"As Black and Latinx activists, we are outraged—but not surprised—by rich and powerful people supporting illegal police surveillance. "
I'm kind of surprised that these neighborhoods don't want cameras TO be monitored / available to police - they are the center of relative high levels of criminal activity.
During these peaceful protests I think something like 30 business were looted or destroyed in the union square area alone?
In other countries all this actually results in INCREASED CCTV etc use. Just interesting that such use is becoming illegal in SF.
Note the word "activists" in the quote. Activists are not always representative of the communities they come from. Survey data shows that most blacks and Latinos in the US want more policing in their communities. Idk how they feel specifically about the camera question
I'm pretty sure the blacks and Latinos who had their small businesses looted and/or vandalized and/or burned would be all for nice high resolution cameras with enough lumens to identify people (or at least get a really, really good description).
And no, not all small businesses have insurance that covers damage from a riot and/or swarm lootfest with no raised rates or titanic deductible. And even if they did, they might not get covered next year (this has happened to some vineyards in Napa after the recent major fires).
Ethnic “activists,” especially in the upper echelons, are often socialized into white-dominated institutions such as universities, and largely reflect the views of the highly educated whites in their circle.
This discrepancy became starkly apparent to me during the recent spate of hate crimes against Asians. The “activists” on CNN were blaming it on Trump and “white supremacy.” I strongly suspected my Bangladeshi immigrant aunts and uncles would instead have blamed gang bangers, aggressive homeless people, etc. I actually had to quietly reach out to my “raised in Queens” card carrying Chinese friend for a guy check to confirm that, yes, the violence was caused by gang members and homeless people, not “white supremacy.”
Turns out that not only did Asians in NYC end up supporting Yang and Adams, who took a tougher stance on crime, a shocking number voted for Sliwa even after Adams won the Democratic nomination. Matt Yglesias accurately summarized the issue in an article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang
> However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent. You can listen to these groups if you want to. But if your purpose in listening to them is to understand how certain communities are thinking about specific issues, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
...just 3% of Hispanics and Latinos would describe their group using the term “Latinx.”
It's a great neologism; mispronounced (identically) in both Spanish and English! I said this word twice before I was strongly encouraged not to do so by those it theoretically describes.
“Latine” suffers from the same problem, which is that it’s mainly driven by the concerns and politics of highly educated white people, along with the small fraction of minorities who rely on highly educated white people for jobs, platforms, etc. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics speak a gendered language, think that’s fine, and don’t see a problem that needs solving.
I’m not opposed to “identity politics”—but I think as it’s practiced in America it’s often parasitic. Activists—often in league with white elites—trade on the group’s political capital to advance views that are unrelated to or may be directly opposed to the interests of the group. It’s morally wrong to use a minority group’s political capital for ends that aren’t aligned with what the group wants.
For example, in the context of this article: Hispanics are more supportive of increased policing than whites: https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/562738-pol.... Over the years surveys have shown this repeatedly: the majority supported stop and frisk in NYC when it existed; they were the least supportive of ending mandatory minimums, etc. Couching anti-police activism in terms of what “Latinx” or “brown” people want is just putting ethnic window dressing on white progressivism.
>The University of Wisconsin uses it this way in the official name for its Department of Latin@ and Chican@ Studies. Karma Chavez, a professor there, said that the push toward gender neutrality in Spanish has been going on for decades.
>OK, but how would you actually say it aloud?
>"Well, this is where things get complicated," Chavez said. "Most people end up just saying Chicano and Chicana."
> >The University of Wisconsin uses it this way in the official name for its Department of Latin@ and Chican@ Studies. Karma Chavez, a professor there, said that the push toward gender neutrality in Spanish has been going on for decades.
I love it when NPR segues to an ethnic studies professor to present the “POC view.” Professor Chavez attained tenure by winning the favor of the University of Wisconsin faculty—which, outside the engineering department, has got to be one of the whitest group of people in the country apart from NPR management.
Fox’s viewership is older and whiter than NPR’s. But Fox’s popularity means that even Black Democrats are much more likely to watch Fox than to listen to NPR (or read the NYT): https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/03/11/black-and-.... About 1/3 of Black democrats get political news from Fox. Just 10% get political news from NPR.
> One way that black Democrats break out of the media bubble is that roughly a third (36%) get political news from Fox News, which, according to the Center’s survey data, has an audience that leans to the right politically. That contrasts sharply with the 17% of white Democrats who get political news from Fox.
> In using sources for political news, black Democrats are also more inclined to turn to ABC News (53%) and CBS News (46%) than white Democrats (35% and 34%, respectively). White Democrats, however, are much more inclined to get political news from The New York Times (39%) than their black counterparts (12%). The same pattern holds for NPR (43% vs. 10%) and The Washington Post (32% vs. 13%).
My point would be that by it's nature, regardless of content, NPR appeals to a different set of listeners than Fox News does. The useful comparison would be between NPR and talk radio, which seems easy: there's a lot of conservative talk radio.
I don’t understand what you mean by saying that NPR appeals to different group of listeners “regardless of content”, especially as you later observe existence of conservative talk radio. NPR and conservative talk radio appeal to different groups of listeners, but what else make it so, other than the content? Similarly, what makes Fox News appeal to non-whites more than NPR, other than the content?
Maybe! If you think conservative talk radio has more diverse appeal than Fox News, that's an argument. I'm just bristling at comparing NPR to cable news of any sort.
There is an articulable enough reason that requires history to know why people would gravitate to that term, now, and why it is not the end all be all of consensus.
Basically, somewhat unlike White, Asian and Black, there are no specific phenotypes or looks that encompass people from Latin America. And Latin America doesn't encompass all parts all of the other Americas or the Caribbean, to all people depending on who you ask. So since
A) White, Asian and Black people can be from Latin America, plus
B) People can be from other parts of the Americas that are not always considered part of Latin America
C) The United States lacks a shorthand to address that population who lacks an adequate form of representation within the United States
then D) some people that want to signal that willingness to acknowledge these realities as Latinx.
But yes, it can be ignorable as it doesn't reflect the wishes of people with heritage from Central and South America and some parts of the Caribbean, but understand that perspective too is because many people from any distinct country in Latin America don't come from a diverse place to begin with as its mostly just their countrypeople with its own unique phenotypes (or not giving representation or to other people in a caste system), whereas in the US there already is a history of grouping people by race for better or for worse for any reason, and the idea falls apart fastest when it comes to Hispanic or Latin America groupings.
White, Asian and Black terms have the same problems when you dive deep enough into it, but the history of migration to the US by those groups makes it easier to ignore that for those groups. For example, if 25%+ of our Asian population had stopped in Peru for a few hundred years before coming to the US, then yeah we actually might be saying something like Axian by now, and there are many people who do wish for more nuanced representation.
> There is an articulable enough reason that requires history to know why people would gravitate to that term, now, and why it is not the end all be all of consensus.
Are people really "gravitating" to it, though? All we hear about as of late is the Latinx folks who refuse to endorse it. It seems to be mostly the product of a vocal minority, pushing for a sort of cultural appropriation of actual 'Latinx' identities.
> whereas in the US there already is a history of grouping people by race for better or for worse,
Come on, are we seriously arguing that Latin America, of all places, does not have a centuries-long problematic history of grouping people by race? Where do you think all those funny words like "quadroon" and "octoroon" were imported from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta Latin America is the best existing case study for the reality and long-run societal consequences of structural and institutional racism, far more so than the U.S. !
> Come on, are we seriously arguing that Latin America, of all places, does not have a centuries-long problematic history of grouping people by race?
Nobody is arguing that, its more about non-"latinx" people in the US not being able to tell and not know and picking a term for people, alongside some of this generation's US residents that have latin american heritage that aren't represented adequately also picking the term, specifically to not perpetuate a caste system.
I'm saying that the folly of the term is that it masquarades as representation of central and south america when its just for some US residents that want amorphous representation.
It doesn't really factor in what the other US residents with the same heritage think, and it doesn't factor in the history of the places they came from. Its not a factor at all.
The correct name is latinos (or latinoamericanos), not latinx. Easier to remember, easier to write, more precise (you can talk about latinos or latinas, with latinx the difference is lost) and everybody was happy with it.
Latinx is clearly derogatory. Is like choosing to call 'japos' to japanese in 2022. Or like choosing to use 'blacky' to refer to blacks in 2022. Is ideological and insulting and speaks volumes of the people using it.
While your first observation is good your conclusion is jumping the gun as people arent using it in a derogatory way.
Its more like “African American” which is just as contrived of a term made around 40 years ago simply as an attempt to make amorphous representation for an unrelated group of people that have been in the United States for a long time, in the absence of another distinguishing term specifically for slave descendants that have no relation to Africa or any other country. A couple influencers chose that term and everyone can tell it does not make sense as a grouping mechanism for other people or all black people in the US or anywhere.
Latinx is an… attempt… at similar amorphous representation as US English is becoming ungendered while simultaneously trying to use shorthand for a greater population than just latinos.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but if I owned a business that provided for my employees and my family in the area where these disturbances* were occurring and had cameras, you bet I’d be trying to get access to those feeds to the police that I pay to protect the law-abiding citizens of the area.
Same story if I had cameras covering the Jan 6th, 2021 events.
* - I’m trying to use as neutral language as possible.
> I’m trying to use as neutral language as possible
There's a framing problem here, on both sides. Notice how the EFF article starts off talking about how the recently enacted ordinance requires the police to get pre-approval permission to use facial recognition. But all that actually happened was the policed looked at live CCD footage from cameras not on the pre-approved list. The article is framing the debate by making the rules seem reasonable and the police seem sinister.
At the same time, presumably the reason you felt the need to qualify "disturbance" is because you recognize that on the other side of the debate are people who try to frame these protests in a negative light, with an insinuation (if not explicit assertion) that they inevitably descend into looting and violence.
Neither narrative is realistic, though in San Francisco the former group absolutely controls the narrative, and likes to play off the counter-framing about inevitable violence. In any event, there's no real debate here: just FUD on both sides.
When several weeks ago Mayor Breed said that the 2019 ordinance needed reforming, one of the drafters wrote an op-ed that said there's no need for it; that it doesn't restrict the police in any meaningfully way, and Breed's claim were groundless. That op-ed likewise tossed around the specter of facial recognition. But not once did they address the most obvious issue, which is that the police are severely limited in their ability to perform real-time surveillance of spontaneous and fluid situations, such as peaceful protests, riots, etc. The 2019 and earlier ordinances basically presume a context of continuous, 24 hour surveillance, access thereto, or after-the-fact evidence gathering. For example, requests to put up cameras on corners with high rates of crime or to deploy license plate scanners on patrol cars.
Activists on the left have lost all credibility, trailing right behind the right. Even the EFF has gone too far. The debate has become unhinged. It's become so adversarial that nobody even tries address the legitimate concerns of the other side, and facts simply take a back seat. There aren't any adults in the room. Perhaps that's because there isn't a room anymore--the entire conversation, even among the elected and professional classes (scholars, journalists, etc), has shifted over to social media, where success simply equates to spreading your memes (i.e. narratives, baseline assumptions, [poor] statistics, etc).
> The ordinance basically presumes a context of continuous, 24 hour surveillance or access thereto.
I definitely agree with everything that you wrote but real-time continuous facial recognition is going to be here sooner rather than later. In the context of reforming this ordinance, it makes sense to just assume it's available. To me anyway.
Don't know what you are talking about. Real-time continuous facial recognition at the >98% level is used for about 5.000 crowds already, and they are just ramping up their infrastructures to detect 100.000 simultaneously. A football stadium. Only budgets are the problem, not tech.
Esp. with US government "services", but also Europe and Asia.
The comment was in the context of a San Francisco City Ordnance, so the question is, does the City of San Francisco use Real-time continuous facial recognition? Today the answer is no, but that's likely to change; therefore, any forward-looking ordnance should take it as a given.
The problem is "live monitoring". The lawsuit is not against businesses providing CCTV footage to the police for investigation. It's also not against police monitoring live CCTV *if* they gets pre-approved.
The police simply has to get pre-approved before they can monitor live cameras but they did so without pre-approval.
I definitely agree with the notion that property/physical business owners would want good surveillance. I don't see any good coming from LEOs having unregulated access to a facial recognition network that is funded by taxpayers and run by a private nonprofit with special interests.
Maybe I'm tripping and quasi-government surveillance entities funded by crypto-millionaires is okay as long as we can stop the looting.
35 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadI'm kind of surprised that these neighborhoods don't want cameras TO be monitored / available to police - they are the center of relative high levels of criminal activity.
During these peaceful protests I think something like 30 business were looted or destroyed in the union square area alone?
In other countries all this actually results in INCREASED CCTV etc use. Just interesting that such use is becoming illegal in SF.
And no, not all small businesses have insurance that covers damage from a riot and/or swarm lootfest with no raised rates or titanic deductible. And even if they did, they might not get covered next year (this has happened to some vineyards in Napa after the recent major fires).
Note the tell—just 3% of Hispanics and Latinos would describe their group using the term “Latinx.” https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in.... Many actively dislike being called that: https://twitter.com/RubenGallego/status/1467920180135276554. It’s a term popularized by highly educated white people and used by minorities whose peers are mainly highly educated white people.
This discrepancy became starkly apparent to me during the recent spate of hate crimes against Asians. The “activists” on CNN were blaming it on Trump and “white supremacy.” I strongly suspected my Bangladeshi immigrant aunts and uncles would instead have blamed gang bangers, aggressive homeless people, etc. I actually had to quietly reach out to my “raised in Queens” card carrying Chinese friend for a guy check to confirm that, yes, the violence was caused by gang members and homeless people, not “white supremacy.”
Turns out that not only did Asians in NYC end up supporting Yang and Adams, who took a tougher stance on crime, a shocking number voted for Sliwa even after Adams won the Democratic nomination. Matt Yglesias accurately summarized the issue in an article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang
> However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent. You can listen to these groups if you want to. But if your purpose in listening to them is to understand how certain communities are thinking about specific issues, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
It's a great neologism; mispronounced (identically) in both Spanish and English! I said this word twice before I was strongly encouraged not to do so by those it theoretically describes.
I’m not opposed to “identity politics”—but I think as it’s practiced in America it’s often parasitic. Activists—often in league with white elites—trade on the group’s political capital to advance views that are unrelated to or may be directly opposed to the interests of the group. It’s morally wrong to use a minority group’s political capital for ends that aren’t aligned with what the group wants.
For example, in the context of this article: Hispanics are more supportive of increased policing than whites: https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/562738-pol.... Over the years surveys have shown this repeatedly: the majority supported stop and frisk in NYC when it existed; they were the least supportive of ending mandatory minimums, etc. Couching anti-police activism in terms of what “Latinx” or “brown” people want is just putting ethnic window dressing on white progressivism.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/07/168818064...
>The University of Wisconsin uses it this way in the official name for its Department of Latin@ and Chican@ Studies. Karma Chavez, a professor there, said that the push toward gender neutrality in Spanish has been going on for decades.
>OK, but how would you actually say it aloud?
>"Well, this is where things get complicated," Chavez said. "Most people end up just saying Chicano and Chicana."
I love it when NPR segues to an ethnic studies professor to present the “POC view.” Professor Chavez attained tenure by winning the favor of the University of Wisconsin faculty—which, outside the engineering department, has got to be one of the whitest group of people in the country apart from NPR management.
Yeah, Fox News viewers are more racially diverse than NPR audience.
> One way that black Democrats break out of the media bubble is that roughly a third (36%) get political news from Fox News, which, according to the Center’s survey data, has an audience that leans to the right politically. That contrasts sharply with the 17% of white Democrats who get political news from Fox.
> In using sources for political news, black Democrats are also more inclined to turn to ABC News (53%) and CBS News (46%) than white Democrats (35% and 34%, respectively). White Democrats, however, are much more inclined to get political news from The New York Times (39%) than their black counterparts (12%). The same pattern holds for NPR (43% vs. 10%) and The Washington Post (32% vs. 13%).
There is an articulable enough reason that requires history to know why people would gravitate to that term, now, and why it is not the end all be all of consensus.
Basically, somewhat unlike White, Asian and Black, there are no specific phenotypes or looks that encompass people from Latin America. And Latin America doesn't encompass all parts all of the other Americas or the Caribbean, to all people depending on who you ask. So since
A) White, Asian and Black people can be from Latin America, plus
B) People can be from other parts of the Americas that are not always considered part of Latin America
C) The United States lacks a shorthand to address that population who lacks an adequate form of representation within the United States
then D) some people that want to signal that willingness to acknowledge these realities as Latinx.
But yes, it can be ignorable as it doesn't reflect the wishes of people with heritage from Central and South America and some parts of the Caribbean, but understand that perspective too is because many people from any distinct country in Latin America don't come from a diverse place to begin with as its mostly just their countrypeople with its own unique phenotypes (or not giving representation or to other people in a caste system), whereas in the US there already is a history of grouping people by race for better or for worse for any reason, and the idea falls apart fastest when it comes to Hispanic or Latin America groupings.
White, Asian and Black terms have the same problems when you dive deep enough into it, but the history of migration to the US by those groups makes it easier to ignore that for those groups. For example, if 25%+ of our Asian population had stopped in Peru for a few hundred years before coming to the US, then yeah we actually might be saying something like Axian by now, and there are many people who do wish for more nuanced representation.
Are people really "gravitating" to it, though? All we hear about as of late is the Latinx folks who refuse to endorse it. It seems to be mostly the product of a vocal minority, pushing for a sort of cultural appropriation of actual 'Latinx' identities.
> whereas in the US there already is a history of grouping people by race for better or for worse,
Come on, are we seriously arguing that Latin America, of all places, does not have a centuries-long problematic history of grouping people by race? Where do you think all those funny words like "quadroon" and "octoroon" were imported from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta Latin America is the best existing case study for the reality and long-run societal consequences of structural and institutional racism, far more so than the U.S. !
Nobody is arguing that, its more about non-"latinx" people in the US not being able to tell and not know and picking a term for people, alongside some of this generation's US residents that have latin american heritage that aren't represented adequately also picking the term, specifically to not perpetuate a caste system.
I'm saying that the folly of the term is that it masquarades as representation of central and south america when its just for some US residents that want amorphous representation.
It doesn't really factor in what the other US residents with the same heritage think, and it doesn't factor in the history of the places they came from. Its not a factor at all.
Latinx is clearly derogatory. Is like choosing to call 'japos' to japanese in 2022. Or like choosing to use 'blacky' to refer to blacks in 2022. Is ideological and insulting and speaks volumes of the people using it.
Its more like “African American” which is just as contrived of a term made around 40 years ago simply as an attempt to make amorphous representation for an unrelated group of people that have been in the United States for a long time, in the absence of another distinguishing term specifically for slave descendants that have no relation to Africa or any other country. A couple influencers chose that term and everyone can tell it does not make sense as a grouping mechanism for other people or all black people in the US or anywhere.
Latinx is an… attempt… at similar amorphous representation as US English is becoming ungendered while simultaneously trying to use shorthand for a greater population than just latinos.
Same story if I had cameras covering the Jan 6th, 2021 events.
* - I’m trying to use as neutral language as possible.
There's a framing problem here, on both sides. Notice how the EFF article starts off talking about how the recently enacted ordinance requires the police to get pre-approval permission to use facial recognition. But all that actually happened was the policed looked at live CCD footage from cameras not on the pre-approved list. The article is framing the debate by making the rules seem reasonable and the police seem sinister.
At the same time, presumably the reason you felt the need to qualify "disturbance" is because you recognize that on the other side of the debate are people who try to frame these protests in a negative light, with an insinuation (if not explicit assertion) that they inevitably descend into looting and violence.
Neither narrative is realistic, though in San Francisco the former group absolutely controls the narrative, and likes to play off the counter-framing about inevitable violence. In any event, there's no real debate here: just FUD on both sides.
When several weeks ago Mayor Breed said that the 2019 ordinance needed reforming, one of the drafters wrote an op-ed that said there's no need for it; that it doesn't restrict the police in any meaningfully way, and Breed's claim were groundless. That op-ed likewise tossed around the specter of facial recognition. But not once did they address the most obvious issue, which is that the police are severely limited in their ability to perform real-time surveillance of spontaneous and fluid situations, such as peaceful protests, riots, etc. The 2019 and earlier ordinances basically presume a context of continuous, 24 hour surveillance, access thereto, or after-the-fact evidence gathering. For example, requests to put up cameras on corners with high rates of crime or to deploy license plate scanners on patrol cars.
Activists on the left have lost all credibility, trailing right behind the right. Even the EFF has gone too far. The debate has become unhinged. It's become so adversarial that nobody even tries address the legitimate concerns of the other side, and facts simply take a back seat. There aren't any adults in the room. Perhaps that's because there isn't a room anymore--the entire conversation, even among the elected and professional classes (scholars, journalists, etc), has shifted over to social media, where success simply equates to spreading your memes (i.e. narratives, baseline assumptions, [poor] statistics, etc).
I definitely agree with everything that you wrote but real-time continuous facial recognition is going to be here sooner rather than later. In the context of reforming this ordinance, it makes sense to just assume it's available. To me anyway.
Esp. with US government "services", but also Europe and Asia.
The police simply has to get pre-approved before they can monitor live cameras but they did so without pre-approval.
Maybe I'm tripping and quasi-government surveillance entities funded by crypto-millionaires is okay as long as we can stop the looting.