{"id":837,"date":"2019-10-18T01:07:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T01:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=837"},"modified":"2019-11-12T19:26:19","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T19:26:19","slug":"blog-post-4-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/critical\/blog-post-4-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post #4: The Connections Between Modern Algorithms and The Social Security Act"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As this was a very early time for civil rights the Long\nCivil Rights Movement is a movement brought up in Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse\u2019s\nbook Discovering the South: One Man’s\nTravels Through a Changing America in the 1930s <\/em><\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> that states that while\nthe civil rights movement was at its peak in the 1960s the LCRM can be\nconsidered a sort of pre curser to that. What the LCRM did was simply layout\nthe foundation for what was considered the height of the civil rights as well\nas modern civil rights movements. During the 1930s there was a push for a\ncultural lift in the United States spear headed by people like Harry Hopkins as\nwell as The New Deal on FDR\u2019s part. However, as discussed in The Living New\nDeal\u2019s Working Together <\/em><\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> the New Deal failed to address the hardships of minorities in\nduring the Depression Era and in some ways even heightened the hardships. Therefore,\nmovements like The Popular Front and the LCRM are mostly credited with the\nadvancement of civil rights during the 1930\u2019s. There simply weren\u2019t many things\nthat the U.S. Government was doing for the advancement of minorities. People\nlike W.E.B De Bu Bois, Jane Adams and Marcus Garvey are essentially the first\nstep of the 1960s civil rights explosion and that of modern times. Some contributions\nsuch as the books and papers that were written or physical organizations like\nthe NAACP are still at the forefront of civil rights. Also, while they may not\nhave lasted as long, things like Jane Adams\u2019 Hull House <\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> were at\nthe time some of the best advancements for class injustice as well as other\ncivil rights issues. With these movements and organizations, the central idea\nwas for basic racial, class, and many other forms of equality. Also, as\ndiscussed in The American Yawp<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n

the central message was to give the people clearly being discriminated against some form of control in their government. The example given in the book states that even though the heavily African American community of agricultural workers still had to pay taxes they would not receive the benefits of the Social Security Act. The reason for this being that \u201c\u2026(white southern lawmakers were) afraid that economic security would allow black southerners to escape the cycle of poverty that kept them tied to the land as cheap, exploitable farm laborers\u2026\u201d <\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. This clearly was wrong and many of the civil rights leaders of the time vouched for some representation as many white southern lawmakers only advocated for discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways this has not changed today with other issues\nthat are at the forefront of politics. The way that many people saw the treatment\nof African Americans in the 1930s specifically regarding the Social Security Act\nis largely the same when regarding biased and unfair algorithms today. Much\nlike the little control the African Americans had over their right to social\nsecurity many today argue that there is too little understanding of what\nhappens inside of an algorithm. This, much like the little representation in\nsocial security, results in zero control over large part of the algorithm\n<\/p>\n\n\n<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n

. Overall while people think that algorithms are something\nthat is unbiased it has been shown that many can give unintentional bias or\neven intentional. It has been exposed that many of the algorithms that can\ndecide very crucial things in people\u2019s lives are unreachable in how they are\nmade. This results in people not actually knowing how or why they were denied\ninsurance, for example <\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. One example that has recently plagued\nmany early detection police algorithms has to do with African American crime\nrate. Obviously African American are not more likely to commit murder. However,\ndue to the statistic of African Americans making up 13% of the population while\nmaking up 50% of all homicides in the United States many algorithms have mistakenly\nunderstood this as \u201cAfrican American are more likely to commit crim.\u201d Clearly\nthis is not the case, this is a biased and bigoted thought but because the\nalgorithm only sees the statistic it has been known to sort of \u201clet go\u201d of\nother races. This clearly is a problem and many situations like this is what has\ncaused many activists to call for access to these crucial algorithms. The lack\nof access and thus lack of control has proven to be a problem time and time\nagain and thus needs to be addressed in the future. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As this was a very early time for civil rights the Long Civil Rights Movement is a movement brought up in Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse\u2019s book Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s that states that while the civil rights movement was at its peak in the 1960s the LCRM … Continue reading “Blog Post #4: The Connections Between Modern Algorithms and The Social Security Act”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critical","tag-fall-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1823,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions\/1823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}