Yesterday I attended the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit to discuss engagement and social media. Executive Director for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence Jose Rico and Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement Julie Rodriquez set the stage by outlining their goal of increasing the number of Latino students in schools by 4.5 million in the next 10 years. From there, others jumped in with ideas on civic engagement, methodologies for outreach, and new definitions of education.

The question which officials didn’t ask, but that I find fascinating is this — If you’re targeting Latinos for educational programs, how do you determine race and ethnicity online?

HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY RACIALIZED PEOPLE ONLINE?
Before I even start in on this, I recognize how controversial this can be and how the Fourth Amendment is meant to protect us from race-related profiling. But honestly, I’ve thought about this for myself for a while and wondered about a machine-readable way to identify my own Asian-ness. Self-identification (like I just did in the last sentence) is the obvious and most accurate method.



But beyond that, other potential indicators lack validity including looking at organizational affiliations (today I’m Hispanic as per the first sentence of this post), foreign language tracking and then of course the seemingly telltale fact that I love to use the Shanghai font. None of these are accurate.That being said, even without self-identification from the user…the White House doesn’t have to start from scratch if they choose to target Latinos in education online.

According to Rico, the White House Initiative has already power mapped a list of 33 key communities for Latin Americans. I ironically just wrote a post about how you can disguise your IP address and location, but one controversial way I know that the Department of Education could tailor its services to Latinos is to target the IPs of the power mapped communities. By looking at these community IPs, the government could:
1. Find common referring organic search terms (and design content to those terms to increase relevance and usefulness);
2. Find common referring sites and social networks and do outreach through these external tools in order to increase distribution around grant program access etc.;
3. And finally, create culturally appropriate content and serve it.

The build for this would be simple, but the opt-in piece of it would not be. Although this search report would offer no more insight than a basic Google Analytics account (something all commercial content owners have for their incoming site users), even high level government tracking seems scary at a time when the Patriot Act’s surveillance procedures leave so much to interpretation.

Based on yesterday’s discussions, it’s clear that a diverse range of citizens have new implementations to the country’s solutions. The really difficult task is getting us to set aside our partisanship, dispelling anger against past and present injustices, and gaining widespread buy-in without getting caught in the weeds.

To offer up a better way to technically target Latinos for access to educational opportunities such as grants, subsidies and school programs you can comment below, sign up at La Plaza or use the #WHenCA hashtag on Twitter.