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On Our Radar

A curated collection of links to news, analysis, trends, ideas and views from elsewhere.

Next City: Raising the bar for local economic impact of affordable housing

With its office about two and a half miles away in another part of Brooklyn, Williams’ JW Electric Corp. is a certified minority-owned subcontractor hired to set up the building’s electricity. The firm got $5.1 million in subcontracts for CAMBA Gardens II, its largest contract since Williams founded the business in 2002. The project employed up to 25 of his workers — most of them Brooklyn residents.

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The New York Times: How the suffrage movement betrayed black women

Historians who are not inclined to hero worship — including Elsa Barkley Brown, Lori Ginzberg and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn — have recently provided an unsparing portrait of this once-neglected period. Stripped of her halo, Stanton, the campaign’s principal philosopher, is exposed as a classic liberal racist who embraced fairness in the abstract while publicly enunciating bigoted views of African-American men, whom she characterized as “Sambos” and incipient rapists in the period just after the war. The suffrage struggle itself took on a similar flavor, acquiescing to white supremacy — and selling out the interests of African-American women — when it became politically expedient to do so. This betrayal of trust opened a rift between black and white feminists that persists to this day.

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The New York Times: DeVos to eliminate rules aimed at abuses by For-Profit colleges

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

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The New York Times: The week in tech: inequality rising

The present, however, can be brutal. To my mind, the week’s most important tech story was the slaying of an 18-year-old woman at a BART station in San Francisco’s East Bay, just a few miles from Silicon Valley, as she was getting off a train. Nia Wilson was traveling with her older sisters Lahtifa and Nishiya when, in a shocking act of terror, a man slashed her neck. She died at the scene. Lahtifa Wilson was wounded. A transient with a history of violence has been arrested.

How does this relate to tech?

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The New Yorker: The Summer of Coupon Carl, Permit Patty, and the videos that turn white privilege into mockable memes

This season, a string of recordings documenting quotidian social aggressions has been accumulating in our social-media feeds, clip by clip, like some portentous summer garland. The videos are shakily produced—shot by the rightfully indignant, who, in a matter of minutes, have realized that they must take up the role of gonzo filmmaker in order to protect reputations, freedoms, and, potentially, lives. They have a sick synchronicity, revealing an irrefutable pattern of behavior in their protagonists. Let’s call them the cop-calling tapes.

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Washington Post: Amazon’s facial-recognition tool misidentified 28 lawmakers as people arrested for a crime, study finds

Amazon.com’s facial recognition tools incorrectly identified Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and 27 other members of Congress as people arrested for a crime during a test commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the watchdog said Thursday.

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NPR: What you need to know about the democratic socialists of america

Here’s how one socialist sums up his beliefs:

“I think we just need to realize that the end goal is, ultimately, like social control of the means of production,” said Joe Cernelli, a founding member of that West Virginia DSA chapter. “You know we don’t just want to improve capitalism, we will ultimately want to get rid of it.”

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