Writings about libraries, technology, and the Web by Matthew Reidsma.

Since the revelation of Governor Ralph Northam’s offensive yearbook photos a few weeks ago, many have taken time to dig into their own University’s historical yearbooks to see if they also containe…

IBM included Brazilian and South African racial terms in a US intern application.

Tech giants under fire? Hold my beer, says Big Blue as it spins up race slur recruitment websites

Appropriating the slang of other cultures can be problematic if you're doing so to up your street cred or make money off it.

Last week brought an extraordinary demonstration of the dangers of operating a surveillance state — especially a shabby one, as China's apparently is. An unsecured database exposed millions of records of Chinese Muslims being tracked via facial recognition — an ugly trifecta of prejudice, bureaucracy, and incompetence.

Many dress codes unfairly target students in certain populations, doing more harm than good. This guide will help you review and revise your current policy.

He wanted to know how institutional racism has made an impact on my life. I’m glad he asked, because I was ready to answer.

Laura B. McGrath looks at the data to find out why the publishing industry is still so white....

After more than 15 years of espousing racist views in Congress, the representative from Iowa is finally seeing consequences.

By Nabil Hassein Researchers have documented the frequent inability of facial recognition software to detect Black people’s faces due to programmers’ use of unrepresentative data to train mac…

Even feminists helped build the Klan.

White supremacy and patriarchy have acted upon and through the white female body, which has implications for library and information science (LIS), a white- and female-dominated field. Insisting that we investigate librarianship through a lens that does not consider gender alone, this paper draws upon whiteness, critical race, and feminist theories to explore the formation and persistence of a particular mode of whiteness in LIS. Calling on the Lady Bountiful archetype, this paper interrogates the ways in which patriarchy, white supremacy, and notions of ideal femininity have worked together to craft a subject fit to perform the work of colonialism in its variegated and feminized forms. By exploring how the white woman was deemed an appropriate agent for the racial, missionary, and “civilizing” projects of early libraries, one can better locate her legacy in contemporary pedagogies, practices, and representations. This paper concludes with suggestions for addressing this undertheorized yet prevalent archetype in both LIS scholarship and teaching.

About the incident where an LIS student of color got hassled and then cop-called by a student hourly at the law library.

CW verbal abuse, threats.

The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product—an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their “risk” levels for parents—is not racist. It is not biased.