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Black College Students Lead Movement to Eliminate Bias in Tech
NNPA NEWSWIRE — “Civics of technology derives from a lot of related concepts, but it’s about how we can use technology to further civic engagement, the democratic process, and social justice — especially anything that will galvanize a group of individuals to create social good,” Cierra Robson, associate director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, explained.
The post Black College Students Lead Movement to Eliminate Bias in Tech first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

By Nadira Johnson | Word in Black | The Afro
From self-driving cars that can’t detect folks with darker skin to keep from running them over, to digital assistants like Siri that have trouble understanding non-White accents, technology is biased, and it is hurting Black folks.
“A lot of people will look toward technology as the end all, be all solution to a lot of social issues, but often social issues are not solved by technology, and technology often exacerbates these social issues,” said Cierra Robson, associate director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab which brings students, educators, and activists together to develop creative approaches to data conception, production, and circulation.
Founded in 2018 and led by Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, the lab focuses on finding ways to “rethink and retool the relationship between stories and statistics, power and technology, data and justice.”
“Civics of technology derives from a lot of related concepts, but it’s about how we can use technology to further civic engagement, the democratic process, and social justice — especially anything that will galvanize a group of individuals to create social good,” Robson explained.
In her role at the lab, Robson works closely with Princeton students on a variety of projects that look at how technology bias is contributing to bias in all areas of our lives, from healthcare, to labor, and education.
Robson first became passionate about finding solutions to biased technology after learning about how the issue leads to violent over-policing.
“When I was an undergrad at Princeton, I had access to this entire wealth of resources that was kind of stuck in the university,” Robson said. “One of the biggest things that I wanted to do when the labs started in the summer of 2020 was figure out a way to get those resources from Princeton into the community, to people who needed them.”
And people do need this information, desperately, because biased technology is killing Black and Brown folks and contributes to higher rates of incarceration and injustice.
“Predictive policing technologies — there’s a whole bunch of them — but one of the ones I focus on a lot is that it predicts where crime is likely to happen in a given city, and that prompts police to go be deployed in those areas so that they can catch whatever crime might happen there,” Robson said. “What they base that data on is an algorithm that uses data on historic police interaction, but no one really stops to think that those historic police interactions are colored by all sorts of discriminatory processes.”
Robson points out that a recent study conducted by Aaron Chalfin, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that in Southern cities with large Black populations the homicide rate did not change when more police presence was added. But, more officers made arrests for low-level offenses like alcohol-related infractions, “which are not typically seen as contributing to public safety.”
“The fact is that Black communities are historically over-policed even before the advent of these technologies and algorithms,” Robson explained. “When you feed the data that focuses on arrests only in Black communities into an algorithm that predicts where crime is likely to happen, what you are going to get out of it is that crime only happens in Black and Brown neighborhoods when that’s not true.
“As a result,” Robson said. “Police are deployed overwhelmingly to Black and Brown neighborhoods, and it creates this cycle where more data is being created because there are more police there. This obviously has negative impacts on people’s lives. From the waves of violent policing that we’ve seen for quite some time, it’s evident why you would not want police in your community all the time. There has also been chronic over-policing and under-protection. Just because police are in a neighborhood, does not equate to greater safety in that neighborhood.”
Through her work with the lab and the Civics of Technology conference, Robson hopes to inspire more students to ask critical questions about how data is sourced and how technology is used in Black and Brown communities so that they can use their newfound knowledge to create better practices in whatever fields of work and study they choose to venture in to.
“A lot of them will end up in politics, in the tech industry, as lawyers, doctors, and all sorts of things,” Robson said. “One of the best things that comes out of teaching students of all kinds about this work is that it ripples out in every single environment in our daily lives, whether that be the law, whether that be healthcare, whether that be worker justice and labor.”
Participants in the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab might go on to earn a doctorate degree or work in the tech industry, but that isn’t required. Robson says if they end up working in another industry entirely, she wants students to be “able to take some of the tools that we teach them about — about fair design practices and questioning what it really means to have something be objective or questioning what it really means for something to be data-driven — into whatever area they’re going into in the future. Hopefully, if we can create enough students to do that, we are creating a new generation with a new awareness so that people are thinking twice about the technologies that they deploy and the data that they use in every area.”
To that end, in early August, the student members of the lab participated in Civics of Technology, a free, two-day virtual conference designed to bring the knowledge they’ve acquired while participating in the lab to the greater public.
Technology and education justice
During the virtual conference, Collin Riggins, a junior at Princeton and a research associate at the lab, and Payton Croskey, a senior at Princeton and creative content director for the lab, led “Reimagining Education Justice: Practices and Tools for Tech Freedom Schools,” a workshop which focused on education justice — from early childhood to college and beyond the traditional classroom. Their goal was to determine how technology can be used to promote better education practices for diverse students if it is used properly.
“The theme for this summer’s convention is Freedom Schools,” Croskey said, “Freedom Schools is where all of the research groups and products stem from. We are rooting ourselves in history before we try to build something new for the future.”
Freedom Schools were created in 1964 as entirely new schools specifically designed for the education and advancement of Black students. Supporters of these schools believed in paying attention to and meeting the unique needs of each individual child. Bringing that concept into the present day, Croskey and Riggins say that if we want to eliminate bias in education, we must similarly listen to and respond to the needs of the communities we wish to serve with technology.
We need to shift to “Thinking how we can build technology and community with those that the technology is seeking to serve,” Croskey said. “If we are building technology for young Black students in New York City, and we are saying that this is going to help them learn, then they also need to be part of that conversation and need to be included in that design.
“Technology is not going to be one size fits all,” Croskey said. “Especially in the education field, technology is going to need to be curated for a specific group and specific environments. Not pushing this one model that everyone needs to follow.”
“Although our goals are revolutionary, our work spawns from a long tradition of Black radical education,” Collins added. “We’re looking at the Freedom Schools, which decided in the summer of 1964 to create entirely different schools for Black students so they could learn frameworks for how to resist and how to function in daily life.”
“Across any institution, and even maybe across the world in general, there is a fixed approach to how you engage with technology,” Collins said. “One of the things the Lab does beautifully is allow people from different backgrounds and disciplines to come together in conversation. This has been very radical to me, especially at an institution like Princeton, which is very tech-driven and quantitatively driven. It’s nice to be able to engage with these concepts through art, or through storytelling, or through speculative fiction, and that not only be accepted but embraced. That inclusivity is rare.”
The two students have also used their time in the lab to focus on the use of surveillance in schools, which has significantly increased given the rising rates of school shootings. Although surveillance may prove useful in keeping some students safe from shooters, Croskey worries this will prove dangerous for Black students and students from other marginalized backgrounds.
“There is a lot of surveillance being used these days with the rise of school shootings. There is a lot of data being collected and a lot of tracking done on students who do not have the power to consent,” Croskey said. In addition, there are “Parents who are not being given the power to truly consent because they are not being given full explanations about how this data is being used or where it will be sent to.”
Their hope is that technology can be reimagined in a way that is “curated for a specific group and specific environments. Not pushing this one model that everyone needs to follow,” Croskey explains.
Connecting technological and environmental justice
It’s been a boiling hot summer with historic droughts ravaging the globe, but many people don’t often think about the connections between technology and environmental justice.
“When you look into it, there are a lot of ways that the technologies that we are using can be harmful to the environment,” said Kenia D. Hale, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology. During the Civics of Technology conference, Hale, who is also a graduate of Yale University, led “Reimagining Environmental Justice: Practices and Tools for Tech Freedom Schools,” a session that explored the intersection of the two topics.
Hale says that although the energy needed for a single internet search or email is small, there are approximately 4.1 billion people, or 53.6 percent of the global population, who now use the internet, and the associated greenhouse gasses emitted with each online activity can add up. It turns out that the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet, and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7 percent of global greenhouse emissions. This is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally.
“I wanted to figure out ways to challenge the idea that technology is automatically better for the environment and spreading more awareness about the ways it can be quite harmful. People think there is no physical impact, but there is actually a lot of physical impact,” said Hale. “You can’t do anything without a laptop, so this isn’t to shame people into not buying one, but more so to spread awareness. Get engaged with the environmental organizations and activist groups that are in your city. It’s better to be more proactive in getting organized with our communities on how to collectively combat these things.”
Hale says that some questions that folks should be asking themselves when determining the environmental impact of a technological tool are who is mining the materials that go into your car, computer, or smartphone, and does the company that makes this product overly contribute to global pollution?
Learning more about the effects of technology on our lives
To learn more about how to spot technology bias and how to advocate for better data sourcing practices in your community, the lab’s research and resources page lists plenty of useful information.
In addition, the lab’s founder and director, Ruha Benjamin, has written extensively about the connections between technology and inequality. Her 2019 book “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code” explores how new technologies are framed as “benign and pure,” even though they perpetuate social inequities. The book, which was a 2020 winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award (for anti-racist scholarship) from the American Sociological Association Section on Race & Ethnic Minorities also shares ideas on how we can combat these inequities.
In addition, “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, by Kwame Ture and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, which defines Black Power, presents insights into the roots of racism in the United States and suggests a means of reforming the traditional political process for the future through technology and other tools.
The post Black college students lead movement to eliminate bias in tech appeared first on AFRO American Newspapers.
The post Black College Students Lead Movement to Eliminate Bias in Tech first appeared on BlackPressUSA.
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PRESS ROOM: Top Climate Organizations React to Trump’s Executive Orders Attacking Health, Environment, Climate and Clean Energy Jobs
NNPA NEWSWIRE — Climate Action Campaign (CAC), along with partners and allies, voiced strong concerns about the executive orders and the confirmation of Lee Zeldin as the 17th Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

Voice concerns about the New EPA Administrator
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump wasted no time implementing the Project 2025 playbook. Within his first hours as the 47th President, he issued executive orders aimed at dismantling crucial climate, health, and economic protections, which could have dire consequences for the country and the environment. His actions of disservice to our communities on the first day of his presidency coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day which was meant for service and reflection. The policies introduced by President Trump, along with his new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, stand in stark contrast to the spirit of Dr. King’s commitments to service others and improve society.
Climate Action Campaign (CAC), along with partners and allies, voiced strong concerns about the executive orders and the confirmation of Lee Zeldin as the 17th Environmental Protection Agency administrator. “The new administration has moved to undo hard-earned generational progress like Justice40 that was created to ensure every American has an opportunity to be healthy and thrive,” said Dr. Margo Browne, Senior Vice President of Justice and Equity, at Environmental Defense Fund. “These actions threaten the rights of tens of millions of Americans to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and use products free of toxic chemicals, particularly those people whose zip code or race add undue burdens.
We must stay focused. Leaders change, but our work remains the same. And we will do everything we can to uphold the progress made with our partners and allies and to uplift the people on the frontlines fighting for equity every day.” “As we enter into an era of weaponized phrases and issues, we must remember that environmental justice means that all people should have equitable access to a healthy, sustainable, and resilient environment,” said Leslie Fields, Chief Federal Officer, WE ACT For Environmental Justice. “Trump’s day one acts – including rescissions of nearly 80 vital executive orders while adding dozens of new, anti-democratic orders – roll back popular policies that promote clean, renewable, and affordable energy. These actions also place vulnerable communities in even greater danger from pollution and the dire, real-time consequences of the climate crisis. In the face of these assaults, we will not stop pursuing justice.”
“The President of the United States is elected to lead and protect all Americans,” said Ben Jealous, Executive Director, Sierra Club. “Donald Trump promised to be a president who fights for working families, but his bluster of action shows he’s fighting harder to protect corporate polluters and their profits, all at the expense of our health, our safety, and our jobs. The American people want cheaper energy bills, safe drinking water, and clean air. Donald Trump should listen and offer actual solutions instead of exploiting their pain for political gain while he further lines the pockets of the wealthiest instead of American workers.”
On the Confirmation of Lee Zeldin, 17th administrator of the EPA:
“Lee Zeldin’s confirmation as EPA administrator is a catastrophic blow to the health of Americans, the climate, and the economy,” said Margie Alt, Director, Climate Action Campaign. “Under Zeldin’s leadership, the Environmental Protection Agency will no longer protect the American people and our communities – it will protect polluters. Zeldin’s public statements and record make it clear he will implement Trump’s anti-science, anti-clean energy Project 2025 agenda, prioritizing the interests of oil and gas CEOs at the expense of the clean air, water, and energy that Americans overwhelmingly support and rely on. Americans deserve an EPA administrator who will prioritize the health and safety of families over polluter profits. Zeldin’s confirmation is a tragic failure for all Americans.”
“The new head of the EPA must ensure that neither he nor the President denies vulnerable communities their most basic rights—the right to breathe clean air, drink water free from poison, and live on land that does not make them sick,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, Executive Vice President, National Wildlife Federation. “Environmental Justice is not a privilege; it is the foundation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To neglect it is to abandon the people who need protection the most.” “Confirming a director who normalizes baseless conspiracies, while failing to earnestly accept the facts of climate change, is a threat to the health of everyone in the United States and especially the most vulnerable Justice 40 communities,” said KeShaun Pearson, Executive Director, Memphis Community Against Pollution. “Lee Zeldin is the antithesis of environment and climate justice. We are amid a climate crisis that demands a protector, not a big oil pawn.” Climate Action Campaign is a vibrant coalition of advocacy organizations working together to drive ambitious, durable federal action to cut carbon pollution, address the climate crisis, advance environmental justice, and accelerate the transition to clean energy.
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BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2025 We Proclaim It
NNPA NEWSWIRE — In the history of this country, in the ongoing fight against racial oppression, against a white supremacist narrative, and against the racial apartheid laws that were passed and upheld, there have always been gear-shifting moments when individual people have taken a stand.

By Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead
Former Georgia Representative Julian Bond and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver once said that when Rosa Parks chose to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, somewhere in the universe, a gear in the machinery shifted, and everything changed.
A gear-shifting moment.
In the history of this country, in the ongoing fight against racial oppression, against a white supremacist narrative, and against the racial apartheid laws that were passed and upheld, there have always been gear-shifting moments when individual people have taken a stand. It happened in 1850, when Harriet Araminta Tubman, a year after her self-emancipation, chose to go back to Baltimore, Maryland, to help lead her niece and her niece’s two children to freedom. A gear shifted. It happened in 1770, when Crispus Attucks, a Black and Indigenous sailor and whaler, chose to get involved with the growing kerfuffle in Boston. In 1864, when the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops marched from Camp William Penn through the streets of Philadelphia on their way to fight, gear shifted.
When Mamie Till told them in 1955 to leave her son’s casket open so that the world could see what those white men had done to her son, a gear in the machinery of the universe shifted, it happened again in 1966 with Kwame Ture and Mukasa Dada’s declaration of Black Power after the “March Against Fear.” In 2014, after police officers killed unarmed Eric Garner in New York and unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Black people came together under the banner and hashtag of Black Lives Matter to march, protest, and demand change. Gears shift when we choose to fight, when we choose to stand up, and when we refuse to back down. The moral arc of the universe does not bend on its own toward justice, it bends because we push it and because we are willing to continue to do it until change does happen.
In 1926, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson—the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the son of formerly enslaved parents, a former sharecropper and miner, and the second Black person to receive a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University—sent out a press release announcing the first Negro History Week, a gear shifted. He chose February because the Black community was already celebrating the historic achievements on the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (2/12) and Frederick Douglass (2/14). Dr. Woodson did not wait for the celebration of our history to be proclaimed, he proclaimed it. He did not wait for someone to permit him to celebrate what we had contributed to this country, he celebrated it. Dr. Woodson understood that Black parents had been teaching their children our history since we arrived in this country. Our stories and achievements had been carried by the wind and buried in the soil. It had been whispered as bedtime stories, spoken from the pulpits on Sunday mornings, and woven throughout our songs and poems of resistance and survival. America did not have to tell us who we were to this country; we told them.
[This post contains video, click to play]
America did not have to tell us that we built this country, our fingerprints are etched into the stone. America does not have to proclaim Black History Month, we proclaim it. We live in the legacy of Dr. Woodson, and as we have done for 98 years, we will celebrate who we are and all that we have accomplished. We stand at the intersection of the past and the future; what we do at this moment will determine how the next gear shifts. The 2025 Black History Month theme is African Americans and Labor, which focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people and the transformational work that we have done throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. We are celebrating our visible labor—from the work we did back then to build the White House to the work we do right now to hold the White House accountable, from repairing the roads to teaching in our schools, from stocking shelves to packing and unloading trucks; from working in the federal government to our ongoing labor in the state and local offices—and, our invisible labor—from raising and teaching our children to caring for our aging family members, from finding ways to practice revolutionary self-care to finding ways to hope beyond hope in a country that frequently targets and terrorizes Black people. We bear witness to what it means to work hard every day and to get sick and tired of working so hard.
As the president of ASALH, one of the many legacy keepers of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, I am excited to proclaim and uplift the start of Black History Month 2025. I believe that ASALH is a lighthouse that you do not notice until you need it. When boats are caught in a storm or fog, they look for the lighthouse to help guide them safely back to the shore. We have been standing as a lighthouse proudly proclaiming the importance of Black History and helping people to understand that it is only through studying the quilted narrative of our historical journey that one can see the silences, blind spots, hypocrisies, and distortions of American history. We do not celebrate because we are given permission, we celebrate because we are the permission givers. We do not wait for Black History Month to be proclaimed, we proclaim it. We do not wait to be seen, we see ourselves. We do not have to be told the story of America because we are writing it, we are telling it, we are owning it, and we are pointing the way to it. We invite you to join us as we once again celebrate and center the incredible contributions that Black people have made to this beautiful and imperfect nation.
Dr. Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead is the 30th person and the eighth woman to serve as the national president of ASALH. She is a professor of Communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland and the host of the award-winning radio show “Today with Dr. Kaye” on WEAA, 88.9 FM. She is the author of the recently released “my mother’s tomorrow: dispatches from Baltimore’s Black Butterfly” and a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She lives in Baltimore with her family.
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Black Reaction to Trump DEI Blame on The Plane Crash
NNPA NEWSWIRE — Before the completed investigation officially began, President Trump laid the blame for the accident on the Army helicopter. He felt it should have been flying at a different altitude, higher or lower, than the jet

By April Ryan
“We are dealing with a vicious adversary,” according to Rev. Al Sharpton, the head of the National Action Network speaking of President Donald Trump and his hate diatribe Thursday morning. President Trump blamed DEI, the Obama and Biden administrations along with former Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg for the deadly midair crash over the Potomac last night. 67 people died after an accident between an American Airline Plane and an Army Helicopter. When asked why President Trump thought diversity had something to do with the crash, he said,” I have common sense and most people don’t.” Reverend Al, who is investigating the impact of the Trump anti-DEI efforts in retail believes Trump is “obsessed with race” and he is a “raw, insensitive, uncaring man.”
Former Secretary Buttigieg immediately went to social media making a statement saying, Trump should be leading, not lying.” Buttigieg also fact-checked Trump saying we grew Air Traffic Control and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.” Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) / X During Trump’s rant on DEI at the White House briefing room podium, he asserted, “the FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing. And then it says, the FAA says, people with severe disabilities, the most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and they want them in, and they want them. They can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so.” Trump went on to say the prior administrations felt those departments were “too white.”
According to reports FAA staffing has been an issue since Inauguration Day January 20, 2025. Also, Elon Musk, the head of the White House Office of Government Efficiency is reported to have asked the head of the FAA to resign. Musk FAA Ax Former Black Obama Administration Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx exclusively told this reporter after the Trump statements,” I would caution against any definitive conclusions until that work [investigation] is done by trained, experienced professionals.”
Foxx, who also worked as a transportation consultant in the Biden administration admonished the Trump address saying, “There is no sugar-coating the tragic midair collision that occurred last night. In my experience, safety has always been the number one focus of the Federal Aviation Administration.” Foxx says there is a safety mission to be completed after this tragedy. “There is a well-practiced root cause process that has been taken in the past. It should be used now with competent professionals. A comprehensive, fact-based investigation will answer the many questions we all have. It would also help guard against future accidents of this type,” according to the transportation expert.
Before the completed investigation officially began, President Trump laid the blame for the accident on the Army helicopter. He felt it should have been flying at a different altitude, higher or lower, than the jet. When it comes to the president’s corrosive comments, reaction has been swift from the civil rights community. In a statement from the President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Derrick Johnson, “The NAACP is disgusted by this display of unpresidential, divisive behavior.” Johnson told this reporter in a text message, “The President has made his decision to put politics over people abundantly clear as he uses the highest office in the land to sow hatred rooted in falsehoods instead of providing us with the leadership we need and deserve.”
As Trump worked to distract with his words on DEI, the questions still abound as to what caused the deadly plane crash. Former Sec. Foxx, immediately following the fatal crash last night said. “My worst fear is that something happened with the avionics. I hope and expect that this is not the case. But most aircraft these days run in a form of GPS. Could a warning system have failed? But then, how can two systems fail? That leads to some even more grave concerns about interference with the systems. There are many other potential causes.”
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