Trump fair housing rule shows administration's desire to increase segregation

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Trump changes housing policy and ramps up his stump speech dog-whistling, and Facebook’s under fire for allegedly ignoring data showing that Black Instagram users were more likely to sanctioned than white ones. Black founders got nowhere to turn when faced with racist venture investors, and oh, white folks? San Francisco Mayor London Breed would like a word.

But first, here’s your cognitively amazing week in review, in Haiku.

Person. Woman. Man.
Camera. TV. Nothing
short of amazing!

Person. Woman. Man.
Camera. TV. Something
short of amazing.

Have a truly amazing weekend.

Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com

On point

Trump administration scraps a rule designed to foster more diverse neighborhoods The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced this week that it planned to end an Obama-era rule that encouraged cities to address segregation in their communities via federal housing aid incentives. The plot thickens: Trump is playing on legacy fears of integrated neighborhoods in his current stump speeches. He recently claimed that Democrats want to “abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions.” Further, he's been saying that any such zoning moves will “[bring] who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.”
Los Angeles Times

White liberals: San Francisco Mayor London Breed thanks you for trying She’s been up against it from the beginning of her term, grappling with rampant income and housing disparities, an urgent homelessness crisis and social safety net issues — now all compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. In a candid interview, Breed acknowledged the robust if overdue presence of white people in the movement for Black Lives. That said, she wants them to do better. “I have a real problem with the takeover of the movement by white people,” she told Vogue. She cites, specifically, white critics of her plan to divert some police funding to serve the city’s Black community. “I want people to respect the opinions and feelings of Black people and allow us to decide what is in our best interest.”
Vogue

Facebook ignored warnings about bias on the Instagram platform Last year, researchers began studying the impacts of new rules on Instagram designed to curb bullying and bad behavior on the site. Their conclusions raised flags: Black users based in the U.S. were 50% more likely to have their accounts flagged and disabled for problematic activity than white users. Their findings were mirrored by internal interviews with Facebook employees, who also detected bias in the moderation system. Yet insiders say when presented with the findings, Facebook officials shut down the research and directed the researchers to keep the findings to themselves. Part of the issue is the way Facebook's automated content monitoring systems assess hate speech. In an attempt to be neutral, the company doesn’t distinguish between the lived experiences of white and Black people on the platform. “The world treats Black people differently from white people,” one employee told NBC News. “If we are treating everyone the same way, we are already making choices on the wrong side of history.”
NBC News

No legal remedies for Black company founders facing racist VCs The racist remarks and biased feedback that Black entrepreneurs seeking investment experience have long been well documented behind the scenes. But defanged civil rights laws make it impossible for those who believe they were discriminated against to seek redress out loud, via the courts. “You almost need a smoking gun, an email that says, ‘I have discriminated against you, and I’m not investing with you because of your race,’” a professor at Tulane University Law School tells the Washington Post. More than a dozen Black founders shared their stories on background. “Tone down the Black,” one was told. Others have learned to bring white people with them to pitch meetings, which almost always helped their cause.
Washington Post

On background

How diverse is your personal network? This foundational research from Harvard’s Herminia Ibarra established two decades ago that the lack of diversity in the informal networks of white managers were important factors in the lack of advancement reported by anyone who wasn’t white. It was, at the time, an important corrective to the idea that members of “minority” groups should work harder to assimilate into the personal networks of majority culture leaders. Guess what? Things haven’t changed much since 1995! Inclusion expert and author Ruchika Tulshyan recently broke the phenomenon all the way down. Speaking of which, who do you know? Not a rhetorical question.
Academy of Management Journal

In search of shared (intersectional) sisterhood at work This is the poignant quest identified by Beth A. Livingston and Tina R. Opie, both researchers and management professors. (Opie’s name may be familiar for her work on natural hair and identity.) The idea of alliances or meaningful connections between women in the workplace, “allows us to share struggles together, realize that we’re not alone, that the pain we’re going through is something bigger than us,” says Opie. But when they created a survey to explore the theme of sisterhood, they found a significant difference in how “inclusive” environments were experienced by white and Black women. “You can’t build meaningful connections between women of different races and ethnicities, let alone ask them to advocate for their collective advancement, if Black and Hispanic women report being excluded from the relationships required to make an organization run.” A must read and share.
HBR

How the discovery of the Tuskegee study impacted the health of Black men The full name of the study was the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a forty-year experiment of cruelty and neglect in the name of science that has become synonymous with racist medical mistreatment. In a paper in the Oxford Quarterly Journal of Economics, two researchers found that the news of the study had a devastating effect on the lives of Black men. “We find that the disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older Black men,” say the authors. As a result, life expectancy for Black men who lost faith in the medical system fell by 1.5 years. It accounted for some 35% of the life expectancy gap between Black and white men in 1980. (Subscription required.)
The Quarterly Journal of Economics

raceAhead is edited by Aric Jenkins.