ASK Musings

Racism

“Last week, Variety reported that Kim and his co-star Grace Park would be departing the CBS procedural ahead of its eighth season, due to a dispute with CBS Television Studios to reach pay equality with co-stars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan. Insiders said Kim and Park’s final offer from the studio was 10-15% less than O’Loughlin and Caan, who each also each have lucrative back end deals on the show. Since the announcement of the duo’s departure, fans have been critical of CBS’s failure to reach parity with the series’ two Asian actors, while keeping two Caucasian stars on the show. The social media chatter comes after critics have targeted CBS for its lack of diverse leading roles for women and actors of color, in comparison to the other broadcast networks.” Daniel Dae Kim Breaks Silence After ‘Hawaii Five-0’ Pay Dispute: ‘The Path to Equality Is Rarely Easy’ (by Elizabeth Wagmeister for Variety)

Misogyny

“However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals. It got to the point where the VP of engineering had to intervene to get people to back off. I thought that maybe because I was a well-known Rubyist, other engineers were particularly interested in seeing the kind of code I was writing. So I asked Aaron Patterson, another famous Rubyist who had started at GitHub at the same time as I did, if he was experiencing a lot of scrutiny too. He said he was not.” Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub (by Coraline Ada Ehmke)

Responsibility

“As a writer and a member of the founding team of a publisher—the one where you’re reading these words—committed not only to good, honest writing and journalism, but also committed to celebrating and amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, the responsibility for what we publish is something I take very seriously.” When Your Words Are Weapons (by Ijeoma Olua for The Establishment)

Local Politics

“Though she envisioned her political career playing a role to help elect others, Oliver soon found herself as the candidate. In November 2016, she was part of a group of friends and clergy who travelled to Standing Rock. On the return trip, a friend died in a car accident. Oliver and a group of community organizers in central and south Seattle found themselves grieving, grappling with the election of Trump and reflecting on the injustices they’d just witnessed at Standing Rock. It was so glaringly apparent that the law and justice are not the same thing as you watched law enforcement openly protect corporations that were drilling on land that at that time, they had absolutely no permits to drill on,” she explained to Jezebel in May.” A Conversation With Nikkita Oliver, the Seattle Mayoral Candidate Whose Activism Spawned a Movement (by Kara Brown for Jezebel)