Links Roundup 2.7.13

Advocates hope that an immigration reform bill will begin to replace punitive lock up with alternative, community-based measures to keep track of non-citizens in deportation proceedings. Last week, President Obama nodded in that direction. The White House’s guiding principles for immigration reform note that the president’s proposal “allows DHS to better focus its detention resources on public safety and national security threats by expanding alternatives to detention and reducing overall detention costs.”

In 2012, the federal government spent over $2 billion on detention operations, a nearly 150 percent increase from just seven years ago. And the two leading private detention companies, Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, together netted about $425 million in revenues from their ICE contracts. The industry spends millions lobbying Congress.

• Racism Doesn’t Exist In Tech Because White Tech Blog Millionaire Jason Calacanis Has Never Seen It (Gawker)

Eventually, Calacanis took it to his blog, in a post entitled “Doing the Right Things.” It’s a shockingly un-self-aware document, even by the low standards of tech writing; it opens with the lines “I’m a white guy so I’m not allowed to talk about race. At least that’s what they tell me,” and goes downhill from there.

He drops the factoid “Ninety percent of the people in Silicon Valley were not born there” as a rebuttal to the straw-man charge “Silicon Valley is in some way a closed, secret society.” (Very few Bonesmen were born inside the Skull and Bones clubhouse at Yale, either.)

He jokingly apologizes to his father for the attenuation of identifiable white-ethnic identity in his mixed-race kids.

He posits that maybe those of us in the “1st world” shouldn’t be allowed to talk about “inequality,” because he “can’t talk about race because I’m white”—to show how illogical and unfair this prohibition against white people discussing race is. (He never names or identifies the “they” who have told him that as a white person he is not allowed to discuss race.)

He describes his former employee Rafat Ali: “much darker skin than mine (brown, but not black for those obsessed with the exact tone — really?)” It is unclear whether or not this is a joke, or if he actually thinks that Bouie or his other critics are “obsessed with the exact tone” of anyone’s skin.

• new study examining racial bias in the wording of online ads suggests that Google’s advertising algorithms may be unfairly associating some individuals with wrongdoing they didn’t commit.

  After learning that a Google search for her own name surfaced an ad for a background check service hinting that she’d been arrested, Harvard University professor Latanya Sweeney set out to investigate whether race shaped online ad results. She searched over 2,000 “racially associated names” to determine if names “previously identified by others as being assigned at birth to more black or white babies” turned up ad results that indicated a criminal record. Specifically, she focused on ads purchased by companies that provide background checks used by employers.

  Sweeney concluded that so-called black-identifying names were significantly more likely to be accompanied by text suggesting that person had an arrest record, regardless of whether a criminal record existed or not.

  • On Guns, Conservatives rewrite, Disrespect African-American History (The Miami Herald)

  Rush Limbaugh thinks John Lewis should have been armed.

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