1.Colorado may be overwhelmingly white, but in the 1910s, Dearfield, Colorado housed an all-black settlement outside of Denver. Read more...

“Dearfield’s founder saw it as a real dream for African Americans,” says Robert Brunswig, professor emeritus of anthropology at University of Northern Colorado and Dearfield scholar. “They were establishing a place where they could develop their own future.” Today, it’s a ghost town 30 miles east of Greeley and a National Historic District brimming with stories that researchers are eager to uncover.

—"Dearfield: The Story of Colorado’s Historic All-Black Settlement” by Angela Ufheil from 5280 Magazine

2. Facial recognition tech can only recognize the faces of white men because of racial bias. Listen…

Earlier this month, IBM said it was getting out of the facial recognition business. Then Amazon and Microsoft announced prohibitions on law enforcement using their facial recognition tech. Nationwide protests have opened the door for a conversation around how these systems should be used by police, amid growing evidence of gender and racial bias baked into the algorithms.Today on the show, Short Wave host Maddie Sofia and reporter Emily Kwong speak with AI policy analyst Mutale Nkonde about algorithmic bias — how facial recognition software can discriminate and reflect the biases of society.

—”Tech Companies Are Limiting Police Use of Facial Recognition. Here’s Why” from the podcast “Short wave” from NPR

3. Have you ever wondered how many of our nation’s founders owned slaves? Turns out, nearly all of them. :( Read more…

John Trumbull’s painting “Declaration of Independence,” which hangs in the rotunda of the US Capitol, commemorates the document that freed the United States, formerly the 13 British colonies, from European rule in 1776. The concept of freedom, though, was severely limited: slavery was only abolished nearly a century later, and its reverberations of racist violence and mass incarceration subjugate Black people to this day.In a poignant illustration of this hypocrisy, Arlen Parsa, a Chicago-based documentary filmmaker, covered the faces of every enslaver in the painting with a red circle: a 34 out of the 47 men pictured, most of whom were signers of the Declaration. (The fact-checking website PolitiFact has corroborated Parsa’s count.)

—”Historical Painting is Altered to Show Most Declaration of Independence Signatories Were Enslavers” by Valentina Di Liscia from Hyperallergic

4. One Dad’s story of protesting the death of George Floyd with his sons. Read more…

As a Black man raising two Black boys, I have had many fitful nights thinking about the slaughter of Black lives. Lives that could be theirs or mine. But more than the uncertainty outside my door, what has kept me up at night is a question repeatedly posed to me by my 5-year-old son. It is a question that causes me to worry about the souls of Black children.“Daddy, why are white people so evil and mean to Black people?”

—"Put Your Shoes On. We Are Marching” by J. Jioni Palmer from Sojourners

5. Talking about making reparations to the ancestors of former slaves might feel weird. But you know what’s weirder? The other ways us white people deal with our guilt. Listen…

Black people all across the US are receiving the world's weirdest form of reparations: Venmo payments from white people.

—”#162: The Least You Could Do” from the podcast Reply All

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