Who Holds up the Mirror? Women, Neighborhoods, and Public Education in Black Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Montreal Regional Committee of the National Congress of Black Women (NCBW), acting out of the burrow of Little Burgundy, was juggling a litany of roles in their service to Black Montrealers by the 1980s. Consisting of a mere fifty members, this non-profit had begun to show vested interest in the affordable public education of their fellow Black citizens, especially in regards to the maintenance of positive self-image in the youths of their communities. One project, “Let’s hold that mirror straight- Towards a positive Black image,” took up much of the energy of this passionate group in 1981. However, despite concerted efforts on the part of the organization and enthusiastic second parties, the event ended up being a middling success at best. This essay will consider how the failure of the “Hold That Mirror Straight” conference reflected the wider social issues plaguing Little Burgundy as a result urban renewal projects, which had been present in the neighborhood for decades by 1981. Indeed, this work will analyze the link between the conference’s lackluster success and another pivotal event which rocked the neighborhood at the end of the calendar year: the closure of the local anglophone secondary school, the Royal Arthur School. These two events, I would argue, would cast a shadow over the community for the next decade, and would mark the earliest steps towards the eventual downfall of the Negro Community Centre in 1993.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".