How our data encodes systematic racism
Deborah Raji below is pretty fired up about what she calls bias in the data we use in decision-making. She notes that the data we use is mainly generated by whites in white societies and reasonably notes that this can introduce bias into research findings.
But I think she is asking a lot to ask for data with a worldwide perspective. We just do not generate such data for cost and other reasons. I have long been aware of cultural bias and did as a result gather multicultural data in much of my research. But I was limited by language constraints and much else. She may be pleased that I gathered some of my data from her ancestral India.
So I think she needs to moderate her ambitions. Gathering bias-free data is a snark. The best we can do is to point out instances of cultural bias when we see them
I’ve often been told, “The data does not lie.” However, that has never been my experience. For me, the data nearly always lies. Google Image search results for “healthy skin” show only light-skinned women, and a query on “Black girls” still returns pornography. The CelebA face data set has labels of “big nose” and “big lips” that are disproportionately assigned to darker-skinned female faces like mine. ImageNet-trained models label me a “bad person,” a “drug addict,” or a “failure.” Data sets for detecting skin cancer are missing samples of darker skin types.
White supremacy often appears violently—in gunshots at a crowded Walmart or church service, in the sharp remark of a hate-fueled accusation or a rough shove on the street—but sometimes it takes a more subtle form, like these lies. When those of us building AI systems continue to allow the blatant lie of white supremacy to be embedded in everything from how we collect data to how we define data sets and how we choose to use them, it signifies a disturbing tolerance.
Non-white people are not outliers. Globally, we are the norm, and this doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Data sets so specifically built in and for white spaces represent the constructed reality, not the natural one. To have accuracy calculated in the absence of my lived experience not only offends me, but also puts me in real danger.
Corrupt data
In a research paper titled “Dirty Data, Bad Predictions,” lead author Rashida Richardson describes an alarming scenario: police precincts suspected or confirmed to have engaged in “corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal” practices continue to contribute their data to the development of new automated systems meant to help officers make policing decisions.
The goal of predictive policing tools is to send officers to the scene of a crime before it happens. The assumption is that locations where individuals had been previously arrested correlate with a likelihood of future illegal activity.
What Richardson points out is that this assumption remains unquestioned even when those initial arrests were racially motivated or illegal, sometimes involving “systemic data manipulation, police corruption, falsifying police reports, and violence, including robbing residents, planting evidence, extortion, unconstitutional searches, and other corrupt practices.” Even data from the worst-behaving police departments is still being used to inform predictive policing tools.
As the Tampa Bay Times reports, this approach can provide algorithmic justification for further police harassment of minority and low-income communities. Using such flawed data to train new systems embeds the police department’s documented misconduct in the algorithm and perpetuates practices already known to be terrorizing those most vulnerable to that abuse.
This may appear to describe a handful of tragic situations. However, it is really the norm in machine learning: this is the typical quality of the data we currently accept as our unquestioned “ground truth.”
An analysis of 63 recent statements shows that US tech companies repeatedly placed responsibility for racial injustice on Black people.
One day GPT-2, an earlier publicly available version of the automated language generation model developed by the research organization OpenAI, started talking to me openly about “white rights.” Given simple prompts like “a white man is” or “a Black woman is,” the text the model generated would launch into discussions of “white Aryan nations” and “foreign and non-white invaders.”
Not only did these diatribes include horrific slurs like “bitch,” “slut,” “nigger,” “chink,” and “slanteye," but the generated text embodied a specific American white nationalist rhetoric, describing “demographic threats” and veering into anti-Semitic asides against “Jews” and “Communists.”
GPT-2 doesn’t think for itself—it generates responses by replicating language patterns observed in the data used to develop the model. This data set, named WebText, contains “over 8 million documents for a total of 40 GB of text” sourced from hyperlinks. These links were themselves selected from posts most upvoted on the social media website Reddit, as “a heuristic indicator for whether other users found the link interesting, educational, or just funny.”
However, Reddit users—including those uploading and upvoting—are known to include white supremacists. For years, the platform was rife with racist language and permitted links to content expressing racist ideology. And although there are practical options available to curb this behavior on the platform, the first serious attempts to take action, by then-CEO Ellen Pao in 2015, were poorly received by the community and led to intense harassment and backlash.
Whether dealing with wayward cops or wayward users, technologists choose to allow this particular oppressive worldview to solidify in data sets and define the nature of models that we develop. OpenAI itself acknowledged the limitations of sourcing data from Reddit, noting that “many malicious groups use those discussion forums to organize.” Yet the organization also continues to make use of the Reddit-derived data set, even in subsequent versions of its language model. The dangerously flawed nature of data sources is effectively dismissed for the sake of convenience, despite the consequences. Malicious intent isn’t necessary for this to happen, though a certain unthinking passivity and neglect is.
Little white lies
White supremacy is the false belief that white individuals are superior to those of other races. It is not a simple misconception but an ideology rooted in deception. Race is the first myth, superiority the next. Proponents of this ideology stubbornly cling to an invention that privileges them.
I hear how this lie softens language from a “war on drugs” to an “opioid epidemic,” and blames “mental health” or “video games” for the actions of white assailants even as it attributes “laziness” and “criminality” to non-white victims. I notice how it erases those who look like me, and I watch it play out in an endless parade of pale faces that I can’t seem to escape—in film, on magazine covers, and at awards shows.
Data sets so specifically built in and for white spaces represent the constructed reality, not the natural one.
This shadow follows my every move, an uncomfortable chill on the nape of my neck. When I hear “murder,” I don’t just see the police officer with his knee on a throat or the misguided vigilante with a gun by his side—it’s the economy that strangles us, the disease that weakens us, and the government that silences us.
Tell me—what is the difference between overpolicing in minority neighborhoods and the bias of the algorithm that sent officers there? What is the difference between a segregated school system and a discriminatory grading algorithm? Between a doctor who doesn’t listen and an algorithm that denies you a hospital bed? There is no systematic racism separate from our algorithmic contributions, from the hidden network of algorithmic deployments that regularly collapse on those who are already most vulnerable.
Resisting technological determinism
Technology is not independent of us; it’s created by us, and we have complete control over it. Data is not just arbitrarily “political”—there are specific toxic and misinformed politics that data scientists carelessly allow to infiltrate our data sets. White supremacy is one of them.
We’ve already inserted ourselves and our decisions into the outcome—there is no neutral approach. There is no future version of data that is magically unbiased. Data will always be a subjective interpretation of someone’s reality, a specific presentation of the goals and perspectives we choose to prioritize in this moment. That’s a power held by those of us responsible for sourcing, selecting, and designing this data and developing the models that interpret the information.
Essentially, there is no exchange of “fairness” for “accuracy”—that’s a mythical sacrifice, an excuse not to own up to our role in defining performance at the exclusion of others in the first place.
Those of us building these systems will choose which subreddits and online sources to crawl, which languages to use or ignore, which data sets to remove or accept. Most important, we choose who we apply these algorithms to, and which objectives we optimize for. We choose the labels we create, the data we take in, the methods we use. We choose who we welcome as data scientists and engineers and researchers—and who we do not. There were many possibilities for the design of the technology we built, and we chose this one. We are responsible.
So why can’t we be more careful? When will we finally get into the habit of disclosing data provenance, deleting problematic data sets, and explicitly defining the limitations of every model’s scope? At what point can we condemn those operating with an explicit white supremacist agenda, and take serious actions for inclusion?
An uncertain path forward
Distracted by corporate condolences, abstract technical solutions, and articulate social theories, I’ve watched peers congratulate themselves on invisible progress. Ultimately, I envy them, because they have a choice in the same world where I, like every other Black person, cannot opt out of caring about this.
As Black people now die in a cacophony of natural and unnatural disasters, many of my colleagues are still more galvanized by the latest product or space launch than the jarring horror of a reality that chokes the breath out of me.
The fact is that AI doesn’t work until it works for all of us.
For years, I’ve watched this issue extolled as important, but it’s clear that dealing with it is still seen as a non-priority, “nice to have” supplementary action—secondary always to some definition of model functionality that doesn’t include me.
Models clearly still struggling to address these bias challenges get celebrated as breakthroughs, while people brave enough to speak up about the risk get silenced, or worse. There’s a clear cultural complacency with things as usual, and although disappointing, that’s not particularly surprising in a field where the vast majority just don’t understand the stakes.
The fact is that AI doesn’t work until it works for all of us. If we hope to ever address racial injustice, then we need to stop presenting our distorted data as “ground truth.” There’s no rational and just world in which hiring tools systematically exclude women from technical roles, or where self-driving cars are more likely to hit pedestrians with darker skin. The truth of any reality I recognize is not in these models, or in the data sets that inform them.
The machine-learning community continues to accept a certain level of dysfunction as long as only certain groups are affected. This needs conscious change, and that will take as much effort as any other fight against systematic oppression. After all, the lies embedded in our data are not much different from any other lie white supremacy has told. They will thus require just as much energy and investment to counteract.
Yes, Georgia Senate Candidate Raphael Warnock Is a Radical, Bigoted Nutjob
Rev. Raphael Warnock, one of the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate in Georgia runoff elections, praised the racist and anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan‘s Nation of Islam back in 2013.
On July 11, 2013, Warnock gave a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., called “The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety and Public Witness.”
During the Q&A after the lecture, he was asked by a member of the audience about the Nation of Islam’s relationship with the church, and whether “the black church” is having similar attendance problems as “so-called mainstream white” churches and synagogues.
“Well, the Nation of Islam is significant. But its numbers don’t come anywhere near the membership of our churches,” Warnock explained. “Its voice has been important, and its voice has been important even for the development of black theology, because it was the black Muslims who challenged black preachers, and said, ‘You’re promulgating,’ you know, they called ‘the white man’s religion. That’s a slave religion. You’re telling people to focus on heaven. Meanwhile, they’re catching hell.’ And so we needed the witness of the nation of Islam in a real sense to put a fire under us and keep us honest about the meaning of the proclamation coming from our pulpits.”
Warnock’s radical left-wing and racial ideology is well-documented. In 2008, he defended Barack Obama’s racist former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, during an appearance on Fox News, even defending Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks as a form of the “truth-telling tradition of the black church,” which makes people “uncomfortable.” Warnock then blamed the media for “constant playing over and over again of the same sound bites outside of context,” before comparing Wright to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and calling him a “preacher and a prophet.”
In February 2013, Warnock defended the sermon in which Wright proclaimed “God Damn America” as a “very fine homily entitled on confusing God and government” and said it was “consistent with black prophetic preaching.”
Despite recent attempts to brand himself as pro-Israel, Warnock has a history of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments.
Warnock compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to segregationist Democrat George Wallace by saying his two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “tantamount to saying, ‘Occupation today, occupation tomorrow, occupation forever,'” alluding to Wallace’s past words about segregation. Warnock also accused Israel of killing Palestinians like “birds of prey.”
“We saw the government of Israel shoot down unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey,” Warnock said in a 2018 sermon delivered shortly after the U.S Embassy in Jerusalem was opened. “And I don’t care who does it, it is wrong. It is wrong to shoot down God’s children like they don’t matter at all. And it’s no more anti-Semitic for me to say that than it is anti-white for me to say that black lives matter. Palestinian lives matter.”
Warnock’s radical views are further proven by his past praise of communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In 2016, Warnock eulogized Castro before his congregation. “We pray for the people of Cuba in this moment. We remember Fidel Castro, whose legacy is complex. Don’t let anyone tell you a simple story; life usually isn’t very simple. His legacy is complex, kind of like America’s legacy is complex,” Warnock said. “While we focus on political prisoners in Cuba, you saw the folks standing here this morning. If some people get slapped on the hand for the same crime and others go to federal prison, then we too have our own political prisons because politics more than the crime politics of race and class. And in that sense, many of us have sisters and brothers who are political prisoners. We are about to pray to a man who was a political prisoner.”
Warnock also allegedly attempted to obstruct a 2002 police investigation into suspected child abuse at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Maryland. This is disturbing on several levels, and not just because of his history of anti-law enforcement rhetoric.
In 2015, Warnock complained about “police power showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality” in Ferguson, Missouri.
He even claimed that law enforcement officers are often a danger to children. “Our children are in trouble, and it’s often those who are sworn to protect who cause more trouble. … Our children are in danger,”
In another sermon, he said, “We shouldn’t be surprised when we see police officers act like bullies on the street.”
PJM’s Stephen Kruiser described Raphael Warnock as “a ferret-molesting nutjob.” That’s a fairly good description.
And Joe Biden is in Georgia today stumping for Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the other Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in the runoff elections.
Breonna Taylor: The True Story of a BLM Hero
Hey, guys, I found out the true facts in the Breonna Taylor case!
Remember the “botched raid” (New York Times) on Breonna’s apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, last March, when police officers killed this innocent black woman as she slept peacefully in her bed?
Yes, apparently, without announcing themselves, the police smashed in the front door of the WRONG APARTMENT. Their warrant was for a man Breonna had dated eons ago and barely knew anymore, and whom they already had in custody! Assuming the police were home invaders, Breonna’s boyfriend pulled out a gun — again, police were at the WRONG APARTMENT — whereupon the officers opened fire, killing Breonna and wounding one of their own in friendly fire.
You probably won’t believe this, but it turns out, none of that is true.
Contrary to the repeated claim that the police “had the wrong address and the wrong person and the person was in custody” — as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it — the police were not at the wrong house at all.
It seems that Breonna Taylor was knee-deep in the criminal enterprise of her sometime-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, who was running a massive drug operation, selling crack cocaine and fentanyl to the citizens of Louisville.
The morning after Breonna was killed, for example, Jamarcus told his baby mama (on a police-recorded phone call): “This is what you got to understand, don’t take it wrong, but Bre been handling all my money, she been handling my money … She been handling sh*t for me and Cuz, it ain’t just me.”
He detailed the amounts when an unidentified male got on the line, saying, “Tell Cuz, Bre got down like $15 (grand), she had the $8 (grand) I gave her the other day and she picked up another $6 (grand).”
And yet, the media credulously repeated that Breonna barely knew Jamarcus, based on the family’s lawyer, Sam Aguiar, saying that they had broken up two years earlier and had only a “passive friendship.”
In addition to “handling sh*t” for Jamarcus, Breonna had bailed Jamarcus out of jail, driven with him to a “trap house” (where the drugs were sold), and allowed him to use her address — the site of the raid — for his mail, phone bills, a bank account and jail bookings. All this in 2020.
Police GPS tracking showed that Jamarcus had been to Breonna’s apartment six times in January alone, and had called her from jail dozens of times since they had allegedly broken up.
Jan. 3, 2020:
Jamarcus: “Just be on standby so you can come get me. Love you.”
Breonna: “Love you, too.”
More significantly, police had photos of Jamarcus picking up USPS packages at Breonna’s apartment as recently as Jan. 16, 2020, then taking them directly to a trap house. The photos are available online. (If only our media had access to the internet!)
And of course, back in 2016, after Breonna had rented a car for Jamarcus, police showed up at her door because … a dead body was found in the trunk. The murdered man turned out to be the brother of one of Jamarcus’ co-conspirators. Surely that gave Breonna an inkling that Jamarcus was not walking on the right side of the law.
These are a few of the reasons why, on March 13, Louisville police planned to execute four simultaneous no-knock search warrants on homes associated with Jamarcus’ drug operation: 2424 Elliott Avenue (the trap house, where vast amounts of crack cocaine, fentanyl pills and guns were found), 2425 Elliott Avenue, 2426 Elliott Avenue (the houses next door, used to hide guns and drugs), and 3003 Springfield Drive No. 4 (Breonna’s apartment).
Although all the warrants were written as “no-knock” to protect the officers and prevent the destruction of evidence, the police did knock and announce themselves at Breonna’s apartment. The officers say so, and at least one brave neighbor broke with “the community” to admit he heard the police announce themselves.
The media make the inane point that a dozen neighbors didn’t hear the police announce themselves. Even assuming they’re telling the truth, that proves: A dozen neighbors didn’t hear the police announce themselves. It doesn’t prove that the officers didn’t announce themselves. (This is why there are LSATs to get into law school.)
Even Breonna’s boyfriend says they knocked. You’re the bagwoman for a major crack cocaine operation, there’s loud banging on your door after midnight, and your reaction is:The last thing I imagined was that it could be the police!
Team Breonna makes a big point of the fact that the police found no drugs or money at her apartment. Yeah, that’s because they didn’t look.
The first officer through the door was shot by Breonna’s boyfriend — who eventually admitted he shot first — and the officers returned fire, hitting Breonna five times, one fatally. (All proved by federal ballistics reports.) In the commotion after the shootout, the officers never executed the search warrant.
That was confirmed by a police investigator to the grand jury — and also by Jamarcus, who said in jailhouse recordings that his money was still at Breonna’s house:
Jamarcus: “It was there, it was there, it was there … They didn’t do nothing though that’s the problem … [Breonna’s boyfriend] said ain’t none of that go on.”
[Unidentified man] to Jamarcus: “So they didn’t take none of the money?”
Jamarcus: “[Breonna’s boyfriend] said that none of that go on. He said Homicide came straight on the scene and they went to packaging Bre and they left.”
But how on earth did the officers hit Breonna, when she was sound asleep in the next room? She wasn’t. She was standing in the hallway right next to her boyfriend … who, again, was shooting at the police. He ducked, she didn’t.
As Jamarcus summarized what happened to Breonna in a jailhouse phone call: “that n@gga did this shit. At the end of the day, if I would have been at that house, Bre would be alive, bruh. I don’t shoot at no police.”
For this, Breonna’s family got $12 million from the city and the rest of us got endless nights of violent riots.
https://anncoulter.com/2020/12/16/breonna-taylor-the-true-story-of-a-blm-herox/
Australia: Indigenous leader appointed to Murray-Darling Basin board
A man with a red beard is an Aborigine? Pull the other one! The stream of articles like this are amazingly racist. They constantly show that you have to be effectively white to be regarded as a high-achieving Aborigine
The legislated position for permanent Indigenous representation on the board of the Murray Darling Basin Authority has finally been filled after more than a year’s delay.
Rene Woods has been appointed to the position by Water Minister Keith Pitt. Mr Woods was chairman of Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN), which is a confederation of Indigenous Nations or traditional owners in the southern part of the Basin. He stepped down from the role to serve on the MDBA board.
Mr Woods said Indigenous representation was a “step in the right direction” to improving the influence of First Nations on water management.
“It’s my hope that there will be more First Nations representation in coming years that will continue to take our voices to the Authority, improving their understanding of First Nations water issues,” Mr Woods said.
“My father, Ian, was the first Indigenous man on the Murray Darling Basin Commission – he started to advocate for more involvement in decision making – I’m proud to continue that work.”
'Disgrace': Calls for Indigenous voice in water management
The decision to deliver a permanent Indigenous representative on the authority’s board was announced in September last year by then-water minister David Littleproud, but the position remained vacant until Mr Woods’ appointment on Friday.
Indigenous representatives railed against the appointment delay. The Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations labelled it “appalling” and MLDRIN vice chairman Grant Rigney said it was “unjustifiable”.
MLDRIN’s acting chairman Grant Rigney said Mr Woods was the “the ideal candidate”.
“Now more than ever, as controversial new dam projects and flood plain harvesting rules pose heightened threats to our sacred waterways, First Nations need a strong voice at the highest decision-making table of the MDBA,” Rigney said.
Mr Pitt said Mr Woods had been a prominent force in his representation for MLDRIN and he was well qualified for the MDBA board.
“He grew up with the Murrumbidgee River running through his veins and has a wealth of valuable experience in a broad range of local and national water management issues.”
The MDBA oversees water resource management and delivers the $13 billion Basin Plan to recover water for the environment.
A study from Griffith University this year found in NSW Aboriginal people collectively have rights to 0.2 per cent of the available surface water (12 gigalitres). Aboriginal people comprise 9.3 per cent of the population in NSW’s Murray Darling Basin, but only hold rights to 0.1 per cent of the value of the water market there ($16.5 million).
Two other overdue MDBA board appointments remain unfilled.\
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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