Data, Tech & Black Communities

Demands to welcome cops at Pride amount to a collective hallucination, as if the policing of gender and sexuality by the state was a thing of the past.

The NYPD uses biometric technologies such as facial recognition to identify crime suspects, but dark-skinned people are misidentified 40% of the time. To imagine a future where we don't deploy facial recognition & policing, #ForFreedoms & @ai4theppl launched #HeartRecognition: pic.twitter.com/5dnmxZAFLv— For Freedoms (@forfreedoms) June 21, 2021

How have data-centric systems perpetuated racial capitalism, and how have different communities, particularly in the global South, resisted this datafication?

Workplace challenges posed by new technology could be answered by very traditional solutions. "Nevertheless, there is also substantial historical evidence that technological changes tend to affect lower-paid and lower-qualified workers more than others. This suggests there are likely to be unequal effects that cause disruption for some people or places more than others,"

New automatic extraction of data from GP-held patient records, due to come into force next month, are ‘far bigger’ and ‘more intrusive’ than care.data, GP privacy campaigners have warned.

Digital vaccine passports are novel technologies, built on uncertain and evolving science. By creating infrastructure for segregation and risk scoring at an individual level, and enabling third-parties to access health information, they bring profound risks to individual rights and concepts of equity in society.

Exclusive: Equalities watchdog tells government documents could create ‘two-tier society’

Guardian analysis shows young black workers hit disproportionately hard by Covid pandemic

In tests, it detected black faces less than half the time

The Data Services & Analytics has data on 650 million people and has been accused of creating a “super database”

Enterprise section ‘laughably simplistic’ and looked to TV programme Dragons’ Den for answers

Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report overlooked ‘30 or 40 years of evidence’ about inequalities

As scandal is mentioned twice in 258 pages, some of those affected question government’s understanding of it

Dal Babu, who was one of UK’s most senior British-Asian officers, regrets taking part in racial disparity report

This report comes at a pivotal moment for our nation’s race debate. We need to place that debate on objective and democratic foundations – ones that include people of goodwill, of all races and ethnicities. The purpose of this report is to lay the ground for a country built on the full participation and trust of all communities. We envisage a country more at ease with itself because it can recognise where progress has been made. One that is confident that, where unequal access to opportunity persists, whether among inner city ethnic minorities or the left-behind from the ethnic majority, it is being addressed.

Objective To quantify rates of organ specific dysfunction in individuals with covid-19 after discharge from hospital compared with a matched control group from the general population. Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting NHS hospitals in England. Participants 47 780 individuals (mean age 65, 55% men) in hospital with covid-19 and discharged alive by 31 August 2020, exactly matched to controls from a pool of about 50 million people in England for personal and clinical characteristics from 10 years of electronic health records. Main outcome measures Rates of hospital readmission (or any admission for controls), all cause mortality, and diagnoses of respiratory, cardiovascular, metabolic, kidney, and liver diseases until 30 September 2020. Variations in rate ratios by age, sex, and ethnicity. Results Over a mean follow-up of 140 days, nearly a third of individuals who were discharged from hospital after acute covid-19 were readmitted (14 060 of 47 780) and more than 1 in 10 (5875) died after discharge, with these events occurring at rates four and eight times greater, respectively, than in the matched control group. Rates of respiratory disease (P

BMJ analysis of 48,000 records also finds one in eight patients die within four months of discharge

This was a wasted opportunity. But last year’s protests created a move for change the government won’t be able to hold back, says Simon Woolley, director of Operation Black Vote

Our government has chosen a moment of national crisis to drive a wedge within the working class, framed around the notion of white marginalisation. Our government would have us believe the white working class are held back because of the gains made by minority groups, rather than as the result of decades of underinvestment.

The report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 3 months overdue and 9 months after the Commission’s inception, is a script that has been written for 10 Downing Street. The people involved in this Commission had no interest in genuinely discussing racism, but even this Government does not go as far as to say that we are post racial. The least the Commission could have done is acknowledge the very real suffering of Black and minority ethnic communities here in the UK.

In the face of adversity, allies come together. It's clear this Commission wants to set race relations back by 20 years - we're not going to let that happen. Stay mobilised, stay engaged, stay positive. In case you missed our event, catch it here.

A government who doesn't like it when people say institutional racism exists appointed a panel of people who don't believe institutional racism exists, and they've produced a report which argues that institutional racism doesn't exist.— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) March 31, 2021

What the Commission on Race & Ethnic Disparity said about why ethnic minority people are more likely to die from covid-19 (left).What the ONS report they cite to support this claim actually says (right). pic.twitter.com/TjhLIJPUze— Jonathan Portes (@jdportes) March 31, 2021

Jonathan Portes @jdportes - I & others have pointed to errors/misrepresentations in the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Diversities. To be fair, there is plenty of good or uncontentious stuff. But leaving aside the specific empirical analysis, a short thread on the conceptual framework.

Monish joined us to outline the history and contemporary use of electron monitoring (tagging) for criminal sentencing and punishment which was extended under the Asylum and Immigration Act s36 to ‘immigration controls’ of ‘high risk’ individuals. This is a special five part series in collaboration with the official journal of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), Race & Class. The series begins with an introduction to the history of IRR with Director Liz Fekete & follows with four episodes about the latest special issue: Race Mental Health, State Violence with editors Eddie Bruce-Jones & Monish Bhatia and contributors Tarek Younis and Vanessa E Thompson. With special thanks to Sophia Siddiqui.

A new paper from the MIT Media Lab’s Joy Buolamwini shows that three commercial facial-analysis programs demonstrate gender and skin-type biases, and suggests a new, more accurate method for evaluating the performance of such machine-learning systems.

"Any data scientist working to automate issues of a social nature, in effect, is engaged in making moral and ethical decisions – they are not simply dealing with purely technical work but with a practice that actively impacts individual people." - Abeba Birhane

👇New Article👇 It uncovers racial surveillance and electronic monitoring of migrants and its traumatic consequences #challengingecarceration #nodigitalprisons Thanks @Race_Class, reviewers,& colleagues for offering constructive comments 🙏 https://t.co/q1A4MXpIT3 https://t.co/E80soLS5kf

Agnes Agyepong, parent engagement programme manager at Best Beginnings and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust Maternity Voices Partnership Chair discusses why Black women are not engaging in research and what can be done to change this?

We have published a rapid review that calls for further action on racial bias in pulse oximetry. A series of recommendations for national healthcare, regulatory and research bodies have been outlined: https://t.co/yyOEJnq9Pl https://t.co/TMpGOnh0qH