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In the ted talk “Raising a Black Child in America” it talks about the difference between what it is like to raise a white child vs raising a black child. The speaker talks about how he raises his own son and the talks he has to have with him in order to keep him safe in our society. To me it is terrible that black people still have to protect themselves in our society. Have we not grown far enough to be past this? Most people would tell you yes, but the truth is no. Many black people have to teach their kids things like, not wearing a hood at night or keeping your hands where everyone can see them. I can not believe that people still have to protect themselves like this in our society and that people are still racist enough that black people still feel the need to teach their kids how to act infront of whites people.

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In this analysis of the book "Huckleberry Finn" the author talks about how life in that time was full of cruelty and awful behavior towards people of color. Morrison describes the scenario in a way that shows Jim as the safety and trust that Huck would need to survive this world. Growing up in this kind of world without the help of Jim could cause Huck to turn out like much of the rest of the society, a bigoted racist man who has no respect for anyone of color and views them as tools or even less then the animals or pets that surround them. Through the book we see how Huck developed with the help of Jim and we can only think about how Huck would have been had he been raised by Pap which shows how people are much better off when being raised without hate and racism in their life.

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In the short film “The N word” it talks about how the use of the word has become normalized to the upcoming generation. Because of this, I feel as though black people are not receiving the respect the deserve because that word is associated with years of pain and slavery. Although black people are not receiving the respect they deserve, some black artists are not helping. Because of rap music, many people feel that the word has been normalized and that they can use it or say it freely because it is in the music they listen to. In my opinion this is fair because if the black community is acceptant of these songs being put out, then they have to understand it is a word that is going to be used. If the word was not used as much in the music, I believe that it would not be as normalized. I still believe the word should not be used by anyone because of its very strong meaning.

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Sending minority children off to school requires forethought They need to be ready for the inevitability of hateful words and actions.: [CITY Edition]

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Sending minority children off to school requires forethought They need to be ready for the inevitability of hateful words and actions.: [CITY Edition]

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When sending a child of minority decent to school, there is much thinking prior to actually sending them. Each minority child will eneveitbely will be discriminated against in some sort of way. It is much worse in the south and other parts of the country, but even in Maine there is still discrimination towards people of color in schools. Larger schools are worse for these kids because there is more people and generally more people that are going to discriminate against people of color. Even though in larger schools there is generally more people of color, these kids will get sectioned off into groups and will only find real safety in people of their own color. It is very scary starting a new school for anyone, but for people of color it is much harder to be ready for the discrimination and harships they may endure during their time at a new school.

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Although the title of this article claims Trump supporters are not racist, much evidence points to the fact they are. Trump has provided many racist claims and actions before and during his presidency. Because of is racist ways, some people began to think that being racist or saying racist things is OK because our president says them. This can lead to a bad society in which people of color are discriminated against more then they were years ago. Trump is sending us back years to a time in which there was still much discrimination against people of color. This can be related to the how life was like in Huckleberry Fin. Trump is trying to send us back to that time which was obviously worse for our society and many of the colored people that we share the world with. In Huckleberry Fin free colored people were discriminated against and unfortunately with the help of our president we may be back in that situation sooner then people may think.

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Harvard Agrees to Turn in Records Amid Discrimination Inquiry

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Harvard Agrees to Turn in Records Amid Discrimination Inquiry

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Harvard has had to turn over all records regarding Asian applicants. The justice department has been sent to investigate whether or not Harvard has had any discrimination towards Asians throughout the application process. Many have complained that they had nearly perfect applications and did not even make it onto the wait list because of their Asian decent. Although the stereotype has been made to show that Asians are smarter then most other races and therefore are first choices for colleges. Although they did not get into Harvard, Harvard claims that all applicants have the same chance of getting in in the initial reviewing process until grades and extracurriculars come into play. Harvard also claims that these students were not chosen because they were not up to Harvard's standards, not because of their race. After the review of the applications an answer will be revealed about Harvard showing whether or not they are a racist college. This scenario shows that racism is in over part of our society, even if we don't see it.

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It was unclear on Friday whether the Justice Department would agree to the offer.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Devin M. O'Malley, struck a conciliatory note, saying: "The Department of Justice takes seriously any potential violation of an individual's civil and constitutional rights. We are pleased that Harvard today indicated it too takes this matter seriously and has presented a potential path forward. The Department is reviewing the university's response and declines comment at this time."

The Justice Department investigation is based on a complaint by a coalition of Asian-American organizations who say that Harvard has in effect penalized high-achieving Asian-American applicants by passing them over for admission in favor of less-qualified black, white and Hispanic applicants. Harvard has said that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, and that in the quest to put together a diverse student body, it looks at many intangible factors, and many applicants who would qualify based on grades and test scores alone are denied.

The complaint closely tracks a federal lawsuit against Harvard by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit organization formed to challenge race-conscious admissions policies.

In August, the Justice Department set up a special project in its Civil Rights Division - run out of its front office, where political appointees work, rather than its education section - to scrutinize race-conscious college admissions practices. After initially refusing to talk about it, the department said it was looking at a complaint filed on behalf of Asian applicants, describing it in a way that clearly matched the Harvard dispute.

The government investigation into Harvard was later confirmed by a Nov. 17 letter from the Justice Department to Seth Waxman, who is representing Harvard, complaining that the university had refused to turn over a single document it had requested, and threatening to sue unless the documents were provided.

The documents would include personal information about test scores and grades along with interviews and personal essays gathered during the admissions process.

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Harvard Agrees to Turn Over Records Amid Discrimination Inquiry

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It was unclear on Friday whether the Justice Department would agree to the offer. A spokesman for the Justice Department, Devin M. O'Malley, struck a conciliatory note, saying: "The Department of Justice takes seriously any potential violation of an individual's civil and constitutional rights.

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This article is about how doctors originally attributed sickle cell anemia to black people because it was a "black" disease. Because of the racial hierarchy at the time, it was an early conclusion that because they had only seen black people with the disease, that black people must be its origin. They argued that black people were inferior and that the start of disease could be attributed to blacks. To explain to skeptics why white people could also have the disease, doctors would cover it up by saying there must be a black gene somewhere in the family tree. Even using a quick google search would show you that the picture on WebMd for sickle cell is a picture of a black person, adding to the lies and making more people belive it probabakt is a black disease. Now in recent news, doctors have come together to retract all claims that any disease is black or a white because anyone could get any disease. I think that this is a very big step forward in a racial stand point , and that we could learn a lot from getting rid of the lies about black people that have been passed on for centuries.

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That's worrisome for many reasons, he says, chief among them that it may result in subpar medical care for some patients. Case in point: California's universal blood disorder screening program has identified thousands of nonblack children with the sickle cell trait and scores with the disease - patients who, had doctors stuck to received "wisdom," might have been missed.

Professor Yudell belongs to a growing chorus of scholars and researchers who argue that in science at least, we need to push past the race concept and, where possible, scrap it entirely. Professor Yudell and others contend that instead of talking about race, we should talk about ancestry (which, unlike "race," refers to one's genetic heritage, not innate qualities); or the specific gene variants that, like the sickle cell trait, affect disease risk; or environmental factors like poverty or diet that affect some groups more than others.

The push to retire the race concept may seem to contradict another progressive trend in medicine: increased attention to how race affects treatment. Research suggests that blacks and other minorities are less likely than whites to receive treatment for pain and fare worse in a number of medical outcomes. The issue is complex, but some scientists think that doctors' unconscious stereotyping partly drives these disparities.

So how can we fix the issue unless we frankly acknowledge what drives it - the perception of race? Indeed, rather than discarding the idea of race, some medical schools now include "unconscious bias" training, classes in which students are essentially asked to contemplate their own often unintentional racism.

Such initiatives are not entirely incongruous with the goal of superseding race. The idea in both cases is to push beyond the clunky race labels we have inherited, as well as our own preconceptions about those labels, and to see people with greater clarity and nuance than those categories and their attendant biases generally allow.

In biology, race is roughly analogous to the idea of subspecies, and the argument over its utility for humans has some history. After championing the concept as useful for categorizing human variation in the mid-20th century, the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky began to see that scientists needed a more precise way to talk about human diversity, and said as much. The race concept had been used to justify so much cruelty and oppression that its value, he came to realize, was questionable.

In the decades since, others have reiterated those points. What's new today is that modern genetic science has revealed just how arbitrary the old race categories - Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and so on - really are. Yes, there is variation in the human family, but there are few sharp divides where one set of traits ends and another begins. Rather, traits exist in gradients, reaching high frequency in some populations and lower frequency in others. As the geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania reminded me, human beings are too young as a species, too promiscuous and full of wanderlust, always moving and mixing, for the kind of separation and differentiation that would cause true speciation to have occurred.

The truth is that there is sometimes more variation within what we call races than there is between them. A study led by the geneticist J. Craig Venter highlights this point. He compared his genome to that of James Watson, one of the two scientists who discovered the double helix shape of DNA. Dr. Venter focused on six genes that affect how we respond to antidepressants and antipsychotics, among other drugs. Dr. Venter and Dr. Watson are "Caucasian." Dr. Venter had two copies of a "Caucasian" variant of one of these genes, but Dr. Watson carried a version more common in East Asian populations. Judging by self-reported race, Dr. Venter noted, a doctor might prescribe Dr. Watson the wrong dose of medicine.

The takeaway from studies like this is that rather than relying on race, doctors should focus on the genes important to whatever puzzle they face - an approach often called "precision" or "personalized" medicine. The idea is that tailoring treatment to the patient's genotype, not to skin color or hair texture, would improve outcomes.

Consider the case of kidney disease. Scientists have found that African-Americans fare worse than whites when it comes to this illness. The assumption had long been that some environmental factor explained the difference. But in recent years, scientists have linked certain variants of a gene called APOL1 to worse kidney-related outcomes. Those variants are enriched in people of African ancestry. Girish N. Nadkarni, a kidney specialist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, explained to me that scientists think this may be because those variants protect against the sleeping sickness endemic to some parts of Africa.

But not all African-Americans carry the variants. That is important because, in an attempt to account for the higher risk of kidney problems among African-Americans, kidney donor registries include information about race. And kidneys from "black" donors might be discarded on the assumption that they are more prone to failure. But by looking directly at whether patients and donors carried this gene variant - in particular, two copies of it - scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham recently found they could theoretically improve transplant outcomes. Kidneys donated from black donors that might otherwise have been discarded could, with genotyping, go to patients who needed them.

Not everyone agrees that it is possible or even desirable to completely scrap the race concept. Alex Lickerman, founder of Imagine MD, a medical concierge service in Chicago, cites the example of prostate cancer. For unclear reasons, African-Americans have a higher risk than whites. One test for the cancer, which looks at prostate-specific antigen, is controversial because it can yield false positives. Some recommend against using it at all.

But Dr. Lickerman says that merely being aware that African-Americans have a higher disease risk impels him to order the test more often for African-American patients. To his mind, the elevated risk of cancer outweighs the risk of a false positive. "Race is a crude marker, but it's a usable marker," he said. In that respect, it is no different from other factors doctors consider, most of which are based on imperfect studies of limited size and scope, and need to be weighed carefully.

Furthermore, we still don't know all the genes responsible for observed health disparities. In a future "utopia," explains Esteban Burchard, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, we'd have this information. Patients' medical files would contain information about their unique genomes. But we're not there yet. "We can't even give people basic health care," Dr. Burchard said. "Are we going to pay for everyone to get genotyped?"

In some cases, it is precisely the nongenetic aspects of race that are important in understanding what ails a patient. If you want to understand the life expectancy of people in Ferguson, Mo., for example - where the Justice Dep artment found that the police department needed to be overhauled in part because of racial bias - it is critical to know whether the person is African-American. "Genetics don't matter there," Dr. Burchard said. What drives those disparities are environmental - that is, social - factors.

African-Americans, who on average have about 20 percent European ancestry, suffer from high blood pressure more often than whites do. Some studies indicate that among African-Americans, the darker one's skin, the greater the risk of high blood pressure. The pattern could indicate that African ancestry is responsible.

Yet Africans in Africa don't generally have high blood pressure. So some argue that the experience of having dark skin in the United States - of experiencing racism - is what's raising blood pressure. In this case, Dr. Burchard says, even though race is a social construct, the best way to talk about the associated disease risk may be to use the labels, since the societal baggage that comes with them may be causing the problem.

But the hope is that one day we can use modern genetic tools to bypass the quagmire of race entirely. Consider the research of Alan Wu, a lab director of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Wu is working to improve a basic blood test that measures red blood cells, white blood cells and so forth.

Currently, when it comes to ancestry, the test compares everyone's blood against a single standard. This is a problem because what's "normal" probably varies according to ancestry. Dr. Wu hopes to devise a version of the test that accounts for variations in blood count according to ancestry. But instead of using self-reported race as a way to specify this variation, he is trying to determine patients' backgrounds directly with genetic testing - looking at what proportion of a person's DNA comes from East Asia, say, or Europe.

Science seeks to categorize nature, to sort it into discrete groupings to better understand it. That is one way to comprehend the race concept: as an honest scientific attempt at understanding human variation. The problem is, the concept is imprecise. It has repeatedly slid toward pseudoscience and has become a major divider of humanity. Now, at a time when we desperately need ways to come together, there are scientists - intellectual descendants of the very people who helped give us the race concept - who want to retire it.

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That's worrisome for many reasons, he says, chief among them that it may result in subpar medical care for some patients. Case in point: California's universal blood disorder screening program has identified thousands of nonblack children with the sickle cell trait and scores with the disease - patients who, had doctors stuck to received "wisdom," might have been missed.

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Most Americans Think Their Race Faces Discrimination

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Most Americans Think Their Race Faces Discrimination

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In the article “most Americans think their race faces discrimination” it talks about the huge gap between the number of times a black man is discriminated against and how many times a white man is discriminated against. I think that this divide can be traced back to a time of slavery. Many black people are still discriminated against because of bigoted racists that still very much exist in the majority of our country. Where I live you do not see much racism if at all, but in a place like the south where there is a much higher population of black people and racist whites, there is a lot of discrimination. Along with the discrimination, 200 more black people die everyday prematurely due to racism and abuse. I think that this is the worst possible thing people can do to another person. In my opinion there should be no racial divide because we are all the same. It is fault to my own race for still thinking that any person is less than them.

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Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The poll asked a wide range of questions about where Americans experience discrimination - from the workplace to the doctor's office - and people's perception of it. The groups polled include whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ adults.

White Americans are among those who feel their group is discriminated against, with 55 percent saying discrimination exists against whites in the U.S. today.

These results are part of a large national statistically representative survey of 3,453 adults from Jan. 26 to Apr. 9.

We will be releasing the full results of the poll over the next several weeks, starting Tuesday with results from the survey of African-Americans. We will highlight and analyze the particular acts of discrimination that each group experiences.

The African-American results, in 802 adults, provide insight into the historically high levels of discrimination blacks have faced since arriving in America. These experiences happen across a broad range of situations: interacting with police; applying for jobs or seeking promotions; trying to rent an apartment or buy a home; or going to a doctor or health clinic.

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The findings on African-Americans have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

The perceptions of discrimination are not primarily based in actions by institutions, as some might expect. "Most African-Americans believe that discrimination is due to the attitudes of individuals that they interact with," says Robert Blendon, the poll's director and professor of policy and political analysis at the Harvard Chan School. "A smaller share believes it's actually government or institutional policies."

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Fear of discrimination, possibly triggered by past encounters, plays out in different ways. We found that this fear significantly influences people's decisions whether to seek medical care, to call the police when in need, and even whether to drive or attend social events. Nearly one-third (32 percent) of African-Americans polled said they have personally experienced racial discrimination when going to the doctor or a health clinic, with 22 percent avoiding care out of fear of discrimination.

"If someone is avoiding seeking medical care out of fear of discrimination, they're at risk of going undiagnosed for serious conditions," says Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We know that repeated stress from discrimination and racism can actually make some of those conditions more likely in the first place and shorten lives."

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And repeated stress comes from many kinds of discrimination and the fear it engenders. Numerous studies have shown that African-Americans are more likely to be stopped by police compared with other racial groups. In the poll, 60 percent of people told us that they or a family member have been unfairly stopped or mistreated by police because they are black.

That has consequences for them personally and across society - 31 percent of poll respondents say fear of discrimination has led them to avoid calling the police when in need. And 61 percent say police are more likely to use force on a person who is African-American than on a white person in the same situation.

Where people live can make a big difference, too. Our survey found that 64 percent of blacks live in non-majority-black areas. For these people, perceptions of local discrimination, opportunity, police and government and community environment were generally better when compared with majority-black areas, sometimes by wide margins.

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Our poll found substantial numbers of African-Americans who say they have been slurred or have been the target of insensitive or offensive comments or negative assumptions. A story later in our series will explore the split by income and gender in the chart below.

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Persistently higher premature death rates in blacks compared with whites was one of the issues that inspired this poll and series. The most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that gap at 16 percent, even though it has narrowed since 1999, when death rates for blacks from all causes were 33 percent higher than whites.

Many factors play into the gap, including a considerable drop in crime rates involving African-Americans over that period and improved access to medical care for many people. What we're trying to explore with our "You, Me and Them" series and poll is how the stress-inducing experiences of discrimination in everyday life affect health.

"Over 200 black people die prematurely every single day in America, in part because of racism in society," says David Williams, a professor of public health at the Harvard Chan School who has pioneered work in the field of racial disparities in health care. "This poll helps us see where we need to take action to address the problem."

The poll was conducted in the first quarter of 2017. A final report discussing major highlights from the series will be released in December.

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Poll: Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination

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Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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City Police Officers Are Not Reporting All Street Stops

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City Police Officers Are Not Reporting All Street Stops

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There is a new stop and frisk policy for New York, and monitors are sent to review how officers are using and or abusing their new abilities. Many of the officers that were reviewed either did not report all of the stops the had (typically did not report ones with black males) or did report it but did not include some key details. Like always, these officers were not reprimanded, just reminded they need to keep record of what they do. In my opinion there should be no difference from a traffic stop with a white person or a person of color. Although it should not be any different, it is. Black people are treated more poorly and do not have the same luck with getting off with tickets and such. All over the country this happens and still police officers do not get in trouble. This can relate to Huckleberry Fin because the people in the town would treat the black people with discrimination even though they are free, much like how some police officers treat black people or people with color.

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As Police Commissioner James P. O'Neill said last month in a video introduction for a one-day training program for officers, stop-and-frisk "was a tool that was overused, and sometimes misused. And that led to widespread resentment and distrust of our department, especially in communities of color."

Mr. Zimroth's report cites audits of radio transmissions, from the department's computer-aided dispatch system, which examined activity in eight different precincts each month to determine when a stop report was warranted. In the last three months of 2016 and the first half of this year, the audits found a combined 39 instances when a required stop form had not been filled out.

Using a different auditing system - one that examines whether arrests for trespassing or drug possession, for instance, were precipitated by a street stop - the department found that required stop reports were only filled out in 13 of 50 arrests, meaning they were undercounted in 74 percent of arrests.

Mr. Zimroth did not find that officers were willfully hiding the stops, but noted one possible explanation for the undercounting: that officers believed a stop report was not required if there was an arrest report.

"The error, if based on officer confusion, should be relatively easy to remedy," Mr. Zimroth wrote.

In his videotaped message, Mr. O'Neill said, "It is critically important that we learn the law and work within its confines."

The undercounting of street stops was a primary problem first noted by Mr. Zimroth in the July 2015 report he filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

That it remains such a stubborn problem now, shows the work that remains, particularly for police supervisors who must enforce new training guidelines to ensure that stops by patrol officers are legal and free of racial bias.

"The monitor perceives some positive changes in organizational culture driven by the police commissioner and others in leadership roles," Mr. Zimroth said in the introduction to his report. "Nonetheless, much remains to be done."

Mr. Zimroth characterized his tenure as at a crossroads: It is evolving from the task of creating new ideas and policies to implementing them and - equally importantly - measuring whether they are working and are sustainable.

The impact of his oversight is seen in all corners of the department.

There are new forms for officers to fill out on their smartphones or tablets to document their stops. New videos about the laws governing street stops are being played at roll calls in precinct station houses. And there is new training at the Police Academy to help officers better discern the characteristics of a civilian who has a gun.

Yet for each new policy idea during the first four years of the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose settling of federal stop-and-frisk legal battles was among the first acts of his mayoralty, there are several goals unmet.

For instance, training officers to more deeply understand the implicit biases they harbor - which Mr. de Blasio promised would begin nearly two years ago - is scheduled to begin in February.

In a statement, the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the civil rights groups behind the stop-and-frisk litigation, expressed concern over the number of undocumented stops and criticized the group hired to conduct the implicit bias training, Fair and Impartial Policing. The civil rights group said the "lack of transparency" in the process was "troubling."

Equipping officers with body cameras, the tools touted as revolutionary for trust-building and transparency, has been so slow-going that an analysis of their impact is still perhaps a year away. New performance evaluation systems for sergeants and lieutenants - those front-line supervisors considered critical in weeding out improper stops - has not yet been conceived.

And then, of course, there is the underreporting of stops, which Mr. Zimroth warned about nearly 30 months ago.

The Police Department has acknowledged that undocumented "stops are a serious issue that needs to be addressed," Mr. Zimroth wrote in the report released on Wednesday. "A significant percentage of undocumented stops would undermine the department's and the monitor's ability to assess compliance with the court orders."

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City Police Officers Are Not Reporting All Street Stops, Monitor Says

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As Police Commissioner James P. O'Neill said last month in a video introduction for a one-day training program for officers, stop-and-frisk "was a tool that was overused, and sometimes misused. And that led to widespread resentment and distrust of our department, especially in communities of color."

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‘Intelligent’ Policing and My Innocent Children

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‘Intelligent’ Policing and My Innocent Children

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In this article it talks about a women at the center of a tech company that is designing A.I for the police. These A.I machines are programmed to do the jobs of police officers, but with one catch. These robots have their own social profiling that sees people of color as more dangerous and that the robot needs to watch them more then others. This is a very scary thing to see in our society because it is very dangerous to have robots that have no feeling for others, but are programmed to treat some people harsher then others. I really hope that this technology is not put into use or that someone will see the possible bad outcomes that can come from this.

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This is especially frightening when combined with the fact that the current administration has already begun to reverse Obama-era criminal justice reform policies that were meant to make the system more just.

A.I. works by taking large volumes of information and distilling it down to simple concepts, categories and rules and then predicting future responses and outcomes. This is a function of the beliefs, assumptions and capabilities of the people who do the coding. A.I. learns by repetition and association, and all of that is based on the information we - humans who hold all the racial and often, specifically, anti-black biases of our society - feed it.

Just think of how Google's facial recognition programs labeled black people in photos "gorillas." Or how Microsoft's Tay, a bot designed to engage in Twitter conversations, devolved into a racial-epithet-tweeting machine within 24 hours.

These downsides of A.I. are no secret. Despite this, state and local law enforcement agencies have begun to use predictive policing applications fueled by A.I. like HunchLab, which combines historical crime data, moon phases, location, census data and even professional sports team schedules to predict when and where crime will occur and even who's likely to commit or be a victim of certain crimes.

The problem with historical crime data is that it's based upon policing practices that already disproportionately home in on blacks, Latinos, and those who live in low-income areas.

If the police have discriminated in the past, predictive technology reinforces and perpetuates the problem, sending more officers after people who we know are already targeted and unfairly treated, given recent evidence like the Justice Department's reports on Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and the findings of the San Francisco Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency Accountability and Fairness in Law Enforcement.

It's no wonder criminologists have raised red flags about the self-fulfilling nature of using historical crime data.

This hits close to home. An October 2016 study by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group concluded that if the Oakland Police Department used its 2010 record of drug-crimes information as the basis of an algorithm to guide policing, the department "would have dispatched officers almost exclusively to lower-income, minority neighborhoods," despite the fact that public-health-based estimates suggest that drug use is much more widespread, taking place in many other parts of the city where my family and I live.

Those "lower-income, minority neighborhoods" contain the barbershop where I take my son for his monthly haircut and our favorite hoagie shop. Would I let him run ahead of me if I knew that simply setting foot on those sidewalks would make him more likely to be seen as a criminal in the eyes of the law?

The risks are even more acute (and unavoidable) for those who can afford to live only in the neighborhoods that A.I. would most likely lead officers to focus on.

There's yet another opportunity for racial bias to infuse the process when risk-assessment algorithms created by A.I. and machine learning are used to help to sentence criminals, as they already are in courts around the country.

Without a commitment to ensure that the data being used to fuel A.I. doesn't replicate historical racism, biases will be built into the foundation of many "intelligent" systems shaping how we live. It's not that I want this technology to be rejected. There are ways to make A.I. work. But before it is used in law enforcement, it must be thoroughly tested and proven not to disproportionately harm communities of color.

Until then my excitement about advances in tech will always be cautious. Innovation is at the core of the careers that allow me and my husband to provide a good life for our family. The same innovation, if not used properly, could take it all away.

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Opinion | 'Intelligent' Policing and My Innocent Children

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This is especially frightening when combined with the fact that the current administration has already begun to reverse Obama-era criminal justice reform policies that were meant to make the system more just. A.I. works by taking large volumes of information and distilling it down to simple concepts, categories and rules and then predicting future responses and outcomes.