Posted on by Eileen Young

CloudHQ Export Emails to Google Sheets

First things first: I’m writing this blog post because CloudHQ has a promotion where if you write a blog post about them you can get the premium version of their apps free for a year.

But the corollary that is I’m willing to write at least 300 words and publicly shill because I want the premium version of the apps that much.

The only one that I’m using so far is Export Emails to Google Sheets, which I’m using for an ongoing research project on business communications related to COVID-19. That’s right, I’ve been collecting spam, promotion, sale, and closure emails – from several people – since March. It’s a really cool dataset, full of closure dates, reopening dates, messaging, personal reassurances from CEOs, and every company under the sun now selling face masks and hand sanitizer. It’s a dataset that, as of right now, consists of over 5300 emails.

As you might expect, I initially scoped the volume I’d be getting (mis-estimating by a factor of 10 and also several month), and decided that I wanted to automate as much as humanly possible. So I scoped out and tried multiple different Chrome extensions and apps that look at email inboxes. I even looked into learning enough Python to code one myself, because so many tools are aimed at wildly different things, like customer management or assessing productivity. What I needed, all I needed, but what I needed incredibly robustly, was information scraping and archiving.

The free version of the CloudHQ app does almost everything I need! It extracts the emails – with options to save the emails themselves as PDFS, fantastic for archiving – as well as the date, subject, and sender. In addition to saving the emails as PDFs, it scrapes the plain text into a field in the spreadsheet it generates. After having gone through and hand-coded some of the same data, I’m comfortable saying that it has already saved me hours upon hours of work.

The only challenge: the free version caps you at 50 a month. I . . . am not getting 50 emails a month I want to record. I’m not only getting far more than that, I have the massive backlog. I’m also really hopeful that the email support that comes with the premium version can result in getting some help with some of my more arcane data needs (since almost everything is forwarded, I don’t need the ‘from,’ I need the original sender). But it’s a robust extension with a convenient UI, and I’ve had a really positive experience using it so far.

Posted on by Eileen Young

DAY 17 – Building a Race Equity Culture

Today (yesterday but I was trying to finish a thing and accidentally worked 13 hours so time is fake) one of our reading items is AWAKE to WOKE to WORK: Building a Race Equity Culture. One of the first sentences includes the definition of race equity as “one’s racial
identity has no influence on how one fares in society.” Which. Yeah. That’s the goal. But even within that definition I think it’s worth unpacking more definitions.

Because wanting race to have no influence can invite just ignoring it as a factor, which is, I think, the opposite of what we want. Raceblind hiring is great, and something more companies should do and design for, but then – is there a support network for the people of color? Is it a hostile environment or a supportive one? End goals need midline goals, or you end up simplifying to “I don’t see color,” which ends up being a failure mode particularly for white liberals.

I think one of the midline things is just – genuinely valuing diverse perspectives? Which seems like a very progressive, liberal thing to say. But now I get to put online the point I’ve made many times in diversity discussions at the Disaster Research Center.

The William Averette Anderson Fund, named after disaster scientist Bill Anderson, promotes minority, particularly Black, participation in disaster science. I never met Bill Anderson, who was active as a sociologist and disaster scientist somewhat before I started, but he contributed immeasurably to the field. In terms of cold, hard data that is callous to diversity and the humanity of the people both gathering and providing data and uncaring of a legacy of mentorship, this is still true. Because Bill Anderson was Black, he was able to get interviews in the 1960s about the civil unrest and riots related to race that no one else would have.

Diversity enriches a field. This isn’t a sentiment, or not just a sentiment. This is a documentable fact. Valuing that diversity means that you get a better field. The reading talks about how diversity has been reduced in many cases to numbers and percentages, and therefore significantly weakened conceptually. But I’m not sure I agree that shifting the focus to the desired end state is necessarily the best solution everywhere? Though one of the ongoing issues is going to be that everything is highly variable based on location and context, which makes moving forward harder. But I think recognizing and valuing diversity is part of moving towards equity. It’s part of what the reading talks about, moving away from a white-dominant culture to one that promotes equity: everyone’s story and identity needs to be valued.

Posted on by Eileen Young

DAY 15 – Adverse Childhood Experiences and DAY 16 – The Intersection of being Black and LGBTQ

No excuses for why these two are being posted together on either side of a weekend. It is what it is.

Childhood

Racism is an Adverse Childhood Experience. They stack up to a variety of long-term consequences, to health and long-term addiction rates. Which sucks. But I think it’s also important that statistics aren’t destiny for an individual, and we can also do better as a society.

One of the reading options included a Resilience Score. Resilience is a complicated word, with a disaster background in part because structural factors – including racism – play such a part.

LGBTQ

The complications and nuances of Black identity interacting with LGBTQ identity are something I’ve read more about than most of the topics we’ve covered, because I read more social commentary on LGBTQ issues in my downtime. The Stonewall movie did everyone a disservice by having a white man as the face of it: it was trans* sex workers of color who started it. Specifically Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. And this is one of the places where an intersection can complicate things in unexpected ways: one of the stories that makes the rounds on tumblr in the lead-up to National Coming Out Day is the essay by a gay Indian man that talked about coming out not being the same for everyone and the fact that he lost his home culture when he came out in a rejection that cut deeply and broadly.

One of the readings for today talked about how LGBT workers of color end up facing multiple marginalizations.

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DAY 14 – The school to prison pipeline it’s real.

Today’s reading was this study about how black girls are disproportionately targeted for discipline in schools. In light of the semi-recent case of the Black girl who went to juvie for not doing her homework online, this was timely, but also just . . . tiring. Shit just keeps happening? And for people who live it, rather than just reading about it, it seems like it has to be perpetually exhausting. Which is part of the reason for this challenge, I guess.

In better news: the girl was released.

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DAY 12 – The Racial Wealth Gap & DAY 13 – Racialized Outcomes in Education

Late and combined because I started writing stuff but then it felt overwhelming so I did other stuff. So I did some of the journaling and thinking yesterday but never finished.

Today’s action items actually include journaling, so I think this will be longer. The first item is to seek out Black owned businesses and patronize them. Well, Lowe’s is a corporation, but the CEO is Black, and they’re doing cool stuff during lockdown. SoleRebels is an Ethiopian company, and the world’s first fair trade shoe company. When I got my contract for this fall I ordered shoes for everyone in my house because suddenly I could afford it, and they make comfortable, sustainable, ethical (to various people’s concerns, too: they have a vegan footwear line) shoes. I also did a quick Google for makeup brands by women of color and then went to my makeup subscription bag to make sure I had any of those brands that were listed checked off as ones I definitely wanted to try.

Journal or think about on your and your families experiences the work and money. What career do you have? What did your parents have? Do you or they work in a historically segregated industry? If so, how was that segregation maintained? How does that affect your family’s earning power?

Actually doing this late worked, because of my freshman year of university.

My grandfather set up a trust fund for me. There was enough in it that in high school I could comfortably plan for going to the cheapest state school in Wisconsin for four years without taking out loans. Part of the reason this was possible is that my grandfather – who met my grandmother when they were both in university, because this was an option for both of them – was an engineer before he retired.

My parents have been journalists, and there are Black people they know from J-school, so it wasn’t a completely segregated industry. They have also worked in higher education, though. So once I move from talking about my grandparents, the question of work and the question of education are tightly coupled.

Down the hall from me in fall 2007 there was a dorm room where there were two Black girls: the only two Black girls on the hall. My meal plan and dorm and tuition were covered by my trust fund; they were both on loans, and I think one of them had a work-study. Both of them had to drop out in the spring because they couldn’t afford it. I flunked out a semester after that because of depression, but I didn’t have loans to deal with, so I was able to go back, eventually, and now I’m a PhD student. I have no idea if they were able to go back, but I think this is an important example of how intergenerational wealth can work. My family could afford to send me to university unburdened by concerns about money, partly because they were university educated and had economic circumstances that allowed it.

And, like. I’m proud of the work my grandpa has done, and of my family members’ individual accomplishments. But the paths that lead to those accomplishments would have been closed or at least steeper if they weren’t white.

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DAY 11 – What is Environmental Racism?

I missed day 10 because WordPress wasn’t cooperating, but it was “How Your Race Affects Your Health” and *gestures vaguely at the current everything* so I’m not going to revisit it.

One of today’s readings was a profile on Marissa McClenton, an ambitious environmental justice scholar I had Environmental Justice in Disasters (a cross-listed graduate and undergraduate course) with an eternity ago this spring. We had a lot of really good discussions in class about some of the more egregious examples of environmental racism in the US.

The Atlantic article also linked for today’s reading is also good.

Today’s action items included joining Delaware Concerned Residents for Environmental Justice’s FB page or Delaware’s Sierra Club for local information.

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DAY 9 – Housing Equity in Your Backyard

Apparently African Americans are 52% of the homeless population in Delaware, despite being 21% of the state’s population. That’s nuts! That’s super nuts.

I used to live in a highly segregated city – it’s apparently managed to get itself off the top 10 lists, but nearby and similar city Milwaukee tops the list according to some metrics. I’d thought, somehow, that living in a state with no top entrants on the various lists I’d seen, in a fairly mixed neighborhood, that it would be in some way better here. Apparently it just sucks differently. That sucks.

Posted on by Eileen Young

DAY 8 – The intersection of race and law enforcement

For a challenge partially sparked by the murder of George Floyd, we’ve built up to the question of police murder of black people. My reading today involved looking at what reforms might work to curb it. Body cams, de-escalation training, and police departments not hiring former cops who were fired for misconduct are all mentioned.

In a sort of terrible coincidence, today I got the social media guidelines for my current job – where I’m contracted to FEMA and therefore under DHS rules. Which means I’m allowed opinions but not on the clock and not ones that imply institutional support, basically. An article I read recently discussed the results one town had when they police department hired a social worker to respond to some calls, which relates interestingly to a hashtag discussion about police funding that’s been ongoing.

Apparently Delaware now has a Law Enforcement Accountability Task Force, though, so that’s good news!

Posted on by Eileen Young

DAY 7 – Civic Engagement, it matters

Posting this a little late because it’s been a long day.

But luckily, today’s first action item was the Census, which I did already early this year. It’s important that everyone be counted! Especially people rather than citizens.

Today’s second action item was registering to vote, which I’ve done. I actually have my ballot for the Democratic primary next to me, because I registered for vote by mail for the rest of the year. This year in particular, it’s important to know your options – particularly that you can vote early at – well, when I did it in 2008 it was at the municipal building. There are voting options that do not involve waiting at a crowded polling place on election day or relying on an increasingly undercut and sabotaged USPS.

The rest of the action items:

Research candidates; check online to see who’s on your ballot this year.
Get involved with Voter Registration in Delaware. You can register people to vote by emailing Dubard McGriff with the ACLU DE @ Dubard McGriff dmcgriff@aclu-de.org who have a goal of registering 400 Delawareans in Wilmington by October 10th, NAACP Central Branch by e-mailing, Gerald Rocha Sr. glrocha1906@gmail.com, or contact the League of Women Voters to get more involved.

Sadly researching my candidates and actually filling in my vote by mail is still pending.

Posted on by Eileen Young

DAY 6 – Exploring levels of racism

Today’s reading was about the different levels on which racism can manifest. The most easily recognizable is usually interpersonal, but structural and institutional racism are both really important. The article talks about understanding historical context as part of understanding the whole picture.

It’s definitely something that comes up in disaster science, because of the environmental racism component, which is both structural and institutional. A finding that will probably stick with me forever is that race is the single most significant indicator of whether you’ll live near toxic waste. Politicians and corporations deliberately sited toxic waste dumps near communities of color, and also, historically, the more outrageous forms of redlining stuck POC near or on land that was “undesirable” – sometimes for being real close to toxic waste. We’re also coming up on the 15th anniversary of Katrina, so take a shot for every time you’ve read something that implied that Black people lived in flood-prone areas on purpose and knowing the risks. And that’s not talking about Isle de Jean Charles and the fact that Louisiana’s first climate change refugees are such in part because the Army Corps of Engineers excluded them from historic flooding and erosion protections.

. . . actually, in this context, let’s talk about Isle de Jean Charles at least in order to clarify that the community who was there was not white. A First Nation without federally recognized status (and thus protections and negotiation status), some members of the community have drawn sharp parallels to the Trail of Tears – the one that sparked the settlement of Isle de Jean Charles in the first place. There are complications now with how the community will relocate, and who and where and by what mechanism and when, and that’s what gets discussed more. But I think the baseline, the one that’s worth reflecting on right now, is that ACE deliberately excluded them as not worth protecting way back in the 1950s. Which is racist.

And this week we’re beyond self-reflection and have action items, which I think is cool. Today’s action item was finding your legislators and following them. I already follow my federal representatives on Twitter, and I’d emailed my state senator, but I went and followed him, too, and found my rep and followed him.