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Assessment methods across post-secondary STEM education are traditionally constrained by logistics and likely contribute to the widespread inequities in STEM education outcomes. As part of attempts to improve and diversify the methods used in assessment, the authors have developed a flexible and low-tech style known as ‘public exams’ based in educational best practices. Public exams attempt to authentically involve students into the process of assessment through the use of pre-released portions of the exam. Using mixed-methods research techniques at a closely matched pair of institutions (a research-intensive university and a community college classroom), we observed signals of positive impact from the public exam on student learning experiences. Public exams appear to promote deeper thought, to direct students more efficiently to the core concepts in the discipline, and to decrease student anxiety around exams. The public exam experience does not show evidence for exacerbating gaps in exam outcomes for students from underrepresented backgrounds. This suggests that public exams are worth deeper investigation as an evidence-based and effective assessment style.

Calculating Race’s fourth chapter demonstrates that race has become so highly correlated with other social statistics that actuarial science in general has developed a baked-in racial bias. Racial discrimination by proxy (e.g., zip code standing in for race) can be glimpsed in the disparate impact of data-driven decision-making in housing, healthcare, policing, sentencing, and more. Simply leaving out racial data in statistically aided decision-making distances institutions from claims of intentional discrimination, but a disparate, discriminatory impact lingers when other factors correlated with race power actuarial analyses. Chapter 4 considers how insurance law in the United States has defined the limits of acceptable discrimination. By surveying the progression of state-by-state regulations that prohibit or accept the use of race, gender, sex, sexuality, ability, age, and genetics in an industry that revolves around the ability to discriminate risk, it uncovers who the United States has historically chosen to protect.

From the mid-to-late nineteenth century, in the period after the use of branding and before the use of fingerprinting, penal institutions faced the problem of how to identify repeat offenders. In this interim, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police, developed an anthropometric system that measured the bodies of criminals at their intake and catalogued these measurements in order to identify them should they offend again. Calculating Race’s second chapter traces the importation of the Bertillon System of Classification to the United States, where its data collection practices were racialized. It then investigates University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess’s 1920s work on this data set to build a formula for sentencing and parole decisions. The resulting algorithm from Burgess’s work relied heavily on race-based Bertillon data and factored race into its recommendations for length of sentence and supervised release, installing racial statistics as a key variable in matters of criminal justice.

Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment presents the historical relationship between statistical risk assessment and race in the United States. It illustrates how, through a reliance on the variable of race, actuarial science transformed the nature of racism and, in turn, helped usher racial disparities in wealth, incarceration, and housing from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The monograph begins by investigating the development of statistical risk assessment explicitly based on race in the late-nineteenth-century life insurance industry. It then traces how such risk assessment migrated from industry to government, becoming a guiding force in parole decisions and in federal housing policy. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of “proxies” for race—statistical variables that correlate significantly with race—in order to demonstrate the persistent presence of race in risk assessment even after the anti-discrimination regulations won by the Civil Rights Movement. Offering readers a new perspective on the historical importance of actuarial science in structural racism, Calculating Race is a particularly timely contribution as Big Data and algorithmic decision-making increasingly pervade American life.

The economic collapse that set into motion the Great Depression of the 1930s was portended by mass mortgage defaults in the mid-1920s. To address this unprecedented housing crisis, New Deal legislation created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure mortgage loans. Without predecessors or peers and faced with a national emergency, the FHA turned to risk-rating experts in real estate valuation to craft underwriting policies that would shape the geography of the country and cement racial segregation in the United States for generations to come. Chapter 3 details how FHA officials utilized risk-rating standards that disqualified people of color from obtaining federally subsidized mortgage insurance. This institutional discrimination had the deleterious effect of essentially precluding people of color from obtaining middle-class America’s most important wealth-generating asset: the single-family home. Though others have written about the agency’s policies before, my analysis is notably the first to locate each version of the FHA’s underwriting manual, to take stock of each facet of race-based risk rating until the conclusion of the practice in 1947, and to analyze the agency’s effect on the lending industry thereafter.

The introduction of Calculating Race positions the process of racial formation in the context of the risk society. The relationship between race and risk stretches back to the transatlantic slave trade, an era in which enslaved Africans were insured during their voyage across the Middle Passage. Calculating Race begins with a striking account of an uprising on the ship Thames, preserved as a historical record of how the nascent insurance trade of the early modern period viewed enslaved persons as both at risk and a risk. By insuring enslaved persons against the risk of mortality and insuring the ships that carried them against insurrection, maritime slave insurance established a complex relationship between enslaved Africans and risk even before they came to the Americas. This introduction sets the stage for this relationship and previews the intersection of risk and race in the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This essay analyzes the production, text, and reception of Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to consider the potential of revolutionary cinema. It details the one-man band approach Van Peebles employed to make this radical picture outside the studio system and the unique conditions of production he cultivated to gain the autonomy of an auteur. Through an analysis of Sweetback 's cinematic space that draws on the work of Stephen Heath and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as an analysis of the film's dialogue that considers it in relation to the loquaciousness of Poitier and the silence of Eastwood, this essay argues that Van Peebles constructs a new ground on which blackness is signified. By exorcising what Roland Barthes refers to as semiotic "anchors," Sweetback forces spectators to confront the terror of uncertain signs, destabilizing Hollywood's typical representation of blackness. While Van Peebles's position as auteur allowed him to present an unreconciled, multifarious blackness with which blacks possessed mutable subjectivities and the agency to change over time, the film failed to fulfill the hopes of black power leaders. Instead, it birthed blaxploitation. Sweetback was revolutionary in its production, signification, and distribution, but Hollywood was able to poach from it because its traditional exhibition did little to educate its audience on how to interpret its complex signification. To see how this oversight could have been addressed, this article turns to discussions of viewership and education in Huey Newton, Theodor Adorno, and the theorist-filmmakers of the Third Cinema. Finally, it discusses the prospects for a revolutionary cinema that addresses the shortcomings of Sweetback and other revolutionary films such as The Hour of the Furnaces as the space of the cinema dies and social media reigns.