The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Policing: Following the Public Impact

UNLV law professor Frank Rudy Cooper on the psychological impact of repeated exposure to videos of violent and deadly police encounters that increasingly circulate online; the role that slavery and societal norms surrounding masculinity play into them; and police reforms that might be in the works.

Stanford GSB Action Plan for Racial Equity

Stanford Graduate School of Business today announced its action plan and specific commitments for supporting racial equity. The plan seeks to increase representation of Black Americans and underrepresented minorities at the GSB, improve the community’s sense of inclusion and belonging, use the school’s power and privilege to inspire and enable changes beyond the confines of the campus, and establish structures and resources to ensure accountability for its actions.

Racial and LGBT bias persists in ridesharing drivers despite mitigation efforts, IU research finds

Despite efforts by ridesharing companies to eliminate or reduce discrimination, research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business finds that racial and LGBT bias persists among drivers. Platforms such as Uber, Lyft and Via responded to drivers’ biased behavior by removing information that could indicate a rider’s gender and race from initial ride requests. However, researchers still found that biases against underrepresented groups and those who indicate support for the LGBT community continued to exist after drivers accepted a ride request — when the rider’s picture would then be displayed.

Talking With Children About Race and Racism—an Age-by-Age Guide

Talking to children about racism can be daunting. How much should you discuss? How young is too young? What if you don’t have all the answers? Pediatrician and health policy researcher Ashaunta Anderson, MD, MPH, MSHS, FAAP, is a Fellow with the American Academy of Pediatrics who has served as a member of organization’s Task Force on Addressing Bias and Discrimination. She says it’s never too early to talk to kids about race.

“Prescribing Art” course teaches med students to recognize bias and better address racial disparities

Can art help doctors better understand their patients and address racial disparities? An innovative collaboration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham uses art to help medical students hone their observational skills, in order to make more accurate diagnoses. “Prescribing Art: How Observation Enhances Medicine” is a partnership between the School of Medicine, the Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Study: News Reports of Education “Achievement Gaps” May Perpetuate Stereotypes of Black Americans

Scholars have warned that the framing of racial “achievement gaps” in tests scores, grades, and other education outcomes may perpetuate racial stereotypes and encourage people to explain the gaps as the failure of students and their families rather than as resulting from structural racism. A new study finds that TV news reporting about racial achievement gaps led viewers to report exaggerated stereotypes of Black Americans as lacking education and may have increased implicit stereotyping of Black students as less competent than White students.

HU facial recognition software predicts criminality

A group of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology students and professors have developed an automated computer classifier capable of predicting with 80% accuracy and no racial bias whether someone is likely to be a criminal based solely on a picture of their face.
Jonathan W. Korn, a PhD student in Harrisburg University of Science and Technology’s Data Science program and a NYPD veteran; Prof. Nathaniel J.S. Ashby, and Prof. Roozbeh Sadeghian’s research titled “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing” will appear in the forthcoming Springer Nature – Research Book Series: Transactions on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence

Research Finds Teachers Just as Likely to Have Racial Bias as Non-Teachers

Research released today challenges the notion that teachers might be uniquely equipped to instill positive racial attitudes in children or bring about racial justice, without additional support or training from schools. Instead, the results, published in Educational Researcher, find that “teachers are people too,” holding almost as much pro-White racial bias as non-teachers of the same race, level of education, age, gender, and political affiliation.

Public Health Crises — Such as COVID-19 — May Lead to Flare-ups of Dangerous Religious Sentiments, including ‘Scapegoating’

Public health crises such as COVID-19 — in which people may feel powerless and receive conflicting information — can lead to a flare-up of unsafe religious sentiments, says Baylor University epidemiologist Jeff Levin, Ph.D., who cites past persecution of religious and ethnic minorities who were blamed unfairly for spreading disease.