My Colleagues and I Produced a Doc about Race and Affirmative Action

/

Businessman Ralph Taylor, who learned he is 4% Black from a DNA test, is classified as Black by his state government and White by the federal government. This racial inconsistency means he’s eligible for affirmative action programs in Washington state but not in Washington, D.C. But rather than seeking to financially benefit from programs meant to redress past racial grievances, Taylor says he’s out to prove that “there is no valid definition of race.”

HuffPost article
Daily Mail writeup

/ / Comment
, , , ,

Kayvon Afshari

Kayvon Afshari managed the campaign to elect Hooshang Amirahmadi as President of Iran. In this role, he directed the campaign’s event planning, publicity, online social media, web analytics, and delivered speeches. Mr. Afshari has also been working at the CBS News foreign desk for over five years. He has coordinated coverage of Iran’s 2009 post-election demonstrations, the Arab Spring, the earthquake in Haiti, and many other stories of international significance. He holds a Master in International Relations from New York University’s Department of Politics, and graduated with distinction from McGill University in 2007 with a double major in political science and Middle Eastern studies. At NYU, his research focused on quantitative analysis and the Middle East with an emphasis on US-Iran relations. In his 2012 Master’s thesis, he devised a formula to predict whether Israel would launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, concluding that an overt strike would not materialize.

Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” and the NFL Kneeling Protests

/
Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” and the NFL Kneeling Protests

I met social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt at a Thanksgiving party and, after striking up a conversation, he gave me a signed copy of his book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."

I was going to write one long book review, but I realized it's way too much to review his takes on religion, evolution, morality, the emergence of civilized societies, and contemporary politics in one piece. Instead, I decided I would write a series of distinct short essays in response.

I applied Haidt's moral matrix to the NFL kneeling protests and #BlackLivesMatter. "Simply put, if you were in a hypothetical encounter with a police officer and could choose your race for the next half hour, which race would you choose to be?"

If I got anything wrong, feel free to leave an unhinged, ad hominem attack in the comments.

Read More