Book Talk: Structural Racism

next week at Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley belonging.berkeley.edu/SRbooktalk

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach:

Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
… America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

Assistant Professor - Global Black Geographies - Department of Geography University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

My department is hiring! We seek to hire an Assistant Professor in Global Black Geographies whose work engages "with the spatial dimensions of life in African and/or Black diasporic communities in the Global South". Job ad with more details: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05026

amazed it has been 20 years

Fascism erases and rewrites history. It debases facts. The fascist narrative supplants all else. Restricting the acquisition and exchange of information allows the regime to replace evidence with myths and propaganda, while silencing and punishing all contradiction.

so goes my writing session this am // helpful large animals

I said it would get worse very quickly. By tomorrow we will have completed the most dangerous & frightening 24 hours thus far of Trump 2.0. Just to name a few:
1. Defiance of a court order by sending migrants to Sudan without due process (despite clear DP decision SCOTUS) & Dist. CT. order.

Bunker Rule No. 1: The people in control of the bunker are lying about what’s outside the bunker.

This is literally how the Holocaust started, and honestly I'm tired of saying so

Is 'Walk Score' Really Just a 'White Score'? — Streetsblog USA A new paper argues that the popular real estate tools is driving investment to predominantly white urban neighborhoods, without expanding walkability for anyone else.

Appreciate insightful coverage @keawilson.bsky.social @usa.streetsblog.org on our collaboration (@annalivia.bsky.social & Frechette) on walkability & inherent problems of Walk Score as tied to inequitable, racialized investment flows fueling destination proximity usa.streetsblog.org/2025/04/07/i...

delightfully large collaborator

“I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.”
― Toni Morrison

Columbia Concedes to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will.

The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.

Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability algorithm in the context of racial capitalism Walkability functions as an assumed good in many urbanist circles, and numerous metrics claim to quantify it. We examine one widely used metric, Walk Score, to consider how it extends racialized pr...

Excellent critique of walkability that challenges the neutrality of walkability metrics and contextualizes this neutrality within racial capitalism, arguing that Walk Score reflects and could contribute to inequitable investment flows and property (de)valuation. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thank you ! @julianagyeman.bsky.social

Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability algorithm in the context of racial capitalism Walkability functions as an assumed good in many urbanist circles, and numerous metrics claim to quantify it. We examine one widely used metric, Walk Score, to consider how it extends racialized pr...

new piece with Kate Lowe and Sarah Frechette on walk score as an algorithm of whiteness @kateontransport.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So does Ozzy ❤️❤️

Jin is also excited 🤣

It’s out!! Always so happy to work and write with you my friend! (and call out whiteness everywhere it’s showing up) @kateontransport.bsky.social

this interview makes me stupidly happy in such dark times. I cannot wait to read this

In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent - Marwan Makhoul

Painfully relevant.

"Every bombed village is my hometown" - James Baldwin And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home is my sister. Every one of these people are ours, Just like we are theirs. We belong to them and they belong to us.

What is happening to the people of Gaza can happen to any of us.

A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following extraordinary statement was published today in the New York Review of Books and is reposted here with their permission.  The statement’s signatories incl…

academeblog.org/2025/03/20/a.... Extremely important statement by Constitutional law scholars. Please share if you can.

Running Orders BY LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic "This is David." And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. Your house is next. They think of it as some kind of war-time courtesy. It doesn't matter that there is nowhere to run to. It means nothing that the borders are closed and your papers are worthless and mark you only for a life sentence in this prison by the sea and the alleyways are narrow

and there are more human lives packed one against the other more than any other place on earth Just run. We aren't trying to kill you. It doesn't matter that you can't call us back to tell us the people we claim to want aren't in your house that there's no one here except you and your children who were cheering for Argentina sharing the last loaf of bread for this week counting candles left in case the power goes out. It doesn't matter that you have children. You live in the wrong place and now is your chance to run to nowhere. It doesn't matter that 58 seconds isn't long enough to find your wedding album or your son's favorite blanket or your daughter's almost completed college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn't matter what you had planned. It doesn't matter who you are. Prove you're human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.

As Israel brutally attacks Gaza again, I am reminded of this devastating poem by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

“It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you're human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.”

If you let the executive deport people to a foreign gulag just by pronouncing the word “terrorism,” then expect to be called a “terrorist” soon yourself.

Printable 2x4 labels (& more) in this thread. Full sheets at bit.ly/4kOXREP: load your labels, print, stick 'em up wherever. (Don't be a jerk.)

Will this magically solve things? No.
But it helps like-minded people to take their own actions, by letting them know they're not alone. ❤️👊

JUST A REMINDER ...

... of how close we are today ...

NH’s new ID requirements send some would-be voters home to grab passports, birth certificates The law requires all new voters to show proof of their U.S. citizenship. For some, that meant making multiple trips to and from the polls before finally casting a ballot on Tuesday.

As predicted, women in New Hampshire had a hard time voting yesterday because of the new proof of citizenship law:

“It doesn’t have my married name on it,” she said. Town voting officials then sent her away a second time, to get her marriage certificate.

www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025...

Which place????