The real value of your personal data
28 Wednesday Feb 2018
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24 Saturday Feb 2018
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in“BLACK PANTHER” IS INSPIRING BLACK BRAZILIANS TO OCCUPY ELITE, WHITE SHOPPING MALLS
“HOW DIFFERENT. EXOTIC,” commented one women as she watched a group of almost 50 people — mostly young and black, many wearing bright fabrics with African designs — stroll through the Shopping Leblon mall. They came this Monday to participate in a rolezinho pretoi, roughly translated to “black stroll,” and watch the film “Black Panther” in Rio de Janeiro’s most exclusive shopping center, a place where black Brazilians are commonly employed, but are rarely seen as customers. Amid suspicious looks and a VIP escort of security guards, I accompanied the group that went to see the film.
Much of the hype around “Black Panther” focuses on black professionals occupying positions in Hollywood that are usually dominated by whites, from heroic lead to producer to director. As tribute to that fact, the organizers of the rolezinho preto, the Black Collective (Coletivo Preto) and the Grupo Emú, chose the whitest and most elitist spaces in one of Rio’s toniest neighborhoods to stage a group viewing of the movie. The event also protested the lack of black professionals in Brazil’s entertainment industry. A survey by the National Cinema Agency, Ancine, revealed that only 7 percent of professionals in the field are black in a nation in which the majority of citizens have African ancestry.
Rolezinhos are not new to Brazil. They began as a way for fans to meet internet celebrities in 2012 and evolved into a form of protest in São Paulo in 2013 and 2014, quickly spreading to other cities. Organizers would start an event on Facebook and call for everyone to meet at a certain mall at a certain time. Young, mostly dark-skinned residents of the city’s poor and working class neighborhoods on the urban periphery would take a sometimes one- or two- hour train or bus ride to shopping centers in the bougiest enclaves and just go for a walkabout. In some cases, thousands showed up, much to the horror of Brazil’s white elite, whose ever-present racial and class-based fears were palpable. Malls, including Shopping Leblon, closed down in anticipation of these protests. Others were broken up with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Across Latin America, the wealthy, hyper-segregated segments societiesflock to shopping malls for respite from the crime, grit, and disorder that they either benefit from or directly perpetuate. These sparkling sanctuaries of consumerism have become quasi-religious shrines to Brazilian racial and class divides. Many Brazilians claim that the society is not racist, but reactions to the rolezinhos, the attempt to impede young, dark-skinned boys and men from enjoying Rio de Janeiro’s beaches in wealthy neighborhoods back in 2015 and other daily offenses are evidence of how that claim rings hollow.
As one unidentified person, interviewed by EFE Brasil in 2014 during the thwarted rolezinho outside of Shopping Leblon, put it:
I think that the rolezinhos reveal how racist the Brazilian society and elite actually are. They reveal a fear that is unjustifiable. They reveal that as long as Brazilian racism is able to ‘keep everyone in their places’ there is no problem. The problem is, since the ‘90s, thanks to the efforts of the black movement, blacks have begun to enter into spaces that they hadn’t previously occupied.
Four years after the peak of rolezinhos, the “Black Panther” gatherings have rekindled this legacy. In São Paulo, a group sold out a movie theater by gathering 275 people for a screening. A quick events search on Facebookwill yield several other events scheduled for this week.
The Marvel film is considered a cultural milestone owing to the fact that its writers, producers, director, and the overwhelming majority of its cast are black. Beyond that, “Black Panther” pushes beyond the stereotypes of both the black hero and Africa that we usually encounter on the movie screen.
The film premiered worldwide on February 15 and has grossed $462.3 million in its first five days. At the rolezinho and online, the film’s profitability and the effusively positive response to it in the black community has provoked debates about whether this is truly progress in the fight for racial equality or merely the adaptation of capitalism to new market demands. Even if the cast and crew are mostly black, the industry is still mostly controlled by whites and they are the ones that stand to profit most from the film’s success.
However, many of those in attendance felt this dynamic does not overwhelm the symbolic conquest of the film. “The great message of this film is that we have to write, we have to produce, we have to unite and do it together,” explained Licínio Januário, one of the organizers of the Leblon rolezinho.
That reaction is one felt both in the United States and Brazil. One video circulating on Facebook shows a black American man’s reaction to seeing the film’s promotional poster on display: “This is how white people feel the whole time,” he says. “If this is what y’all feel like all the time I would love this country, too.”
Ygor Marinho, a 28-year-old resident of Rio de Janeiro, was similarly moved when he watched the film on Monday. “A movie with 90 percent black actors fills me with pride,” Marinho said. “It makes me want to win. It makes me want to fight. It makes me like myself more, like my own skin tone, like my kind of hair, like the shape of my nose, like the shape of my lips, like myself more. Because you start to see people who are like you and you see how they carry themselves — empowered, happy with themselves — and you start to like yourself better. And you see there’s nothing wrong with you — that, really, black is beautiful, black is capable, black is incredible, and blackness needs to be respected.”
Translation: Taylor Barnes and Andrew Fishman
20 Tuesday Feb 2018
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12 Monday Feb 2018
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inResearchers identify a major risk factor for pernicious effects of misinformation
“Fake news” is Donald Trump’s favorite catchphrase. Since the election, it has appeared in some 180 tweets by the President, decrying everything from accusations of sexual assault against him to the Russian collusion investigation to reports that he watches up to eight hours of television a day. Trump may just use “fake news” as a rhetorical device to discredit stories he doesn’t like, but there is evidence that real fake news is a serious problem. As one alarming example, an analysis by the internet media company Buzzfeed revealed that during the final three months of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the 20 most popular false election stories generated around 1.3 million more Facebook engagements—shares, reactions, and comments—than did the 20 most popular legitimate stories. The most popular fake story was “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”
Fake news can distort people’s beliefs even after being debunked. For example, repeated over and over, a story such as the one about the Pope endorsing Trump can create a glow around a political candidate that persists long after the story is exposed as fake. A study recently published in the journal Intelligence suggests that some people may have an especially difficult time rejecting misinformation. Asked to rate a fictitious person on a range of character traits, people who scored low on a test of cognitive ability continued to be influenced by damaging information about the person even after they were explicitly told the information was false. The study is significant because it identifies what may be a major risk factor for vulnerability to fake news.
Ghent University researchers Jonas De keersmaecker and Arne Roets first had over 400 subjects take a personality test. They then randomly assigned each subject to one of two conditions. In the experimental condition, the subjects read a biographical description of a young woman named Nathalie. The bio explained that Nathalie, a nurse at a local hospital, “was arrested for stealing drugs from the hospital; she has been stealing drugs for 2 years and selling them on the street in order to buy designer clothes.” The subjects then rated Nathalie on traits such as trustworthiness and sincerity, after which they took a test of cognitive ability. Finally, the subjects saw a message on their computer screen explicitly stating that the information about Nathalie stealing drugs and getting arrested was not true, and then rated her again on the same traits. The control condition was identical, except that subjects were not given the paragraph with the false information and rated Nathalie only once.
The subjects in the experimental condition initially rated Nathalie much more negatively than did the subjects in the control condition. This was not surprising, considering that they had just learned she was a thief and a drug dealer. The interesting question was whether cognitive ability would predict attitude adjustment—that is, the degree to which the subjects in the experimental condition would rate Nathalie more favorably after being told that this information was false. It did: subjects high in cognitive ability adjusted their ratings more than did those lower in cognitive ability. The subjects with lower cognitive ability had more trouble shaking their negative first impression of Nathalie. This was true even after the researchers statistically controlled for the subjects’ level of open-mindedness (their willingness to change their mind when wrong) and right-wing authoritarianism (their intolerance toward others), as assessed by the personality test. Thus, even if a person was open-minded and tolerant, a low level of cognitive ability put them at risk for being unjustifiably harsh in their second evaluation of Nathalie.
One possible explanation for this finding is based on the theory that a person’s cognitive ability reflects how well they can regulate the contents of working memory—their “mental workspace” for processing information. First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand—or, as in the case of Nathalie, information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive agingindicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills—strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking—that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.
Meanwhile, other research is shedding light on the mechanisms underlying the effects of misinformation. Repeating a false claim increases its believability, giving it an air of what Stephen Colbert famously called “truthiness.” Known as the illusion of truth effect, this phenomenon was first demonstrated in the laboratory by Hasher and her colleagues. On each of three days, subjects listened to plausible-sounding statements and rated each on whether they thought it was true. Half of the statements were in fact true, such as Australia is approximately equal in area to the continental United States, whereas the other half were false, such as Zachary Taylor was the first president to die in office (it was William Henry Harrison). Some of the statements were repeated across days, whereas others were presented only once. The results showed that the average truth rating increased from day to day for the repeated statements, but remained constant for the non-repeated statements, indicating that subjects mistook familiarity for verity.
More recent research reveals that even knowledge of the truth doesn’t necessarily protect against the illusion of truth. In a 2015 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Lisa Fazio and her colleagues asked subjects to rate a set of statements on how interesting they found them. Following Hasher and colleagues’ procedure, some of the statements were true, whereas others were false. The subjects then rated a second set of statements for truthfulness on a six-point scale, from definitely false to definitely true. Some of the statements were repeated from the first set, whereas others were new. Finally, the subjects took a knowledge test that included questions based on the statements. The results revealed that repetition increased the subjects’ perception of the truthfulness of false statements, even for statements they knew to be false. For example, even if a subject correctly answered Pacific Ocean to the question What is the largest ocean on Earth? on the knowledge test, they still tended to give the false statement The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth a higher truth rating if it was repeated. When a claim was made to feel familiar through repetition, subjects neglected to consult their own knowledge base in rating the claim’s truthfulness.
These studies add to scientific understanding of the fake news problem, which is providing a foundation for an evidenced-based approach to addressing the problem. A recommendation that follows from research on the illusion of truth effect is to serve as your own fact checker. If you are convinced that some claim is true, ask yourself why. Is it because you have credible evidence that the claim is true, or is it just because you’ve encountered the claim over and over? Also ask yourself if you know of any evidence that refutes the claim. (You just might be surprised to find that you do.) This type of recommendation could be promoted through public service announcements, which have been shown to be effective for things like getting people to litter less and recycle more. For its part, research on individual differences in susceptibility to fake news, such as the study by De keersmaecker and Roets, can help to identify people who are particularly important to reach through this type of informational campaign.
At a more general level, this research underscores the threat that fake news poses to democratic society. The aim of using fake news as propaganda is to make people think and behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise—for example, hold a view that is contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus. When this nefarious aim is achieved, citizens no longer have the ability to act in their own self-interest. In the logic of democracy, this isn’t just bad for that citizen—it’s bad for society.
11 Sunday Feb 2018
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inThinking about natives in an era of nativism
IN EARLY 1924 the blue-bloods of Virginia found themselves with a problem. To criminalise interracial marriage, the state had drafted a law that classified anyone possessing even “one drop” of non-white blood as “coloured”. Awkwardly, that would include many of the so-called First Families of Virginia, because they traced their descent to a native American woman, Pocahontas, who had been abducted and married by a member of the Jamestown colony three centuries before. This ancestry had been considered far from shameful. It was a mark of American aristocracy, the real-life Pocahontas having been reinvented (she probably did not save the life of a colonist called John Smith) as an “American princess”. To fix matters, a clause known as the “Pocahontas exception” was added to the racist law, to exempt anyone with no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.
This episode, documented in a new exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, on Indian myths and reality, helps explain a cultural puzzle. It has become clear that the pre-Columbian Americas were much more densely populated, by more sophisticated civilisations, than was previously thought. By one estimate North America, the more sparsely populated continent, had 18m people when Columbus sailed, more than England and France combined. Yet in the popular imagination it remains a vast wilderness, peopled by a few buffalo-hunters. The reason for this gigantic misunderstanding, suggest the Smithsonian’s curators, goes beyond bad schooling.
It is fuelled by the ways Americans use real and mythical Indians, such as Pocahontas, to express their own ideas of citizenship and national identity. At a time when those things are contested by white nativists as well as natives, “Americans”, as the exhibition is called, lives up to its name: it is about all Americans.
From their first flush of revolutionary zeal, Americans used images of Indians to represent themselves. The exhibition’s oldest example is a sketch by Paul Revere from 1766. This was in part a sardonic comment on British cartoonists doing likewise. It also represented the revolutionaries’ self-identification as a new race of men, free of European tyranny. An association between Indians and liberty has been prominent in official iconography, including medals, stamps and friezes, ever since. Some officials were also keen to bring Enlightenment principles to their dealings with actual Indians. To dispossess them, argued Henry Knox, George Washington’s secretary of war, would be a “stain on the character of the nation.” But few agreed.
In 1830 the government began removing Indians east of the Mississippi onto a shrinking territory in what is now Oklahoma. Farther north, on the plains of Minnesota and the Dakotas, white settlers encroached on the hunting grounds of some of the last free tribes, the Sioux, leading to violence that accelerated their demise. By the end of the century, America’s Indians had been reduced to a sickly population of 250,000, huddled on patches of marginal land. Having dispensed with the real Indians, America then began losing its heart to imaginary ones.
Many North American Indians were settled cultivators. The nomadism of the plains was atypical and shaped by Europeans. The Sioux, formerly farmers, had shifted to hunting the herds of bison that grew in a land depopulated by imported diseases, using horses they got from the Spanish and guns from the French. Yet by the time of their futile last stand, they had come to represent all native Americans in the popular imagination. This was in some ways pernicious, a means to associate all Indians with violent resistance, justifying their eradication. Even so, Americans fell in love with the myth of the warrior-like Sioux.
With their eagle feathers and fiery expressions, Plains Indians became synonymous with the rugged individualism Americans liked to see in themselves. That is evident in the many sports teams with Indian-related names—the Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Chiefs and so on. It is also apparent in the endless consumer and military goods, from butter to missiles, marketed with images of Indians—to suggest trustworthiness; durability; environmental soundness; efficacy at killing people. Any residual negative connotations are being scrubbed from that list: the racist caricature of Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland team’s emblem, is being phased out. The remaining Indian-related brand values share a sense of authenticity. “Today, nothing is quite as American as the American Indian,” writes one of the Smithsonian’s curators, Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche scholar with a dry wit.
There are lessons here for understanding America’s latest spasm over who is, and who isn’t, a legitimate American (a word used into the 19th century in England to refer exclusively to Indians). One is that the racist enormities on which America was founded, slavery and the dispossession of Indians, are so recent and unresolved—as evidenced by protests on tribal land and at Confederate monuments—that fights over national identity are inevitable. Another is that the nativist position espoused by many on the right is illogical. A Minnesotan nativist seeks, in effect, to bar Aztec migrants (lately called Mexicans) from a state his grandparents took from people who had had it for millennia.
Siouxing for peace
A third, more hopeful, lesson lies in the way Americans have made national champions of their sometime victims, imbuing them with all-American virtues. That is not merely chutzpah. It stands for America’s relentless ability to synthesise its disparate parts in an uplifting national story. Even in the current quarrelsome time, that contrary movement is evident—including among real-life native Americans, who are, though still deprived, becoming less impoverished and more confident. The admiration of popular culture has played a part in that. “It’s the country saying to Indians, imaginary and real, past and present,” suggests Mr Smith, “without you there is no us.”
03 Saturday Feb 2018
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