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CSUSB professor co-authored study on gender diversity in science
PLOS One
June 25, 2020
Brittany Bloodhart, a former Colorado State University postdoctoral researcher and now an assistant professor of psychology at Cal State San Bernardino, was one of the authors listed in a study that examined whether representation is enough to improve gender diversity in science. The study by Colorado State University researchers says there's more to the story: They've found that even when undergraduate women outnumber men in science courses, women may still be experiencing gender biases from their peers.
Read the complete study at “Outperforming yet undervalued: Undergraduate women in STEM.”
CSUSB professor co-authors paper on why people run for political office
Political Research Quarterly
June 29, 2020
Meredith Conroy, CSUSB associate professor of political science, and Jon Greene, a doctoral candidate in political science at The Ohio State University, published a paper on what motivates people to run for public office.
“More women ran for office in 2018 than any previous election year,” the paper’s abstract reads “This represents progress toward parity, but it remains unclear whether this surge in women’s political ambition signals an easing of the candidate emergence path, which has typically favored men. We leverage over ten thousand intake forms of prospective candidates provided by Run for Something, a candidate recruitment nonprofit founded in 2017, to examine patterns in candidate emergence based on articulated interest through the lens of “communion” and “agency,” two basic behavioral orientations with gendered significance. We find that differences in articulated interest along the dimensions of communion and agency are greater between candidates and noncandidates than they are between men and women, supporting previous findings of similarities in men and women who emerge as candidates. Our results suggest the candidate emergence path is still easier for women (and men) whose motives are congruent with agency, and therefore the “masculine ethos” of politics.”
Read the paper at “It Takes Motive: Communal and Agentic Articulated Interest and Candidate Emergence.”
CSUSB professor comments on Facebook giving the boot to extremist ‘Boogaloo’ movement adherents
Vice News
June 30, 2020
Brian Levin, director the CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, commented on Facebook giving the anti-government “boogaloo” movement the boot. The loose-knit movement had been trying to build support on the social media platform for its violent aspiration of a civil war.
On Tuesday, June 30, Facebook announced it has designated a core online network of boogaloo adherents as a “dangerous organization.” The social media giant also conducted a “strategic network disruption” of the boogaloo online infrastructure, removing 220 accounts, 28 pages, 106 groups, and 95 Instagram accounts that Facebook determined were part of this core boogaloo network.
“The Boogaloo Bois’ swift and broad ascent to national security threat was already on the wings of Facebook,” said Levin. “If the Boogaloo Bois are in Facebook's crosshairs, it may be because the company itself faces the parallel threats of mounting ad boycotts and legislative scrutiny.”
Levin said the future of the boogaloo movement may play out the same way we’ve seen other extremist ideologies evolve after deplatforming. “These actions severely curtail the ability of fringe movements like Boogaloo Bois to expand, but also cause them to migrate as more fragmented cells, to smaller, more encrypted platforms where associational echo chambers are maintained,” said Levin. But, Levin added, the onus is still on Facebook to develop “sustained, flexible collaborations” to identify emergent ideologies or efforts to rebrand old ones on their platforms.
Read the complete article at “Facebook just labeled the Boogaloos a ‘dangerous organization’ and banned 500 groups and pages.”
CSUSB professor comments on report critical of U.S. approach to domestic extremism
The Intercept
June 29, 2020
President Trump’s strategy of blaming on antifa for sporadic violence at Black Lives Matter protests in quick, broad brushstrokes is undercut not only by constitutional hurdles and conflicting evidence on the ground, but also by a sobering report from his own intelligence officials that calls for an entirely revamped approach to domestic extremism. The analysis from the National Counterterrorism Center, which has not been previously reported, offers an unusually self-critical view of the gaps and weaknesses in combating homegrown terror threats, and it suggests that the focus needs to be on individual actors who break the law, rather than groups.
The report was born out of a two-day conference in September 2019 on domestic terrorism organized by National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, and was attended by 120 experts, including Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, who also helped lead a discussion at the event.
Given the administration’s record, “a lot of us were pleasantly surprised that this conference was convened in the first place — it was overdue,” said Levin. “There was a message from the top saying, ‘I get it.'”
But that message has now become muddled, Levin and other participants said, after the Trump administration fired both Joseph Maguire, the acting intelligence chief, and Russ Travers, the acting head of the counterterrorism center, within weeks of each other earlier this year. Trump was reportedly furious with Maguire — and questioned his loyalty — for allowing an aide to give a classified congressional briefing about Russian meddling in the 2020 election.
Read the complete article at “In buried report, U.S. government admits major failures in confronting domestic terrorism.”
CSUSB professor discusses rise in anti-Asian hate incidents tied to COVID-19 pandemic
VOA News
June 27, 2020
A wave of anti-Asian hate comes at a time of heightened tensions over the pandemic fueled by the anti-China rhetoric of President Donald Trump and other politicians. Trump, who initially praised China for its handling of the crisis, subsequently blamed China’s leader Xi Jinping for waiting weeks to report the outbreak in Wuhan to the World Health Organization and covering up the severity of the problem.
This surge in anti-Asian hate crime comes at a time when most American cities are reporting an overall decline in other categories of bias attacks, according to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
The FBI defines a hate crime as a criminal offense motivated by bias against the victim’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity California, home to the nation’s largest Asian American population, has been particularly hard hit. In Los Angeles, police recorded 10 anti-Asian hate crimes through April 30, compared to a total of four for all of 2019, according to police data compiled by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
“In the cities where anti-Asian hate crimes increased, they increased significantly to the extent that there were almost as much anti-Asian hate crime as we had for all of last year or significantly more,” Levin said.
Read the complete article at “US watchdog tracks over 2,100 anti-Asian incidents.”
CSUSB dean and faculty interviewed for ‘Policing in Black Communities (Part 3): The Lessons Learned’
NBC Palm Springs
June 26, 2020
Part one of the NBC Palm Springs multi-part series focused on the history of slavery in America and how the black community was treated by police from the beginning. In part two, reporter Daytona Everett and a panel of experts from Cal State San Bernardino examined the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the growing political influence on law enforcement in the mid-1900s. In part 3, the final installment, they discussed the fight to uphold segregation through politics, and how that affected law enforcement practices.
“If you look at the war on drugs over the 1980s and the 1990s and in to the early 2000s, if you look at drug arrest data, you would presume that drug use was heavily concentrated in communities of color,” Rafik Mohamed, Dean of CSUSB’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, said. “If you look at drug use data from other sources, you see that it’s fairly evenly distributed across the population.”
Yet, nearly 46% of federal inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses and 38% of all federal inmates are Black. Black people make up only about 12% of the U.S. population.
Over the past four decades, the U.S. has committed more than $1 trillion to the war on drugs but prioritizing police really took a turn after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
“It became more about anti-terrorism efforts, intelligence,” CSUSB criminal justice professor Zachary Powell said.
To this day, even local law enforcement is equipped with high-grade military gear.
“A police officer has unique power that we don’t,” Powell said.
Watch the segment online at “Policing in Black Communities (Part 3): The Lessons Learned.”
These news clips and others may be viewed at “In the Headlines.”