Boz Handy Bosma, Ph.D.

@bbbozzz.bsky.social

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Posts

Twitter escapee and tech leader posting about systemic racism, systemic sexism, and intersectional -isms in relation to AI, technology, and policy. Opinions my own. Please follow / amplify. #EndSystemicRacism #EndSystemicSexism

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With fear for our democracy, I am canceling my subscriptions.

Yep. Or, as @volts.wtf puts it:

This is exactly right. About 40 percent of the country thinks they have been blocked by a low single digit percentage of Black people. The math ain’t mathin.

it’s why you have people still blaming affirmative action for why their kids couldn’t get into harvard et al. it’s not legacies or the fact that these places are hyper-selective. it’s that there is *a* black person who took *your* spot.

Four out of five presidential elections now, there has been a concerted effort by some Democrats to erase the election results and overrule the will of the voters. What Trump did leading the insurrection was awful, but complaints from many Democrats really do ring hollow given this fact.

One of the most important speeches in American history, authored by the hand of Ben Franklin ... but Franklin was too frail and weak to deliver it, so he handed it to his fellow delegate from Pennsylvania to read it. About Biden's age, please give it a rest. constitutioncenter.org/the-constitu...

Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention (1787)constitutioncenter.org National Constitution Center Historic Documents Library record for Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention (1787)

@histoftech.bsky.social Hi - so sorry I missed your deadline on new conference date - have sent reply. Boz

Some are shocked this could happen in any business. Given trends, I'm completely unsurprised. Companies don't and probably can't screen for politics, so they will have employees who do these things. They often don't have policy or process in place to prevent them. www.cnn.com/2024/05/29/b...

Black passengers sue American Airlines, alleging they were thrown off a plane because of false body odor complaint | CNN Businesswww.cnn.com A lawsuit filed Wednesday on behalf of three Black men alleges “blatant and egregious race discrimination” by American Airlines after being removed from a flight.

Reading shanty arson stories today. The shanty at the University of Texas where I was a grad student was burned 20+ times. I have stories about who I think did that at least once, but I’ll hold them for now. Same thing happened all over. Here’s Dartmouth. www.nytimes.com/1986/02/12/u...

DARTMOUTH SUSPENDS 12 FOR ATTACK ON SHANTIES (Published 1986)www.nytimes.com

Our daughter, who is biracial, is a freshman at UT. There are so many welcoming people there, but I fully endorse your message about DEI firings. These seem to me to be prompted by the state legislature and SB 17. Whether it's an over-correction or the law itself, I don't have enough details to say.

Denied the nooses, firehoses, and dogs used in previous generations, Texas racists turn to mass firings, in keeping with the anti-DEI theories of Chris Rufo and other GOP darlings, to ensure that people of color never feel comfortable at the University of Texas. www.texastribune.org/2024/04/02/u...

UT-Austin announces round of firings in latest step to comply with Te…www.texastribune.org The firings come after state leaders criticized universities for not doing enough to enforce the ban. Students say UT-Austin has already overcorrected.

Reposted by

Boz Handy Bosma, Ph.D.

Reply to

Greg Sargent

Musk relentlessly elevates the idea of a migrant invasion and regularly boosts the notion that migrants as a class should be conflated with violent criminals. He has turned X into a place where "white genocide" propaganda is absolutely flourishing. 6/6 newrepublic.com/article/1800...

The irony of Republicans arguing against eliminating viewpoints from the public discourse ... I mean, what are the Stop Woke laws and all the other laws in Texas and Florida, if not exactly that?

Important essay from Nikole Hannah-Jones on the color-blindness trap. Surprised I haven't seen it shared on Blue Sky. I'm hoping others will share widely. www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/m...

The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijackedwww.nytimes.com The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.

With Blue Sky open now, we ought to adopt some practices that helped Twitter and other platforms scale. One is Follow Fridays, we’re mostly bigger accounts recommend smaller accounts of interest to follow. Hoping to get some help scaling. My topic is systemic racism and sexism in relation to tech.

Biden’s argument about saving democracy and averting fascism isn’t intended for people who agree with him on policy. It’s intended for people on both his political left and his political, right who don’t like his policies, but would accept those policies as the price of averting fascism.

I will not be silent about speech codes telling me I can't talk about white genociders who tried to block our daughters from speaking at the local school board. These same horrible arguments were made for years. If we had caved, NO kids who weren't white would be able to speak in our school district

The decision of the Twitter board to force Musk to follow through on his bid is one is the most epic fails in corporate social responsibility. Obvious from the start horrible things would happen. Yet another reason the “good of the shareholders” should never be the sole consideration.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, he dismantled its system to flag false election content. Musk, who has spread misinformation himself on X, said the system amounted to election interference, raising alarms among experts and election administrators.

Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gonewww.nytimes.com Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”

This is doubtless true, but it needs amplifying that the same threats have been made against Black people, racially mixed families, and LGBTQ people exercising their rights to speech, assembly, association, and petition for years. Also a threat to democracy. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Yes. I knew this about the cross burning by Charles Murray. One of my earliest memories was of death threats against our family by Klan and John Birchers in Michigan because my father, a teacher, had helped lead integration of teaching there. Murray very much NOT from a Norman Rockwell family.

This open access book about the context of the Bell Curve includes this rollercoaster of a paragraph--did you know Charles Murray burned a cross as a teenager, and claimed not to know what that meant?--concluding with a real beauty

The misguided David Leonhardt: good writing, but if misses the solution to underrepresented students who “would have done well” but didn’t take the test: advise them to opt for the test. It isn’t to mandate it for all, since that pushes down an even larger number. www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/b...

Amazing thread. As for me, I think the annual retrospectives of accomplishments we've seen in recent weeks could benefit from some statement on who or what one has amplified. As for me, I've long amplified scholars, practitioners, and PoVs many considered out of bounds / unsayable.

Reflecting on 2023 & looking forward to 2024, I've continued to cycle on 2 things: 1. The astonishing amount of luck I've had in doors opening for me--compared to people just as qualified who are overlooked. 2. The weight of being a minority in wanting human rights centered in tech dev. 🧵

So it has always been. Look decade by decade at debates on equality going back 200 years or more. Black voices won those debates time and again, and their work, insights, and PoVs erased, twisted, or forgotten.

I know I keep repeating this time and time again, but I keep seeing my work (and fellow poc's work) erased in front of my eyes time and time again.

Since academe was created, erasure of Black scholars and activists has been a default of almost every field since those fields existed. That’s partly because those fields so often were founded with anti-Black racism as a central principle.

thank you! so infuriating to have a significant contribution to the field entirely erased

Yes, this matters. Turning AI to the purpose of a better world requires deep understanding of Black voices of all genders who have tried to solve the hardest problems in the world - systemic racism, systemic sexism, colonialism, and related -isms. Can’t be done otherwise. Amplify those who try.

Pay attention to the scholarship of Black women in AI. Like, extra attention: The default in tech is to forget it when you see it, even if by accident.

Reposted by

Boz Handy Bosma, Ph.D.

Reply to

Margaret Mitchell

Some may have noticed that there is a relatively large amount of *women* from HF who speak in media. As scientists & nerds, we are ofc sharing our experiences and thoughts before+after. It's been a unique opportunity to examine the following research question: 2/

We need an X-it to encourage and help AI practitioners to move off Twitter / X. It's become a cesspool of anti-Black racism and anti-semitism and AI should have nothing to do with it.

End of feed.