transferred between systems. So we spend work to reset the particle's position, to erase our bit of information. Erasure , an information processing task, costs work, a thermodynamic resource.What's more, suppose that you want to compute and compute and compute and compute.
and to spark new theory. erasure and sort of the reverse of that process, which is more-- let's say, the reverse of erasure can convert information into work.
And works that ask us to read their population of exclusively white characters as merely normal, universal people assert white dominance via not just the erasure of non-white people but the denial of race itself. So the absence of characters of color in Joyce's and other white creators' works-- and this is a case study here.
So you'll have to erase some. We just saw that erasure costs thermodynamic work. So computation has an intrinsic thermodynamic cost.
Anna is currently a PhD student at Cambridge where her research addresses gender and race issues in the United States with a particular focus on the pervasive erasure of Black women. Her husband is the former Mayor of Stockton and a former BOLD intern.
were supposed to do, which was to go to the school that was never going to educate them, and Blame the parents There's an erasure of blackness in Latin America.
So in this case, we might imagine Maxwell's demon takes the high-energy particles and tries to sort them to the left side of the partition and the low-energy And that erasure is going to increase the net entropy of the universe.
or "colonizing the imagination," it demonstrates that racial invisibility actually is as harmful as racial stereotyping. And such erasures are not limited to works with all-white casts, either. Publishers can even perform racial vanishing acts on books featuring characters of color.
Do you have any ideas where she might have been educated? And your research focuses on the pervasive erasure of Black women.
People ask me why and how I did it. And I'll get to the erasure part in a minute, because I do have an answer about that too.
Ralph Landauer, an information scientist at IBM, realized this in 1961. The process that we just saw is therefore called Landauer erasure . Now, what if we add quantum physics to this mix of energy and information?
of our communities. And so I started my PhD knowing I'm going to be somebody who finds other hidden figures. I'm going to be someone who addresses the erasure of Black women's stories. But that left this wide landscape of options to choose from.
We've withstood structural, historic racism that's been infused and embedded to keep us oppressed. We've withstood lynchings and beatings and the erasure of our contributions to history. But we still rise to meet the needs of the day.
We believe, though, that there are structures that you can put in place to hold people accountable. Is that something is present-- like do you see the erasure of women in black and brown communities?
We believe, though, that there are structures that you can put in place to hold people accountable. Yeah. And I think erasure often manifests in two ways.
I also think that because aesthetics are bound up in emotions, this type of restorative nostalgia cannot easily be repelled or refuted. When the imagination mingles racist imagery or racial erasures with a deep yearning for childhood, these strands become very difficult to disentangle. In other words, the unconscious racism of restorative nostalgia tends to resist analysis.
Sure, I I think the first thing that really comes to mind that I actually wanna highlight for viewers, particularly because it's so current on did it? It demonstrates, really the history of erasure , invisibility, misunderstanding. And that's the mascot controversy, actually, that it actually is deeply embedded in history. We would hear, you know, people that would say that this is a tradition or we're
Washington Redskins have decided to remove their change. The name of their simple and team name and mascot, etcetera. The offensive that seems like we knew that for generations. But if we bring it to today's times and the erasure of that history has been significant, So what we're looking for is a service for racial equity. Let me make it personal. So I'm you know, you and I are contemporaries. I grew up in New York. I've heard
Unfortunately, so many of our stories as Black women are forgotten, erased, intentionally hidden. So I thought, OK, I can address several different layers of erasure with one project. So the first one is going to be something that celebrates Black women.
And so what really stood out to me, even though I wasn't intending to build these direct connections with the sons, because again, I just thought that their lives were going to be interesting in their own right, and they absolutely were, but it made the erasure of them that much clearer. It was intentional. We actually don't know anything about these men without knowing these mother's stories.
the white lion, which came in 16 19. So I've people who know me know that I've been obsessed with that date since high school I thought about that date since high school and what that meant. And really, the power of erasure 16 19 happened. But if we don't know what happened, it's like it didn't happen. And that eraser, um, is so critical to our understanding of who we are so fast forward