even more alarming.

In the first, they asked the LLM to decide whether an individual was guilty or not guilty of an unspecified crime using only the statement of the defendant. In the case of GPT4, when the statement was in AAE, the conviction rate was 50% higher than when the statement prompt was in SAE.

The second experiment asked the LLM if the defendant merited the death penalty for first-degree (planned and deliberate) murder. Again, the only evidence provided to the language modes was a statement made by the defendant.

In this instance GPT4 sentenced speakers of AAE to death approximately 90% more often than it did speakers of SAE.

Massive pattern detectors

Why, Kaplan was asked, do LLMs produce such unjust outcomes for African Americans?

“These systems are basically massive pattern detectors. They could be trained on millions of documents, including court records that go back decades,” he replied.

“Those old court records would reflect the prejudices of the times, when people of colour were sentenced more harshly, as they still are.

“The records may also contain court transcripts including African Americans’ speech in the context of sentencing. That could all be reflected in the data used to train an LLM.

“The AI system could recognise these patterns of prejudices of the society, reflected in the court records and bound up with the language of the African American defendants who were sentenced to death,” he explained.

Source: Study provides evidence of AI’s alarming dialect prejudice

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Terry Newman: Trudeau’s Canada safe for alleged terrorist targeting New York Jews

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

One of the first pieces in mainstream media that ventures into country of origin and values arguments against immigration in addition to housing, healthcare etc:

…Canada needs to slow immigration for a number of reasons: lack of housing (it’s unfair to bring immigrants here when they have nowhere to live), rising unemployment, increasing social unrest, and decreasing social cohesion. At the very least, Canada needs to slow immigration from countries whose residents are currently hostile to Canada and the United States. This isn’t rocket science, and the notion that even discussing immigration in any way makes you a racist needs to be put to bed once and for all. There are countries with governments and citizens who hate our way of life and want to destroy it, and they are quite vocal about it. Canada needs a government that is mature enough to recognize this reality in order to keep citizens safe. This does not make us less empathetic. It makes us smart.

Source: Terry Newman: Trudeau’s Canada safe for alleged terrorist targeting New York Jews

Filed under Immigration, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Geist: A new academic year requires a new approach to combatting antisemitism on campus

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

This one will be the hardest to implement I think. But needed:

…Third, universities must preserve their position as neutral forums for discussion, debate and learning. Often referred to as institutional neutrality, the principle dates back to the 1960s and a University of Chicago report that concluded, “There is no mechanism by which it [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

In other words, institutional neutrality ensures that faculty members and students are free to express their opinions, but the institution itself should refrain from wading into political matters. That principle was undermined by the University of Windsor’s recent agreement with campus protesters, which included commitments to university advocacy and restrictions on academic partnerships that could undermine academic freedoms.

The proliferation of campus antisemitism may have caught some universities off guard last year. But this year, there are no surprises. Universities must rise to the challenge by prioritizing a safe environment for all students and faculty – one that lives up to their ideals of inclusion and non-discrimination.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of law.

Source: A new academic year requires a new approach to combatting antisemitism on campus

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Religious and Visible Minority Intersectionality: Education and Income

2024/09/07 Leave a comment

For the data nerds among us:

This short article continues my analysis of citizenship by examining the intersectionality between visible minorities, religious minorities and gender in terms of citizenship acquisition, education and income, 15 years old and higher.

Overall, the percentage of non-citizens is greatest among South Asian Hindus and Sikhs, likely reflecting India’s prohibition of dual citizenship. Black and Arab Muslims have higher rates of non-citizens than Christians save for Black Christian men. For the most part, being a university graduate does not appear to affect this overall pattern. None & secular have the largest median after-tax income across most visible and religious minority groups. Male non-citizens have significantly lower levels of government transfers than female non-citizens, again across most visible and religious minority groups. However, there are relatively few gender differences in poverty rates across most visible and religious minority groups.

To provide context on immigrant visible and religious minorities, Tables 1 and 2 provide the overall national and provincial percentages for all immigration periods.

Table 1 highlights the percentage of the various visible minority groups at the national and provincial levels. Overall, 53 percent are female immigrants. The higher percentage of female immigrants applies to most groups with the exception of Arabs and West Asians, where women form less than 50 percent of all immigrants.

Visible minorities form 69 percent of all immigrants but this percentage has increased to 83 percent in the most recent census period, with more Black and Filipino immigrants than Chinese, and more West Asians than Southeast Asians.

Similarly, Table 2 provides a similar breakdown for religious minorities for all immigration periods, national and provincial. Overall, women form 52 percent across all religions, with Buddhists and Christians having higher percentages of women, while Muslims being the only group with a marginally smaller percentage of women.

Religious diversity is increasing. While non-Christians formed 53 percent across all immigration periods, they formed 60 percent of immigrants in the 2016-21 census period. The percentage of Muslim immigrants has increased from 13 to 20 percent, Hindus from 6 to 11 percent, Sikhs have increased marginally from five to six percent. Both Buddhists and Jews have declined; the former from 3 to 1.5 percent, the latter from one to 0.5 percent.

Religious diversity varies among visible minority groups.

Some visible minority groups have greater religious diversity than others, notably South Asians, Blacks, Southeast Asians and to a lesser extent Arabs, West Asians and Japanese. The percentage of None & secular is highest among Chinese and Japanese. I have not included traditional given the small overall numbers and minimal numbers among visible minorities.

Table 3 highlights the overall contrast between those who have naturalized and those who remain non-citizens. Overall, the percentage of non citizens is greatest among South Asian Sikhs and Hindus, Black and Arab Muslims, Latin American and Korean None & secular, along with all religions among Japanese. The greater percentage of non-citizens among South Asian Hindus and Sikhs may reflect India’s prohibition of dual citizenship; however, China’s similar prohibition does not appear to have impacted naturalization to the same degree. Fewer women than men are naturalized among Buddhists, Southeast Asian and Korean None & secular, and all Japanese religions.

Education

Table 4 provides the population numbers by religious affiliation of visible minorities for all education levels and bachelor’s degree or higher, along with the percentage of bachelor degrees, ordered by group size. University degrees vary significantly by visible minority group, with Blacks, Latin Americans, Southeast Asians having lower rates than non visible minorities. With respect to religious minority groups, Buddhists and Sikhs have lower rates than Christians, who in turn have lower rates than Hindus, None & secular, Jewish and Muslims.

Table 5 contrasts non-citizen rates for the university educated. Highest rates for non-citizens are Japanese Buddhists and Christians, South Asian Hindus and Sikhs, followed by Black and Latin American Christians and Muslims. Overall, more women remain non-citizens than men among Buddhists, Sikhs and None & secular with exceptions for South Asian and Black women None & secular. The greatest gaps are with Southeast Asian, Korean and Japanese all major religions, and West Asian Christians.

Income: After-tax, government transfers, poverty rate

Table 6 compares median after tax income, government transfers and poverty rates by visible minority, religious minority and gender. With respect to median income, the overall pattern shows that non-citizen visible minorities, regardless of their religious affiliations, have lower median incomes than visible minority citizens, with gender varying by group. Chinese and Southeast Asian women, all religions have higher incomes than citizens, as do Arab Muslims and no religion secular.

Most racialized/religious women citizens have significantly lower median AT income save for Black Christians, Black Muslims and no religion, secular. While overall gender differences are generally small, Buddhist non-citizen women are doing relatively better than Buddhist non-citizens men and Jewish women relatively worse.

Women have higher levels of government transfers then men across all groups save West Asian Christian non-citizens, reflecting child benefits, CPP, OAS, survivor benefits, GIS supplement and possibly social assistance with the exception of traditional overall and all Japanese men, among non visible minorities, only Christian men have a lower percentage.

Table 7 compares the after-tax median income of religious minorities compared to Christians for naturalized citizens and non-citizens. Among the visible minority population, Hindu men citizens and non-citizens have higher median income than Christians, as do Jewish women citizens and Jewish men non-citizens and Arab Muslim women citizens and non-citizens. For most visible minority groups, None & secular citizens and non-citizens have higher median incomes than Christians, with the exception of South Asian women non-citizens, Black citizens and non-citizens, Chinese citizens and non-citizens, Filipino non-citizens, and Southeast Asian men citizens and all non-citizens.

The positive income gap between citizens and non-citizens is greatest for None & secular for most groups. Conversely, the positive income gap for non-citizens compared to citizens is for south Asian Hindu and Muslim men, Chinese Buddhists and None & secular, and Japanese Buddhists and None & secular.

Concluding observations

In general, visible minority group affiliation is more significant in education and income differences than religious affiliation. However, the variation within visible minority groups by religious affiliation is significant, particularly for Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs.

Overall, the percentage of non-citizens is greatest among South Asian Hindus and Sikhs, likely reflecting India’s prohibition of dual citizenship. Black and Arab Muslims have higher rates of non-citizens than Christians save for Black Christian men. For the most part, being a university graduate does not appear to affect this overall pattern. None & secular have the largest median after-tax income across most visible and religious minority groups. Male non-citizens have significantly lower levels of government transfers than women, again across most visible and religious minority groups. However, there are relatively few gender differences in poverty rates across most visible and religious minority groups.

Just as there is diversity within visible and religious minority groups, largely reflecting country of origin, this analysis highlights the need for ongoing disaggregated data to better understand the dynamics behind immigrant integration and citizenship.

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Ottawa warned release of names of Nazi war criminals who settled in Canada could help Russia

2024/09/06 Leave a comment

Of note (hard to satisfy both groups…):

…A report by LAC on its consultation in June and July, seen by The Globe and Mail, says many stakeholders it spoke to were concerned about the implications “of associating Ukrainian names with Nazis, especially considering that this was part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.”

They were worried that Russia could use the report to “further these allegations or conduct disinformation campaigns in Canada,” which might affect public support here for Ukraine.

Ihor Michalchyshyn, chief executive officer and executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, said he thought the government is bound by Justice Deschênes’s view that Part 2 of the report should “remain confidential.”

But he added that all alleged war criminals, regardless of when or where they committed their crimes, should be brought to trial under Canadian criminal law. “If evidence of wartime criminality by any person found in Canada exists, that information must be communicated to the proper authorities for investigation,” he said.

The report by LAC on its consultation said some people expressed concern that people who committed atrocities during the Second World War “were allowed to live peacefully in Canada and never faced any justice measures due to insufficient evidence.”…

Source: Ottawa warned release of names of Nazi war criminals who settled in Canada could help Russia

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The Muslim Choice: Integration or Confrontation

2024/09/05 Leave a comment

Could also be written for many religions, the fundamentalist vs moderate:

…Two narratives about Islam have developed in western European countries, where Muslims are now a substantial minority presence. The first is of people from various countries settling into their new homes determined to live in peace with (if often at a distance from) their neighbours and the state. In several cases, these newcomers make a considerable contribution to public life: 25 Muslims were elected to the UK parliament in the July general election. The second narrative is of a group aggressively insisting upon their religious rights while they assert that they are the victims of comprehensive Western racism. Occasionally, atrocities are committed, usually by young Muslim men invoking Allah and at the deliberate cost of their own lives.

Likewise, parallel narratives have developed among the Muslim communities themselves. The first understands the West as a place in which they can live relatively well, practise their religion (or not) with little or no opposition, and enjoy freedoms often not available in their own—or their parents’—birth countries. A quite separate view sees relations with state authorities and native citizens in adversarial terms—a constant struggle against a colonial legacy of Islamophobic prejudice, hostility, suspicion, and barriers to freedom of expression and female dress that demand a militant response.

The attacks on mosques and individual Muslims during the August riots demonstrate that bigotry is still a problem among some cohorts of the UK population. But Islamophobia is also a much-abused and hotly contested term. Long before the summer riots, accusations of Islamophobia were used by those eager to deflect—or even reverse—blame for Muslim violence, and amplified by sympathetic parts of the media and some public figures. 

Yet polling does suggest that moderate British Muslim attitudes and communities are not a myth. In 2020, the Crest consultancy launched a research project that compared polls and focus groups of Muslims in eight towns and cities with a comparative group of the general population. The project concluded that: 

We found majorities of British Muslims trust the police, are concerned about Islamist extremism, support the aims of the [government’s counter-extremism] Prevent programme and would refer someone to it if they suspected that they were being radicalised. We found that the views of British Muslims frequently mirror those of the general population and even where they differ they rarely do so dramatically. 

Crest also found that British Muslims have a “broader range of views than is commonly acknowledged by politicians, the media and other participants in the debate on extremism.” The authors do not use the phrase “Muslim community,” since they believe the Muslim population is too diverse to make such a term useful. Instead, Muslims are seen as members of a common faith with differing backgrounds, ideas, and customs who have largely adapted to life in a new country.

As the August riots died down, another poll was conducted by More in Common, a think tank established in 2016 after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, and named after a House of Commons speech in which she said, “We have far more in common than that which divides us.” Its findings underlined the moderation of the British population as a whole and appeared to show that we do indeed have much in common in our views on extremism. Between 87 and 97 percent of respondents said, “The riots do not speak for me.” The outlier was Reform Party supporters, 41 percent of whom said that the riots did, in some measure, speak for them….

John Lloyd was a domestic and foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and a co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Source: The Muslim Choice: Integration or Confrontation

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Gee: High-ranking Toronto cop who cheated in the name of equity received too light a penalty 

2024/09/03 Leave a comment

Undermines trust and efforts to improve representation:

…Even if she did not act for personal gain, the adjudicator said, her conduct fell “far below the standard expected of a police officer.” Ms. Clarke effectively admitted as much when she pleaded guilty last fall to a series of violations of the Police Services Act, among them discreditable conduct and breach of confidence.

She is lucky she was not dismissed from the force altogether. That she will be allowed to continue in the senior role of inspector is difficult to understand.

Police, quite obviously, exist to enforce the rules. When they themselves break those rules, however pure their motives, it undermines public confidence that the law will be applied fairly and evenly. That takes us into dangerous waters. If people start doubting the police, they are less likely to report crime and more likely to take justice into their own hands.

Those who campaign for racial justice know this better than anyone. It is strange to see some of them making a hero of Ms. Clarke.

Source: High-ranking Toronto cop who cheated in the name of equity received too light a penalty

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Brest and Levine: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

2024/08/31 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful discussion:

With colleges and universities beginning a new academic year, we can expect more contentious debate over programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Progressives are doubling down on programs that teach students that they are either oppressed peoples or oppressors, while red states are closing campus D.E.I. programs altogether.

For all of the complaints, some of these programs most likely serve the important goal of ensuring that all students are valued and engaged participants in their academic communities. But we fear that many other programs are too ideological, exacerbate the very problems they intend to solve and are incompatible with higher education’s longstanding mission of cultivating critical thinking. We propose an alternative: a pluralist-based approach to D.E.I. that would provide students with the self-confidence, mind-sets and skills to engage with challenging social and political issues.

Like many other universities, our university, Stanford, experienced a rise in antisemitic incidents after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s response. We were appointed to the university’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which was charged with assessing the nature and scope of the problem and making recommendations. The upshot of hearing from over 300 people in 50 listening sessions is that many Jews and Israelis have experienced bias and feel insecure on our campus.

A parallel committee formed to address anti-Muslim, Arab and Palestinian bias reached similar conclusions for those groups.

These findings are discouraging, given that institutions of higher learning have spent several decades and vast sums of money establishing institutional infrastructures to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Discouraging, but not surprising — because our inquiries revealed how exclusionary and counterproductive some of these programs can be.

Our committee was pressed by many of those we interviewed to recommend adding Jews and Israelis to the identities currently recognized by Stanford’s D.E.I. programs so their harms would be treated with the same concern as those of people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, who are regarded as historically oppressed. This move would be required of many California colleges and universities under a measure moving through the California Legislature. But subsuming new groups into the traditional D.E.I. regime would only reinforce a flawed system.

D.E.I. training originated in the corporate world of the 1960s and migrated to universities in subsequent decades, initially to rectify the underrepresentation of minority groups and then to mitigate the tensions associated with more diverse populations. In recent years, the goals of diversity and inclusion have become the bête noire of the political right, in part to avoid reckoning with our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination in ways that might cause, as some state laws have put it, “discomfort, guilt or anguish.” We do not share this view. We believe that fostering a sense of belonging among students of diverse backgrounds is a precondition for educational success. That said, many D.E.I. training programs actually subvert their institutions’ educational missions.

Here’s why. A major purpose of higher education is to teach students the skill of critical inquiry, which the philosopher and educator John Dewey described as “the active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.” Conscientious faculty members teaching about race and gender require their students to critically consider differing views of the status and history of people of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people. Teaching critical thinking about any topic is challenging and humbling work.

While issues of diversity, equity and inclusion are sometimes addressed in rigorous classroom courses, university-based D.E.I. programs tend to come in two basic forms: online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives. The Intergroup Dialogue, developed at the University of Michigan and used on many campuses around the country, “assist[s] participants in exploring issues of power, privilege, conflict and oppression.” The program’s success is measured by students’ acknowledgment of pervasive discrimination and their attribution of inequalities to structural causes, such as deeply rooted government policies.

D.E.I. programs often assign participants to identity categories based on rigid distinctions. In a D.E.I. training program at Stanford a few years ago, Jewish staff members were assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism. The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises “that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to “decenter whiteness.”

Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development. An excessive focus on identity can be just as harmfulas the pretense that identity doesn’t matter. Overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and by pitting students against one another.

Research shows that all students feel excluded from academic communities at one point or another, no matter their backgrounds. The Stanford psychologists Geoffrey Cohen and Greg Walton have found that “belonging uncertainty”— the “state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be” — can afflict all of us. From our perspective, if one student is excluded, all students’ learning is diminished. Belonging is a foundation for the shared pursuit of knowledge and the preparation of students as citizens and leaders of a diverse society.

American campuses need an alternative to ideological D.E.I. programs. They need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views without subverting their schools’ educational missions. Such programs should be based on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.

An increasing number of educators are coming to this conclusion. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, presents a holistic approach to diversity. Conflicting viewpoints must be “brought into conversation with one another in a constructive way — to form a picture that is more complete and reliable than we would have were we to look at only the dominant perspective or only at subaltern perspectives,” he has written. Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard, champions “confident pluralism,” in which we “honor our own values while making decisions together.” And the philosopher Susan Neiman invokes a tradition of universalism that allows for — indeed requires — empathy with others rather than a competition among sufferings. “If you don’t base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it’s not real solidarity,” she has said. The group Interfaith America, which promotes interfaith cooperation, has developed a comprehensive Bridging the Gap curriculum that offers a practical guide for discourse across differences.

At the core of pluralistic approaches are facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression. Students are taught the complementary skills of telling stories about their own identities, values and experiences and listening with curiosity and interest to the stories of others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.

Success would be an academic community of equally respected learners who possess critical thinking skills and are actively engaged in navigating challenging questions throughout the curriculum — an approach that teaches students how to think rather than what to think.

Pluralism does not ignore identity or pervasive structural inequalities. Rather, it provides a framework in which identity is construed broadly and understood as a starting point for dialogue, rather than the basis for separation and fragmentation. It commits questions about the causes and persistence of inequalities to the classroom, where they can be examined through the critical, evidence-based methods at the root of a university education. Respecting the diverse perspectives of one’s fellows and adhering to norms such as active listening, humility and generosity enable classroom conversations about contentious social and political issues.

Nonprofit and religious leaders are translating these ideas into an emerging movement. A collaborative of philanthropic funders called New Pluralists is organizing and supporting groups that are putting pluralism into practice. Such efforts face headwinds both from conservatives who are suspicious of all efforts to foster inclusion and from groups that believe they benefit from the current system. And it will require heavy lifting by educators to work together with their students to create the preconditions for authentic critical engagement.

The current system is not good for Jews at Stanford and other universities. It’s not good for Muslims, either. And it’s certainly not good for society as a whole.

Paul Brest is former dean and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. Emily J. Levine is associate professor of education and history at Stanford.

Source: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Ling: We’re terrible at talking about the Israel-Hamas conflict. I tried to figure out why. [the need for criteria]

2024/08/30 Leave a comment

Good on Ling for having these conversations.

The most recent example is that of Capital Pride provides an example of the kinds of questions that need to be raised. How should organizations like Capital Pride assess which issues to promote or protest? What should the criteria be? How should one distinguish between different atrocities and abuses? Why Israel/Hamas and not Chinese repression of Uighurs, killings in the Sudan civil war, Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Uganda’s anti-homosexuality act, etc?

So, to encourage some discussion, here are some initial suggestions of possible criteria:

  • Is the protest and actions primarily about LGBTQ rights?
  • If not, how does a country’s or organization’s human rights abuse compare to other human rights abuse?
  • How divisive will the issue/protest be among LGBTQ communities and more broadly?
  • How does the treatment of LGBTQ differ between parties to a conflict?

These have been written for the Israel/Hamas protests and thus reflect my preferences and biases. But the need for criteria, rather than event and particular group driven protests, would reduce the likelihood that some LGBTQ members and allies would feel excluded:

…At least Fogel was willing to be introspective. I suggested to him that Haaretz — the liberal Israeli paper, a fierce critic of Netanyahu, which has relentlessly covered allegations of Israeli war crimes  — could not publish in Canada without being deluged with complaints and criticism. “I don’t think you’re entirely wrong,” he says. “What passes for the norm in Israel is sometimes seen by the Jewish community here as crossing the line.”

How can we have a serious discourse with all these invisible lines? Fogel gave me a fatalistic answer: “I’m not sure you can.”

It’s a variation of an idea I heard from Toney, and Kaplan-Myrth, and a host of other people in recent months: we’re too far gone, too polarized, too emotional to be able to talk about this crisis. Many say they respect the positions of the other side, and are keen to figure out points of agreement, yet often caricature their ideological opposites as inflexible, radical, impossible to reason with.

Mediating this conflict through the body politic doesn’t necessarily mean striving for compromise or capitulation, and it doesn’t entail a return to an age of elite gatekeepers. But it has to mean engaging in discussion, debate and argument without immediately calling it all off. Enabling genuine discourse doesn’t fuel hate, and may act as a pressure release valve to actually prevent it. At the same time, we can’t accept hateful language, online or in the street, just because the author insists their side has a monopoly on morality and justice.

There’s nothing naive about this idea: It is literally the foundation of our society. It is deeply cynical to say that our ideological opposites must be silenced, boycotted, or shouted down because they are dangerous or immoral.

Polarization is not a thing that other people do to us. It is a thing we do to each other. In the same way, mediation is not something that will be done for us, but something we have to commit to and work on, every day, ourselves.

Source: We’re terrible at talking about the Israel-Hamas conflict. I tried to figure out why.

Filed under Antisemitism, LGBTQ, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Prejudice against Muslims higher than towards any other group in US, poll finds

2024/08/30 Leave a comment

Not too surprising given encampments and other Israel-Gaza protests:

Favourable attitudes towards Muslims among Americans have declined and public prejudice against them remains higher than any other religious, ethnic or racial group, a poll published by The Brookings Institution has found.

Released on Tuesday and conducted between 26 July and 1 August, the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll (UMDCIP) consists of two tracks, one measuring the change in American public attitudes concerning Islam and Muslims and the second which studied prejudice towards racial, religious and ethnic groups – including Jews and Muslims.

Generally, favourable views of Muslims and Islam increased over the last year. The findings show a drop to 64 percent from 78 percent in comparison to 2022 regarding favourable views of Muslims, and a drop to 48 percent in favourable attitudes towards Islam.

Favourable views of Muslims dropped among both Democrats and Republicans, but the drop was starker among Republicans.

In February 2024, 52 percent of Republicans viewed Muslims favourably, but in July 2024, the figure dropped to 46 percent. For Democrats, the drop went from 83 percent in February to 80 percent in July.

The survey sampled 1,510 American adults with oversamples of 202 Blacks and 200 Hispanics.

Anti-Muslim versus anti-Jewish sentiment

Following Israel’s war on Gaza, there has been a dramatic increase in incidents of hate and prejudice against both Jews and Muslims globally.

Prejudice toward Jews and Judaism is included in the poll for the first time.

Among all respondents, favourable views of Muslims were at 64 percent and 48 percent for Islam while it stood at 86 percent for Jews and 77 percent for Judaism.

“The gap between attitudes toward people and religion is not uncommon and has been consistently found in our previous polling, particularly toward Muslims,” the poll says.

Another key factor is race. While only nine percent of white people view Jews as unfavourable, 37 percent of white people view Muslims as unfavourable. Among Black and Hispanic people, the difference is less stark, with 29 percent of Black people viewing Muslims as unfavourable, and 21 percent for Jews. For Hispanics, 33 percent view Muslims unfavourably, with 22 percent for Jews.

College education, familiarity and personal relationships with Jews and Muslims are significant contributing factors that lead to more favourable views towards both Jews and Muslims, according to the poll.

Generational gap

The poll shows that younger Americans have more favourable views towards Jews than Muslims overall, but there is a generational gap. Americans under 30 still have more favourable opinions of Muslims and Islam than Americans aged 30 and over.

While factors explaining this trend still need probing, the reason for the less favourable views of Jews among young people may be the fact that white people tend to have more favourable views of Jews than non-whites, although the share of white people among younger Americans is smaller.

Prejudice toward Muslims is also higher than other groups when it comes to their perceived contributions to American society, the poll says.

Polling shows that only one-third (37 percent) of Americans believe Muslims strengthen American society, while a majority of Americans say the same about every other ethnic, racial and religious group.

Young Americans (under 30) have identical views of the degree to which Muslims and Jews strengthen American society, but older Americans believe Jews (55 percent) contribute far more to American society than Muslims (32 percent).

The lowest figure is found among older Republican Americans, with only 21 percent believing Muslims contribute to American society.

Source: Prejudice against Muslims higher than towards any other group in US, poll finds

Filed under Antisemitism, Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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