The Emotional Labor of “Taking a Knee”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We center three publicly accessible images: (1) Am I not a Man and a Brother? (1787), (2) Colin Kaepernick (2017) “Taking a Knee”, (3) Mother McDowell of the Black Student in Florida Admonished for “Taking a Knee” in school (2017). The photograph of mother McDowell is included, rather than her son, who she wanted to remain anonymous across media outlets. We draw primarily from publicly accessible media and scholarship available via the Internet (museums, newscasts, scholarly repositories) to provide a composite of kneeling discourse and counter-narratives related to race (i.e., anti-slavery, abolition, anti-racism protests) and proper behavior. Each image is situated within literature supporting analysis through concepts (time, race) visual, and textual information. Rather than detailing the images, we focus on the surrounding narratives, contemporary readings, redactions, and annotations (we create or relate to) to consider emotions as part of the context, impetus, and force behind the actions captured in them. We juxtapose, redact, and critique images and texts associated with kneeling/taking a knee by men and boys racialized as Black, but not exclusively., as the practices we illustrate in response to structural racism (i.e., discipline in schools) also bring attention to events involving other students: a Black girl and an Indigenous (Inuit) boy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".