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    [post_date] => 2020-10-09 04:32:33
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    [post_content] => Belarusians have found a unifying crucible in their resistance to state violence.

Mass demonstrations erupted in Belarus on August 9 to protest what was widely viewed as a rigged election that gave long-time strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 26-years, a victory over the popular incumbent. The protests have continued on a daily basis for nearly two months, despite mass arrests, beatings, and torture. The largest civil society movement in Belarus’s history is shaping the future of this former Soviet bloc country.

Mikita Mikado, 34 years old, is the CEO of PandaDoc, a California-based software company. From his office in San Francisco, he is following the news from his home country of Belarus. In the midst of the nationwide protests over the result of the presidential election and a crackdown of unprecedented force, he stepped in and urged police officers to resign. Money? “We can solve it,” he promised.

Never before, Mikado said, had he felt like standing up against Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader who has been president of Belarus since 1994. The breaking point was when he watched in horror as his fellow countrymen were dragged away and beaten up by riot police.

“I knew someone who was tortured and beaten,” he said. “I could no longer stay silent and do nothing, when stun grenades were exploding on the streets.”

Mikado’s crowdfunding initiative, Protect Belarus, was successful: over the ensuing three weeks it raised money to financially support police officers who quit their jobs. Hundreds of security forces members applied for re-training in the technology industry and for financial aid.

For years, Belarus’s rapidly expanding IT industry coexisted with Lukashenko’s government, keeping out of politics while benefiting from preferential tax rates and little regulation. For many tech professionals, the luxury of having a stable and relatively well-paid job allowed them the privilege of not following politics.

That relationship was already changing ahead of the August 9 election. Valery Tsepkalo, a former Belarusian ambassador to the United States and founder of the Hi-Tech Park— the Minsk equivalent of Silicon Valley—joined the opposition. Some startups created apps to monitor vote counts and collect data on poll violations.

Young and savvy engineers, fashion designers and successful entrepreneurs joined the protests. Passivity became just what a country could no longer afford. The middle class that long flourished within the system began separating from it. Post-election violence became the last straw.

An apolitical nation fights

Middle class disenchantment with the regime became apparent during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lukashenko played down the danger posed by the virus and dismissed it as mass “psychosis.” He said it was a minor health issue that could be cured easily with a shot of vodka, or with a day of working on the farm. A mass Victory Day military parade went off as scheduled. Public gatherings were not banned. Without guidance or policy from the government, Belarusians organised what they called “the people’s quarantine”: either individuals stayed home from work, or businesses introduced work from home policies without official guidance. Lacking support from the government, dozens of local initiatives and crowdfunding efforts emerged to buy and produce medical equipment, sew protective masks and raise financial support from local and diaspora communities. In Belarus, the pandemic utterly destroyed Lukashenko’s reputation as the controller-in-chief. Despite all his bravado, the president failed spectacularly to contain the virus. More importantly, civil society proved faster, more creative and resourceful than the state. By his very inaction, the president of Belarus unintentionally galvanized ordinary people to take action. Andrej Stryzhak, a human rights activist and volunteer worker, co-founded the #ByCovid19 initiative to help doctors deal with the pandemic. An informal group of some 1,500 volunteers delivered personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical equipment, purchased with money raised through crowdfunding, to hospitals across the country. Private businesses contributed funds and masks. Restaurants donated food. Hotels provided rooms pro bono to medical workers. In May, when we spoke about the initiative, Stryzhak told me he hoped the crisis would develop trust in the country’s third sector. “I see it as gradation from dissidents to parliamentary opposition,” he said. “Even if the dissidents are being trapped, they exist. If there’s less control, they are slowly becoming civil society. Later, alternative candidates appear, after which political parties will be initiated.” As numerous initiatives and projects exploded since then, he’s emerged from all that’s taken place in recent weeks in a distinctly optimistic mood. “Alternative structures of society are being created at the moment. These structures, which citizens are forming themselves, will eventually take over the current dysfunctional politics,” Stryzhak says now. The needle has indeed moved quickly.

Unprecedented solidarity

A vibrant popular movement has unfolded in the past months in Belarus. More than 100,000 rallied against Lukashenko in Minsk each of the past seven Sundays, despite detentions and police violence, insisting that his landslide re-election in August was falsified. Unlike in previous elections, the widespread grassroots protests —the largest in the country’s history—are sustained and organized with skillful use of social media. Telegram, a social media app that often remains available even during internet outages, has become a crucial tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have swept Belarus since the election. Several channels, such as Nexta and Belarus of the Brain, have become the most popular and main tools to facilitate the protests. The crowds are coming from all walks of life. In addition to the middle class, popular public figures are joining the protests. Among the celebrity protesters are athletes and Olympic medalists who march under the banner of the Free Union of Athletes, a newly-created movement. Nearly 600 Belarusian athletes signed an open letter demanding, among other things, new elections and an end to police violence. The wave of solidarity and self-organization is unprecedented in this country. Strike committees have been formed at state enterprises across the country, even though police are arresting and fining workers. Students gather on university campuses to protest repression and censorship. Lecturers support them. Media outlets publish blank pages when journalists are detained. Local residents feel the pride in belonging and self-identification; nearly every neighbourhood has its own newly designed flag. In the largest crowdfunding campaign, Belarusians have raised more than $6 million to help those who suffered from police violence and were fired for political reasons. It is a significant amount in a country where the average salary is roughly $500—and hasn’t increased in the past decade.

New values

The tide of anger and frustration with the Belarusian authorities is longstanding. People have united in the face of blatant injustice. But why was it this particular election that proved to be the tipping point? “Now it’s different. Belarusians made a sharp leap thanks to the generational change,” says Minsk-based sociologist Alena Artsiomenka. “People who grew up in the post-Perestroika era are more inclined to contribute to the society’s well-being. Those who were brought up in more stable and safe conditions are more interested in post-materialistic values.” Technology has been essential to the movement’s growth. Crowdfunding platforms made philanthropy easier. But this is no longer considered desirable. The work of one such platform, MolaMola, came to a halt after the government shut it down. It was launched by Lukashenko’s main rival’s son, Eduard Babariko, who has been under arrest since June. The same platform was used to collect money during the pandemic and previously for civil society projects that were not related to politics. Mikita Mikado felt a desire for revenge, too, after police raided the Minsk office of PandaDoc and arrested four of the company's managers. The government subsequently blocked the company’s accounts. In order to save his employees in Belarus, Mikado left the project Protect Belarus. But this did not halt the initiative. The state’s use of violence against protesters has proved to be not only a breakthrough in the way people think about the authorities— and the Belarusian public’s reaction against police brutality— but also in the way they see many realms of day-to-day life. Belarusians have been moving away from the paternalistic culture that was the tradeoff for economic stability during the post-Soviet period. In recent years, local communities managed to preserve a historic district that was slated for demolition. Residents also protested against the construction of a plant that would pollute their environment. Belarusians have long been associated with a strong paternalistic culture. This began changing in the recent years —people took matters into their own hands. The 2020 demonstrations are not without precedent. In 2017, ordinary citizens rocked the country with widespread protests against a tax on the unemployed, a bizarre plan that would have forced those who do not officially work to pay a penalty to the state. Injustice was the main driving force for the protests; the same is true of the current protests. In response to the 2017 protests, Lukashenko initially agreed to impose a ban on the tax—only to reintroduce it at a later date. He might not have changed in the intervening years, but the country has. Belarusian society had for years seen the trust of ordinary people in one another drain away. Now it has found a unifying crucible in its resistance to violence. Self-organizing and helping one another became fundamental. A nation’s new, yet old, encounter with its autocratic leader may not be finished yet. But there is little to no chance that Belarusians will submit any longer to Lukashenko's authoritarian regime. [post_title] => Belarus's protests are fueled by an unprecedented civil society movement [post_excerpt] => For years, Belarus’s rapidly expanding IT industry coexisted with Lukashenko’s government, keeping out of politics while benefiting from preferential tax rates and little regulation. The rigged August 9 election proved to be a tipping point. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => belaruss-uprising-against-autocracy-is-fuelled-by-an-unprecedented-civil-society-movement [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=2115 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Belarus’s protests are fueled by an unprecedented civil society movement

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    [post_date] => 2020-10-01 20:06:59
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    [post_content] => The balance between a commitment to free speech and a means of preventing online abuse is elusive.

A few weeks ago, while scrolling Twitter, I came across a brewing controversy about the Netflix film Cuties, about a young girl from a conservative Muslim family in a Parisian banlieue who becomes involved with a dance crew. While director Maïmouna Doucouré—who is French-Senagalese just like the film’s protagonist—has said that the film is “sounding an alarm” about the all-too-early sexualization of girls (partly) through social media, its critics—many of whom seemed not to have seen the film—immediately objected, essentially accusing Doucouré of creating softcore porn and petitioning for the film to be removed.

Janice Turner, a columnist for The Times who is known for her “gender critical” stance, wrote a particularly scathing review of the film. In it, she conflated Cuties with the work of a charity that had, weeks earlier, put out a call for queer black youth in the U.K. to respond to a survey asking about their age, sexuality, location, and vulnerability of housing. The call, claimed Turner, violated safeguards intended to protect children’s privacy.

Turner’s critics, myself included, saw the piece as an attempt to paint the charity as sexualizing children. The sub-hed of her column stated so plainly: “Attempts to sexualise minors are always wrong but a vocal minority of gay campaigners twist concern into prejudice.”

I tweeted at Turner, accusing her of seeing sexualization where it didn’t exist, but she refused to engage on that point, repeatedly deflecting and implying that I didn’t care about safeguarding. I gave up shortly thereafter, but her followers did not: For hours after our brief exchange, they attacked me from just about every angle you can imagine.

There was a handful of reasonable comments that brought up the issue of safeguarding, but most were overtly transphobic: My attackers denied the existence of trans individuals, stated that children have no conception of gender, and implied those who are trans are simply insane. One person called me “batshit crazy,” while another accused me of having told trans people that “suicide is their only alternative to life-limiting drugs.”

Later, when I tweeted about the controversy around Cuties, one of Turner’s lackeys assumed I was a trans woman (presumably because I include “she/her” pronouns in my bio, which is a simple reflection of my gender identity) and began harassing me, calling me a man. Then that person’s followers began harassing me, in public and in DMs. I closed my laptop and curled up with a book.

***

This was not my first experience with online harassment. I am, after all, a woman on the internet—and a public one at that. Public critique for my political views (most often fair) has sometimes resulted in brigading by the critic's followers; I’ve at times spent entire weekends offline, avoiding Twitter and waiting for the controversy to blow over, as it almost always does. But this was different. For the first time, I experienced firsthand the kind of outrageous abuse that seems to follow transgender individuals wherever they go online. The next day, I logged back in and tweeted about my experience: “Someone on this hellsite mistook me for a trans woman last night and I got brigaded for a bit (thank you, block button), and holy shit I don't know how y'all deal with that all the time what the fuck.” That tweet received nearly 2,500 likes and retweets and dozens of comments both public and private. Trans followers confirmed that my one-off experience was their daily reality. One person called it “living in hell.” Others shared their tactics (“block early, block often”) and their solidarity. I was in the midst of finishing the final edits on a book that covers a number of issues related to free speech and social media, so the topic of harassment had been on my mind. But now I began to reflect more deeply on positions I had taken in the past, on my own experiences, and how those two things interacted. I was raised in New England to be tough and stoic. I didn’t talk much about my emotions growing up, nor did I feel the need. Then, soon after arriving at a university where I knew no one, I went through a breakup that threw me into a major depressive episode, unable to get out of bed. I tried calling my close friends, who were at other universities, but eventually they got sick of my late-night crying jags. I saw the university psychiatrist, who sent me home with pills after talking to me for just five minutes. They didn’t help, but eventually I found my way out of that depression. From there on out, I was Teflon: I didn’t let anything stick. My hard-won ability to slough off criticism gave me the confidence to work toward my goals but I still struggled, financially and otherwise. I decided that, in order to get ahead, I had to tuck my emotions away. By the time I became well-known for my work, my belief in free expression was near-absolute. The experiences that had led me to take this position were noble: the state-sanctioned murder of a blogger I’d been emailing with in Iran; the arrest of a friend in Tunisia, then another in Egypt and one in Syria; and helping people I knew through the asylum process in the United States. For a while, free expression was my religion. I studied government censorship and, later, the role of social media companies in governing our speech. I became one of the first experts on content moderation, and among the first to suggest that perhaps corporations aren’t the best arbiters of speech. For a long time, that stance felt unimpeachable. And then Gamergate happened. Gamergate, for readers who may not be aware, was a 2014 online harassment campaign. At first it targeted women in the gaming industry who had spoken up about sexism and misogyny in their field, but later it broadened to target loads of other women. Many say that it was a precursor, or an early warning, of the alt-right brigading we see online every day now. I ignored it at first. I was in Australia to give a series of talks; upon my return to San Francisco, I had two weeks to vacate my apartment and move to Berlin. It was not an easy time (there was plenty else going on beneath the surface that I’ll save for an eventual memoir). Since my colleagues were following Gamergate, I allowed myself to block out both the phenomenon and the feelings that the incident raised for me. Eventually, I was asked to comment and—still not having quite caught up on the details—I did, deflecting to talk about the importance of not allowing the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world to define acceptable speech. I argued that what we really needed were better tools that would enable users to control their own experiences. Over time, I recognized that I hadn’t given the victims of Gamergate their due. I focused harder on looking for solutions that would both preserve free expression and ensure that harassers—and the pain and silencing they cause to those they target—wouldn’t be tolerated. But I did so quietly, behind the scenes, unsure of what to say. I knew that the tech companies’ failure to take action was partly due to my prior statements on free speech. This latest incident over Cuties brought my previous missteps into clear focus. I still believe, as I write in my upcoming book, that corporations have far too much power over our speech, and that we, the people, should have the ultimate say in what is or is not acceptable expression. At the same time, I now understand that too many of us—on all sides—treat our perspectives as religion. We are dogmatic and inflexible. What I realized from the brigading I experienced a few weeks ago, and the conversations that took place in its aftermath, is that we must always remember to be compassionate. This is important not just for others but for ourselves as well. I now realize that part of the reason I once found it so difficult to express compassion for victims of harassment was that I was burying my own feelings, and thus couldn’t empathize with people who lacked my ability to grow a thick skin. I could intellectualize the harm of harassment, which I most certainly recognized as harm, but I found it nearly impossible to put myself in others’ shoes. Some of my well-known critics have themselves experienced intense harassment. And yet, they too have taken an approach that feels a lot like bullying—or at least punching down. To be sure, public figures should be criticized when they say something awful, particularly when they have the privilege of access to a massive platform like the New York Times Opinion page (I am thinking of the notoriously thin-skinned columnist Bret Stephens, but there are many like him). But we should also be careful to remember the humanity of others—especially when they’re willing to engage in discussion about or account for their mistakes. When it comes to harassment online and what to do about it, I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I do know: We need to listen to people when they are describing their lived experience. This is particularly true of queer and trans individuals, and people of color. We need to think about holistic solutions that start with education. We need to teach people how to stick up for victims, and how to help them fight back. And we must create better tools and architecture that pre-empt those who would engage in harassment and brigading. I am fine with booting serial harassers off social media platforms, but we also need to be careful about any solutions that fail to consider free expression. In my experience, companies all too often come at harassment with a hammer, whacking not only those who are causing real harm, but also those who are engaging in counter-speech, or sharing their experiences while quoting their harassers. This is harmful too, and we should not accept it as a reasonable tradeoff. There are many partial solutions, but we must be wary of anyone who claims to have a silver bullet; and while there are many worthy ideas out there, each has significant tradeoffs. Nor can we simply ignore harassment or wish it away. Our societies are increasingly divided, a fact that leads to more vitriol, more anger, and more hate. Social media is part of the problem, but it isn’t the whole problem. What we need is to take the holistic view, to see that social media, its architecture and design, maximize controversy for profit, and that there will never be a technological solution to stop online hate and harassment, because it is rooted not in code, but in human behavior. We cannot separate “real life” from “online." And so, whatever approach we take to combat that which ails us must be rooted in compassion.   [post_title] => The struggle to combat cyber bullying begins with compassion [post_excerpt] => Corporations do have far too much power over our speech. At the same time, too many people—on all sides—present their perspective as religion. They are dogmatic and inflexible. 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The struggle to combat cyber bullying begins with compassion

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-24 15:28:22
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    [post_content] => After years of shallow coverage, legacy media in the U.S. are finally engaging critically with white evangelical ideology. Read part one of this three-part series on the trajectory of the Christian Right; and part two.

The would-be respectable evangelical elite, which includes Beltway-based media analysts and political lobbyists who rose to power under the Reagan and Bush presidencies, have positioned themselves as Never Trumpers. But they have failed to take responsibility for their role in waging the culture wars that led to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency and subsequent consolidation of power, which happened largely on the back of the Christian Right’s unswerving support. And while majorities of all white Christian demographics voted for Trump in 2018, white evangelicals led the pack and remain America’s most Trumpist demographic.

While elite evangelicals like Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson, and David French all find Donald Trump a bridge too far, they have long supported the kind of Christian schooling that serves to indoctrinate children in patriarchal and anti-LGBTQ views, toxic purity culture, Christian nationalist history, young earth creationism, and right-wing political ideology. They also share their rank-and-file coreligionists’ obsession with banning abortion, which has served since the late 1970s as a proxy for white supremacism, as white evangelicals and other right-wingers invested in respectability felt compelled to give up overt support for racial discrimination.

Concentrated in the Republican Party since the late 1960s, white Christian America has never had to face up to its crimes. These range from supporting slavery and Jim Crow, to supporting the war crimes committed abroad post-9/11 under the presidential administration of George W. Bush—along with complicity in a predictable spike in hate crimes against Muslims at home. More recently, they include complicity in anti-Black terrorism and support for the voter suppression and “law and order” politics that Trump is counting on to win a second term in office.

Thanks to white evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support, “respectable” evangelicals have failed to keep a lid on the quiet part of their ideology; as a result, they have begun to lose control over the image of the Christian Right in the media, which means they can no longer direct the national conversation about evangelical Christianity as effectively as they used to. Although progress in this regard has been uneven, and particularly limited in major legacy outlets, a significant shift is detectable. Even if Trump loses the election this November, I hope the presence of diverse voices and critical perspectives on evangelicalism will continue to increase in the media, so that the public can begin to deal seriously with the threat authoritarian Christianity poses to democracy and human rights.

The primary barrier to covering right-wing Christianity fairly is the legacy media’s unspoken taboo on careful, critical examination of views that prominent Christians say are the product of “sincerely held religious belief.” This lack of critical coverage allows conservative Christians to get away with insisting that they are above politics; and because reporters for cable news and major media outlets fail to challenge the claim, they reinforce the white Christian supremacism that has become such an important political force.

Like freedom of the press, religious freedom is an important First Amendment right. But when believers use their faith as a bludgeon to attack othered groups and to prevent equal accommodation of members of those groups in the public square, we have moved beyond the bounds of a truly democratic approach to pluralism.

Because white evangelicals are using their religious beliefs to mobilize politically, the media must hold them to account just as they would any political movement. Advocates of democracy and human rights must make the Christian supremacism that pervades American politics visible; this is the most effective means to reclaim a robustly democratic understanding of religious liberty from the Christian Right, which defines it as their right to impose their religious beliefs on a public that does not share them.

Since 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for the flagrantly impious Trump in 2016, journalists, pundits, and commentators have scrambled to explain why. The initial flood of commentary about white evangelical support for Trump was ill-informed, presenting the Christian Right through the lens of hypocrisy; while this criticism was shallow, it was important in that it indicated the extent to which respectable evangelicals were losing their control of the Christian Right’s media image.

Eventually, critical hashtags created by former evangelicals (including myself) like #ExposeChristianSchools and #ChurchToo garnered coverage in outlets like New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press.  Liz Kineke, a religion journalist, produced Deconstructing My Religion, a documentary about ex-evangelicals for CBS Religion (I appear in the film).

More recently, New York Times religion reporter Elizabeth Dias wrote: “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” An evangelical herself, Dias has a history of uncritical, positive coverage of white evangelicals, so it is remarkable to read her critical assessment of white evangelicals in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, even if that assessment was framed very similarly to the introduction of a recent book on right-wing Christianity and gender that Dias failed to cite.

Bradley Onishi, an ex-evangelical who is Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and host of the podcast “Straight White American Jesus” (full disclosure: I have been a repeat guest), told The Conversationalist that the media still has a tendency to give disproportionate coverage to evangelicals who are critical of Trump, which he sees as “a reticence on the part of legacy outlets to be fully critical of white Christians.” He added: “We have it baked into our ether that they are good, wholesome, moral Americans who are the backbone of the country.”

Instead of exploring “the ways white evangelicals are entangled with white supremacists, white nationalists, homegrown terrorists, militias, and other anti-democratic groups,” prominent outlets take pains to represent evangelicals as largely benign, said Onishi. In his view, ex-evangelicals should be given far more media time. They know better than anyone “how and why white evangelicals became the most extreme religious group in the country when it comes to immigration, race, reproductive rights, and religious liberty.” I agree completely, because I believe in the power of stories to change minds.

The American media’s increasingly critical coverage of white evangelicals, however incomplete, has coincided with the rapid growth of the non-religious population. The latter has been driven by the Christian Right’s culture wars, which would seem to be at the root of much of the asymmetric polarization the United States has undergone in recent years. Just as Christian nationalists are concentrated in the Republican Party, a large majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to vote for Democrats. Secular Democrats could help change the ways Americans discuss religion and pluralism; and the more the party recognizes them, the more likely we are to see such changes.

Many secular Democrats are frustrated at the heavy emphasis the Democratic National Committee places on trying to reach white Christians, the vast majority of whom will certainly vote for Trump again this year. But the Democrats have recently taken some serious steps toward embracing the nonreligious vote. These include the DNC’s 2019 Resolution 38, which recognizes the contributions of nonreligious Americans, and the appointment of Sarah Levin, formerly of Secular Coalition for America, as co-chair of the DNC’s Interfaith Council. Levin deserves much credit for pushing the DNC to include secular voters, which could create a positive feedback loop with the press that will further weaken respectable evangelicals’ control of their movement’s narrative.

Levin told The Conversationalist that the rot at the core of conservative evangelicalism “has been exposed to a new level in the eyes of everyday Americans,” who now see clearly “what it looks like when a narrow set of beliefs is privileged, when religious liberty is weaponized to undermine civil rights, when patriotic pluralism is replaced with Christian nationalism, and [how it affects] our foreign policy.”

The disastrous impact on American democracy of an empowered Christian Right could easily, as Levin points out, have been predicted. Many secularists are ex-evangelicals who know white evangelical subculture intimately have been sounding alarm bells for years; they should be part of the national conversation. The lesson of the Trump years could and should be that if the media learns, with the help of ex-evangelicals, to cover the danger of Christian nationalism accurately, it could make possible a healthier democratic future in the United States of America.
    [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism, part 3
    [post_excerpt] => In the third of a three-part series about the trajectory of Christian nationalism to its current powerful position, the author looks at the media's failure to engage critically with white evangelical ideology.
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The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism, part 3

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-17 16:30:03
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    [post_content] => The curious case of the Russian grassroots movement that borrows racist and alt-right language from America to advocate for the rights of white anti-Putin protesters.

As a Black woman who is an historian of the Soviet Union and Russia, the Black Lives Matter movement has put me in an interesting position. The ongoing demonstrations taking place across the United States illuminate the depths of the physical, spiritual, and emotional violence that African Americans and ethnic minorities experience. The Trump administration’s response is callous and includes the use federal power to violate the protestors’ first amendment rights. In Russia, meanwhile, while responses to the protests have ranged from empathy to victim-blaming, one hashtag caught my attention: it is called “Russian Lives Matter.”

Despite its name, RLM does not seek solidarity with BLM. The Russian version calls out police violence committed against anti-government protestors. To be clear: police also target ethnic minorities, such as migrants from Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan, but RLM advocates specifically for ethnic (i.e., white) Russian citizens. The largely overlooked element in the Russian Lives Matter movement is its “borrowing” of American racist and alt-right language.

While a Twitter search for the hashtag Russian Lives Matter brings up a few responses in support of the demonstrations in America, many more regurgitate the Kremlin’s messaging, which mirrors the right-wing American response—i.e., that protestors are criminals and looters, and that the demonstrations are contrary to the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The latter is a popular argument in both the United States and Russia, with the right using it to dismiss the validity of the contemporary struggle for civil rights—not realizing that Dr. King was murdered for his perceived radicalism.

In the United States, the right describes Black Lives Matter protests as riots, planned violence, and “poison.” This language is meant to portray the movement as anything but what it is—i.e., one that demands accountability and reform of the public institutions that maintain the racist status quo.

Many Russians deny that racism exists in their country. Alina Polyanskikh, a Russian television presenter who is Black, described her experiences with overt racism, and with those who deny its existence, in a recent blog post. When Afro-Russian blogger Maria Tunkara posted on her social media accounts about her experiences with racism, she was threatened and even investigated by the prosecutor in St. Petersburg. Popular Russian memes about the American protests compare African Americans to apes and call them thugs; the vilest make fun of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of American police.

My first reaction to these images was disgust, then sadness. They reminded me of my first experience with racism in Eastern Europe, when in spring 2011, I spent a couple of weeks in Varna, Bulgaria, volunteering at an orphanage for Roma children. On one of our first visits, the children (a range of elementary-aged kids) encircled me and called me a “n----r” and “monkey” to the tune of “Ring Around the Rosie.” I was mortified and deeply hurt; seeing my reaction, one of the kids ran off to tell the orphanage director, who made the other children apologize. I did not understand how children in Bulgaria knew the racist slurs that whites had directed against me when I was growing up in southeast Texas in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, almost ten years after my experience at the orphanage in Bulgaria, I see the people who inhabit the corners of the Russian-language internet using the same slurs.

American ideas of racism and the racist undercurrent of conservative populism have a transnational impact that is now felt in Russia. As Natalia Antonova wrote in the early months of the Trump administration, many American racists see Russia as a “white man’s paradise” where there is no political correctness, no vocal ethnic minority demanding rights, and no legal protections for the LGBTQ community. An exploration of the connections between American and Russian white supremacist groups provides further insight into this phenomenon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Hatewatch initiative has documented the close relationship between white supremacist groups in Russia and the United States. In 2018, members of League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist group, launched a Russian-language version of their organization’s website. Michael Hill, the League’s leader, said that Russians and American white supremacists have in common “real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion.” This idea of a shared culture or blood is a dog whistle for a shared white race.

The SPLC also examined the “strange alliance” between Russian Orthodox monarchists and radical white Evangelicals in the annual meeting of the World Congress of Families (WCF). The WCF is an ultra-conservative religious group; its goals include promoting anti-LGBTQ legislation. Participants in the group include far-right and nationalist groups across the United States, Europe, and Eastern Europe, all committed to white supremacism. In this case, Russia reflects American racist ideology.

Claims of a shared culture and religion notwithstanding, the image of a “white paradise” is belied by the numbers that illustrate its ethnic diversity. Russia is home to hundreds of ethnic minorities that speak over 100 languages. It has not seen the mass protests against racism that spread across Western Europe since the murder of George Floyd, but Afro-Russians, Africans, and Central Asians who live in Russia have spoken out and led discussions about their experiences of racism and prejudice.

These discussions can complicate our understandings of how racism assimilates into the relatively unique context of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. Russia does not have a history of institutionalized racism against people of color (POC) like those of the United States and the former imperial states of Europe. This is not to erase the treatment of Jews, and people from the Caucasus and Central Asia who had long been targets of institutional racism and oppression in the Russian empire. In fact, the Soviet Union did not track race in its censuses. People were classified by their nationality; thus, their race was not even a possibility of official identification. This fact lends itself to current understandings of racism and prejudice in Russia.

In contemporary Russia, POC are called racial slurs, denied housing, violently beaten, and sometimes killed. Acquaintances from Russia and Ukraine have posited that these documented cases of racism are manifestations of xenophobia—i.e., that POC are not trusted or are not treated as equals because they are outsiders. But this logic illustrates the greater issue. It shows that people who have dark skin, even if they were born in Russia or are permanent residents, are still excluded from the dominant concept of who is Russian.

There is a Janus-like dichotomy when it comes to Western media portrayals of Russia. Some American conservatives see Russia as a paradise for white heterosexuals, while some American liberals see Russia as an authoritarian regime plotting to destroy U.S. democracy. From my own relatively unique position, I see in Russia a mirror of the United States.

The language and logic of racism in Russia, particularly toward Black people, is not an organic development. Throughout the Soviet period, African American and African people visited, studied, and lived in a country with relatively few incidents of race-based violence (although one African student was murdered in 1963). Even the use of racist language was different. Central Asians were called “chornyi” (black) as a slur, but Blacks were called “negr” (similar to “negro,” but without the negative connotations the word carried in the U.S..)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian lexicon of racism has absorbed elements from America. If Americans and Russians can take away any lessons from this development, it is that anti-racist forces in both countries need to engage with one another and build alliances. Because the forces of white supremacy certainly have.
    [post_title] => Russia as a mirror of American racism
    [post_excerpt] => Some American conservatives see Russia as a paradise for white heterosexuals, while some American liberals see Russia as an authoritarian regime plotting to destroy U.S. democracy. From her own relatively unique position as a Black American who studies Russia, the author sees in Russia a mirror of the United States.
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Russia as a mirror of American racism

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    [post_content] => Being able to vote is rarely the reason people choose to become citizens.

It’s an election year, the most momentous of this century, possibly for the U.S., in the last 50 or 60 years. Eager to vote, many residents are rushing to apply for and win citizenship, with 126,000 ready to take the oath that will offer them a plethora of new privileges.

Millions more are not.

The process is neither simple nor quick, as Amy Zhang recently wrote in The New York Times: “filling out a 20-page application, paying almost a thousand dollars, organizing piles of supporting documents, planning my life around five years of residency requirements and waiting another two — as well as F.B.I. background checks, InfoPass appointments and a civics test.”

Other obstacles prevent some long-time residents from making this move. If a naturalized foreigner, (even the word “naturalized” being one that some find abhorrent), repatriates or permanently leaves the U.S., they’ll still owe income tax to the U.S. government until or unless they renounce their American citizenship or even their green card.

But being able to vote is in fact rarely the reason people choose to become citizens, said Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She’s an expert on immigration and author of 19 books on the subject. “They mostly want citizenship for instrumental reasons,” Foner said. “They don’t want to get deported. If they’re citizens, they can sponsor their parents and minor children. Very few people become citizens because they want to vote.”

Having full citizenship does offer important protections, she said, like losing anxiety over “a change in laws. There’s a fear about that.”

The very high cost of acquiring U.S. citizenship – which has risen 83 percent lately — is an inhibiting factor, she adds. “The expense is very high! [rising to $1,170 as of October 2.] And some people are unsure of their English and the test they have to take.”

Thanks to current policies under Trump, “citizenship rates are not that high,” Foner said. “They’re higher in Canada which encourages citizenship and offers classes while the Trump administration is actively discouraging it.”

No matter how long they live in the U.S., often married to an American, maybe raising their American-born children, some remain determinedly faithful to their original roots and passport. Fiona Young-Brown, 47, a writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her American husband, grew up in England, her accent still strong after 22 years in the U.S. A global traveler who met her husband when both were teaching English for three years in remote areas of Japan, Young-Brown first came to the U.S,  in 1993 as an exchange student at the University of Iowa. Coming to live in the U.S. has offered her professional opportunities and social freedom she knew she couldn’t have found in class-conscious England, she said.

“I grew up in a working-class town and we were always working class, living paycheck to paycheck. I’m the first college graduate in my family.” Watching American TV in the 70s and 80s “it always seemed so glamorous and exciting, just this place where you make your own future, a blank slate where you were free to re-invent yourself,” she adds. Even at 13, she wrote to the U.S. embassy in London about how to obtain a visa.

She had attended a local prep school in England as a child on full scholarship, but the inevitable class differences reminded her daily how inescapable they were. “America was going to be a place where that wasn’t an issue,” Young-Brown said. That proved to be true, but her initial optimism has faded.

Today, even after decades in the U.S., and a thriving writing career, she’s still not interested in citizenship. “America is definitely not the same as when I got here,” she said. “It’s become a much crueler country, much meaner, with more delight in kicking people who are down. It’s not a place to dream but a place you’ll struggle, and you’ll never make it anyway. To take citizenship at this point feels like an endorsement of all this shit that’s going on. To wave a little flag would feel hypocritical and completely tasteless.”

If she were single, she said, “I would have left a long time ago,” but her husband has deep roots in Kentucky, parents in poor health and, now with Brexit, she faces a much more complicated path to repatriation.

For Kevin McGilly, a 55-year-old gay married Canadian in Washington, D.C., there’s a powerful attachment to the U.S. in the form of the Black teenager he and his husband are adopting. Although he’s lived in the U.S. for many years, he still takes “existential pleasure in being Canadian. The two countries look similar, but underneath things are very very different.” Now at a point in their careers they enjoy more mobility, he and his husband have seriously discussed whether or not to return to Canada. “If Trump’s re-elected, it’s a very serious prospect,” he said.

Taking citizenship, as anyone considering it quickly learns–even if you can retain dual citizenship—means literally formally renouncing allegiance to your country of origin. “I love this country and am grateful,” he said of the U.S., but he doesn’t want to take a further step “because of what you do to become a citizen – stand in front of a magistrate and take an oath to abjure your former country. That stopped me cold. I’m not going to say I’m no longer Canadian, even if it’s pro forma.”

Other requirements were off-putting as well, he said, like having to list all the groups you’ve ever belonged to and every country you’ve visited and when. “It’s ridiculous!” And you have to swear that you’re not a Communist, a “1950s language” McGilly calls silly in today’s era.

And yet, he wishes he could vote, as he calls himself “a political animal” – instead channeling his energies into canvassing and registering voters for the candidates he believes in.

The first time Inge de Vries Harding, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, came to the U.S. she was only three-and-a-half, when her Dutch father got a job in San Diego, and she has spent most of her life living in the U.S. But at 16 she also spent three years living in the Netherlands because her brothers were then 18 and 19, and her mother said, “there was no way her boys were going to fight in Vietnam.” Living in Holland was difficult after being so accustomed to American freedoms, she said, and she was relieved to return to the U.S., where she trained as a pediatric nurse, married an American and had two sons in the U.S. In 2015 and 2016 she “very seriously considered” moving to Vancouver, Canada, thanks to its “very different mindset” but there were too many practical obstacles.

Now, still refusing to take U.S. citizenship, Harding remains rooted by family in the country. “For me it’s very simple,  I have children and grandchildren here. I’m not  going anywhere.” The few times she considered becoming a U.S. citizen she was put off by  “too much pomp and circumstance.” She has since been inhibited again by the “fairly large expense. I sometimes wish I could vote, but not enough to take that step. You actually have to denounce your country. I can’t do that! I’m proud of my Dutch heritage.”

For immigration attorney David H. Nachman, managing partner of the New Jersey firm Nachman, Phulwani, Zimovcak (NPZ) Law Group, P.C., people who cling to their cultural roots — even after decades living in the U.S. —form a large part of his practice.

“It’s related to how people feel about their cultures. None of my Japanese clients want to become citizens because it goes against their culture. Japanese are fiercely nationalistic and the French are the same way. Even getting a green card is seen as giving something up of their heritage so they don’t want to do that,” he said.

To help these clients, Nachman can offer options like an E-1 or E-2 visa, which allows permanent residence to those who can produce a solid business plan, show sufficient capital to invest in it and eventually grow their business enough to hire Americans.

“The vast majority who don’t want citizenship plan to work here temporarily and then go home,” he said.
    [post_title] => To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump
    [post_excerpt] => Taking citizenship, as anyone considering it quickly learns–even if you can retain dual citizenship—means literally formally renouncing allegiance to your country of origin.
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To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump

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    [post_content] => Elite evangelicals who oppose the current president built their careers on the culture wars that brought him to power.

For my July column at The Conversationalist, I began exploring the failures of what I call “respectable” evangelicalism—that is, the kind that is associated with a prestigious professional pedigree of some sort and an investment in civility politics. The members of this conservative Christian subculture have established a friendly-seeming presence across prominent liberal media outlets, from the major network television news broadcasts to The New York Times and the Washington Post. Because they have easy and regular access to these platforms, PR-savvy commentators from within the conservative Christian community can claim that their fellow white evangelicals are an unfairly maligned and misunderstood demographic, sincerely motivated by moral convictions about abortion and a fear of losing their “religious freedom.” Liberals, in other words, should empathize with them.

This framing, which has contributed mightily to the normalization of extremism, still dominates the American discourse. But the majority of white evangelicals are ostentatiously enthusiastic for Donald Trump; their unwavering support for the president is accompanied by a remarkable statistical about-face on the question of whether a leader’s immoral private life can coexist with an ethical public and professional life, a fact that has certainly thrown a wrench in the gears of the evangelical PR machine.

Respectable evangelicals are losing their ability to control the narrative, which is an important development that I will examine in next month’s column. This month, the subject is the failure of respectable evangelicals to accept responsibility for the harm they have done to our society and our polity. Theirs is an ethical failure; it reveals the rot at the very center of the conservative evangelical project over the last half century.

In my previous column I examined the ways in which evangelical public figures, particularly Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, have failed to convince their coreligionists that unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump reflects poorly on evangelicalism. Wehner’s career as a GOP operative goes back to the Reagan administration, a connection of which he remains proud. Despite the hagiographic image the media has built of President Reagan, he was in many ways a proto-Trump. Reagan was catapulted to power in part thanks to the efforts of a then newly surging Christian Right, whose foot soldiers were moved by his anti-government rhetoric and projection of “cowboy” masculinity.

During the 1980 presidential campaign Reagan even used the slogan “let’s make America great again.” It was that election that set the United States on its trajectory toward Trumpism. Perhaps there is no better symbol of what Reaganite conservativism always was than the popular Soviet defector and Cold War comedian, Yakov Smirnoff, who, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, opposed a mandatory mask policy in his adopted hometown of Branson, Missouri. The town is a sort of geriatric evangelical Las Vegas—at least in terms of the entertainment it offers to tourists, if not so much the libertinism. “What a country,” indeed.

Gerson acknowledged in an April 2018 article for The Atlantic that evangelical Trump supporters “have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism,” but in the same piece he disingenuously implied that the nineteenth-century history of evangelicalism lies entirely in the abolitionist movement. In fact today’s white evangelicalism is much more a descendant of slaveholder Christianity, which claimed to have found its justification for human bondage in the Bible.

Gerson has not, as far as I know, ever expressed regret for his work in the George W. Bush administration, the politics of which—his politics—helped pave the way for the rise of Trump. The disastrous Iraq war boosted paranoia in the United States; its legacy is a climate of permanent fear, the flames of which the GOP fanned briskly after 9/11. The path from “truthiness” to post-truth is short. But please, sir, continue to wring your hands about how alienated “religious voters” are by Kamala Harris’s record on abortion while the country burns, in large part thanks to a movement you helped build.

Around the same time I was writing about Gerson and Wehner, I published related analysis in Religion Dispatches focusing on the failure of evangelical commentators David French and Ed Stetzer to dissuade rank-and-file white evangelicals from embracing conspiracy theories and spreading disinformation. The almost desperate tone of French and especially Stetzer in their commentary belies, perhaps, a sense at least of embarrassment, if not guilt, about how far into the post-truth wilderness their coreligionists have proven willing to go. What I do not see from them, or other similar commentators, is any serious attempt at self-reflection on the role they played in creating this state of affairs.

Stetzer scolds his fellow evangelicals for their “gullibility,” but not for their paranoid “mistrust of media and government.” According to Stetzer, all evangelicals need is a little more “discernment,” a perfectly vague concept he does little to fill with specific applicable content. He also invokes the Ninth Commandment’s injunction against bearing false witness and worries that the evangelical “witness” is being harmed, a tack that will fail to get results for reasons I explored in last month’s column. Meanwhile, French unconvincingly proffers his own supposed solution to the issue of evangelicals embracing QAnon and Bill Gates nonsense. If evangelical churches were simply to preach a better “political theology,” he maintains, one predicated on a robust understanding of the Ninth Commandment, the issue would be resolved.Clearly, neither man is willing to dig down to the roots of the problem—namely, the conservative evangelical theology that, as scholars in religious studies and sociology have demonstrated, was developed within, and with the purpose of justifying, an unjust hierarchical social order. Although many evangelicals with pretensions to respectability would deny they are racist, conservative evangelical thinking places men above women, white people above racial minorities, and straight people above LGBTQ people; it also emphasizes absolute parental authority over children and prescribes corporal punishment.

In other words, white evangelical subculture is a perfect recipe for authoritarianism. This is reflected in the many revelations, in recent years, of a culture of sexual misconduct and coverups.

Stetzer holds a prominent position at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution that made headlines in recent years for firing a woman hired to “support” LGBTQ students, essentially because she turned out to be “too gay,” and for ousting the only tenured African-American woman in the history of the school for the manner in which she chose to express solidarity with Muslims at a time of surging Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate crimes. Evangelical colleges such as Wheaton depend on right-wing parents and donors who make sure the schools enforce social conservative orthodoxy, even if, quietly, some professors teach “controversial” subjects, such as evolution, psychology, and even human sexuality more or less responsibly—though always at the risk of becoming too visible and thus being purged.

These colleges depend on K-12 Christian schools feeding into them, which brings us back to French, who has a record of staunchly defending them, despite the fact that they discriminate against LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff. They also teach the sort of “alternative facts” that constitute, ahem, false witness. Be that as it may, French proudly notes that he sent his own children to a Christian school, where he served as chairman of the board. As openly queer Florida State Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-Orlando) noted in a recent webinar hosted by Secular Democrats of America, at least 83 Christian schools in Florida that receive taxpayer funding through vouchers have policies in writing that they will expel openly gay or trans students. Typically, such schools also teach young earth creationism and a version of history distorted by Christian nationalism. Is it any wonder that many children socialized in these schools—as I was, by the way—emerge ready to embrace conspiracy theories?

The refusal of elite evangelicals to accept any responsibility for the harm they have done by encouraging and pursuing the Christian Right’s culture wars agenda reveals the rot at the core of the entire conservative evangelical project over the last half century.

The consequences of culture warring include paving the way for the rise of President Trump, whom #NeverTrump evangelicals now seek to scapegoat due to his penchant for saying the quiet part of their ideology out loud. But they are also much broader, affecting everything from the problems of LGBTQ youth homelessness and suicide, to our country’s failures to address urgent problems in the areas of climate change and public health, to our lack of regard, as the only United Nations member state not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, for children’s rights to a robust education and to freedom from abuse and neglect.

America’s respectable evangelicals, still upheld by establishment media as commentators who deserve to be taken seriously, will not have any sort of “come to Jesus” moment over the harm they have done. If, however, enough Americans demand that those of us who have suffered that harm in various ways should be treated as stakeholders in the relevant discussions, it might be possible to compel them to face uncomfortable realities. In any case, sustained public pressure over their lack of accountability will likely be necessary if the United States is to have a healthy democratic future.
    [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism: part 2
    [post_excerpt] => The refusal of elite evangelicals to accept any responsibility for the harm they have done by encouraging and pursuing the Christian Right’s culture wars agenda reveals the rot at the core of the entire conservative evangelical project over the last half century.
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https://conversationalist.org/2020/04/30/jesus-is-my-vaccine-culture-wars-coronavirus-and-the-2020-election/
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The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism: part 2

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    [post_content] => With just 89 days left before the presidential election, we need more grassroots community-led political spectacle grounded in culture and pluralism.

The morning before July 4th, a group of artists and activists working together under the banner of the project “XMAP: In Plain Sight” sent flights throughout various parts of the United States to skytype messages in defense of immigrants incarcerated in detention facilities. These multicultural, multilingual messages -- such as “Care Not Cages,” “Azadi” (“Freedom,” Urdu/Hindi)  “Lespwa Ak Libete” (“Hope and Freedom,” Haitian Creole)  “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“All Are Related,” Lakota) and “Nos Vemos Libres” (“We Will See Each Other Free,” Spanish) — conveyed hope, resistance, and solidarity. They also received significant attention from legacy media outlets like the New York Times, L.A. Times, and CNN—and on social media

That same night, at Mount Rushmore (on stolen Lakota Sioux land), the president of the United States threw a populist pageant. Each detail of the event, from his nativist and racist speech to the grandiose setting, was designed to inflame his base’s desire to pull the country deeper into white nationalism and isolationism. While Native American activists protested outside the event, he ignored people lost to the raging coronavirus pandemic and those suffering under impending economic collapse, and explicitly denigrated people fighting for racial justice. The spectacle was aimed to bolster his failing popularity by stoking fears of a culture war created and driven by his own administration.  

The two events were bipolar political spectacles. The Mount Rushmore event was fascist propaganda grounded in populism and nativism; XMAP:IPS was community-led mobilization grounded in culture and pluralism.

With just 89 days left before the presidential election, we need more of the latter. 

The world is in a fragile state, as its peoples confront multiple catastrophes simultaneously— the coronavirus pandemic, mass political uprisings, forced displacement caused by climate change and war, and massive inequality. In the United States, these interlocking crises are exacerbated by a government fast descending into fascism, sacrificing lives for cheap political points as the GDP craters and millions hover near poverty. 

Past administrations weakened the immigration system, the issue XMAP:IPS addresses. But the Trump administration, with its short-sighted and cruel policies, has caused it to degrade almost completely into brutality. As of May 2020 there are over 25,000 immigrants in detention, all denied protections against COVID-19. The current government has eroded protections for asylum seekers; it has also attempted to ban certain minority populations, roll back the protections offered to recipients of DACA (children of undocumented immigrants), and deport foreign students—all while continuing to threaten immigrant families with forced separation of children from their parents. 

And then there are persistent calls to build a wall: Trump’s “big, beautiful” wall, which serves as a billboard for the administration’s xenophobia.

And that’s the key. So much of what emanates from the White House is bluster and stunt. As election season heats up, the administration is ramping up the political theater. In the month since the July 4th weekend, he and his daughter Ivanka posed with cans of Goya beans to indicate their support for the company’s CEO, whose controversial pro-Trump remarks led to calls from Latinos to boycott the company’s products. He held what could only be called a campaign rally in the Rose Garden, despite the long-observed norm by which incumbent presidents refrained from electioneering at the White House. Later the same week, there were pickup trucks on the South Lawn held up by a crane emblazoned with “Trump Administration.” Even his use of social media is a sort of ongoing digital spectacle. Trump’s recent tweets — which range from claiming the election should be postponed to attempting to ban Tiktok — fix the attention of the media, which chases them like a kitten with a ball of yarn and amplifies them in an endless cycle. 

But just because these are stunts doesn’t mean they can be ignored. The administration is turning violations of basic rights into a series of antics to push the window of acceptability while manipulating our gaze away from the next violation. And as the tide appears to be turning, their tools against falling poll numbers will be voter suppression, attempts at election invalidation, and dialing up their culture war rhetoric. The stakes around the elections—which, despite the U.S.’s declining stature in the international arena, will be one of the most consequential global political events in recent history—couldn’t be higher. 

We need to fight it all, in the courts, on our airwaves, in the press — and also in the streets and in the public imagination. For this last one, we need to mount spectacles of our own. 

There is a long-standing tradition, domestically and internationally, of community-led cultural intervention — a social relation amongst people, mediated by images”  — crafted in the language of aesthetic political resistance and radical community. It is an essential tool of nonviolent action. ACT UP, the grassroots movement to find a cure for AIDS, is particularly well known in the United States. More recent examples can be seen in South Korea, Armenia and Argentina, where culture-based demonstrations have been instrumental in pushing movements towards their goals.

I haven’t always supported political spectacle as practiced in the United States. Too often it is generated from outside an affected community, such as last decade’s Kony 2012. When imposed on a community’s needs and demands, grand gestures can be paternalistic, whitewashed, corporate stunts, such as Paving for Pizzas, or Refugee Nation, mounted by the same advertising firm that refused to stop working with Customs and Border Patrol, the US agency responsible for menacing immigrants. These types of actions suck time and energy away from the actual work that leads to positive social change. And as with the president, authoritarians and fascists have historically relied on it as a means of delineating and manifesting ideology and to distract a populace from larger social ills. 

But when the purpose of political theater is to get people to engage with grassroots movements for change, it can be an effective tool for strengthening coalitions. When grounded in participatory democracy and cultural expression, the planning and implementation process of these events are an effective means of connecting people. This is what my team at XMAP:IPS had in mind when we created the strategy for our action in immigration. 

We built the project predicated on three commitments: First, to amplify the voices of immigrants. Second, to be intersectional in the makeup of the production team and the invited contributors. Third, to partner with a network of national and local activists and organizations working directly with affected communities, and provide a new way for them to collaborate with each other. Highlighting their calls to action helped attract attention and resources for their work. This is how we captured the public square.

Ours was one of several interventions that captured media attention this summer. Black Lives Matter protesters have peacefully claimed the streets: they turned Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and 125th Street in Harlem into outdoor dance parties; in Washington, DC they created an outdoor yoga studio. In Minnesota an Aztec dance group paid tribute to George Floyd with performance, and a group in Atlanta honored John Lewis with dance. Artists turned slogans of resistance into public art. K-Pop stans — Korean pop music fans, many of whom have turned to activism -- were joined by American TikTok teens in culture jamming the president’s June 20th Tulsa rally. In a signal they are watching and using the tools they have at their disposal to activate on current political events, they rapidly spread messages over social media channels to reserve seats in the stadium. The president’s campaign staff claimed a million people would attend. Instead, only 6,200 showed up. The president was despondent -- and the culture jam achieved its goal. 

Each of these actions is a statement. It is a reminder that none of this is okay -- but that we might be able to come together to fight it. 

In a time of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by grand visions of change. 

These actions are fuel to our organizing power. They can be even more effective in firing up the collective imagination if they are connected, networked, and sustainably resourced. Driven by urgency and a political philosophy of interconnectedness, artists and activists too often fight without income or safety nets. Currently, legacy media outlets are giving far more coverage to the spectacle of the Trump administration and the GOP, than they are to the spectacles mounted by grassroots movements for social justice. 

And yet, despite the lack of attention paid by the legacy media, those very movements — for Black Lives, for the climate, for the displaced and detained — are currently fighting to turn the public gaze to calls for justice. In the tradition of past cultural activations stretching from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom through to the establishment of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington DC and painting the sky with messages of solidarity, our movements are using culture and community to hold the public square. 

We are at a critical moment in history. It requires us to continue using art as a foundation of social change and community building. We need support to allow people to stand up in a different way and create the space to do so, to use public dialogue to reignite compassion and build a collective vision for the country. Our interventions leading up to November can apply a different kind of pressure and allow us to dream beyond the election. Imagine the community engagement over the coming months if we were able to mount a coordinated series of local and national cultural activations.

With 89 days left until the election, we could lead the country through song, dance, art, and flight into a just future. Let’s give it to them. In the words of the late John Lewis, let’s find a way to get in the way. Let’s go big. 

 
    [post_title] => Radical community is the way to counter the Trumpian populist spectacle
    [post_excerpt] => We are at a critical moment in history. It requires us to continue using art as a foundation of social change and community building. We need support to allow people to stand up in a different way and create the space to do so, to use public dialogue to reignite compassion and build a collective vision for the country.
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Radical community is the way to counter the Trumpian populist spectacle

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    [post_date] => 2020-07-30 09:31:44
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    [post_content] => Trump did not cause the rise of authoritarian Christianity. He is its symptom.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, prominent conservative commentator Peter Wehner, who worked for the Reagan and both Bush administrations, lamented the “Faustian bargain” his fellow white evangelicals have made in aligning themselves with Donald Trump. But the coreligionists Wehner finds so problematic represent the base that made his own high-profile career possible, and they do not agree that they are dealing with the devil. That the vast majority of white evangelicals have embraced Trump has caused prominent evangelicals invested in respectability, like Wehner and Michael Gerson of The Washington Post, considerable consternation. Gerson also played an influential role in the George W. Bush administration, and his hand wringing over the alliance between the Christian Right and Trump likely represents concern for his own legacy and that of “compassionate conservatism.”

The fear is not misplaced. One key lesson the American public should take away from the Trump years is precisely that the project of “respectable evangelicalism,” to which men like Wehner and Gerson have devoted much of their careers, has emphatically failed.

Specifically, the avatars of this “genteel” conservative Christianity have failed in three interrelated ways:
  1. they have failed to convince their coreligionists that supporting Trump is hypocritical or damaging;
  2. they have failed to take responsibility for the harm they have done by encouraging the culture wars and trying to put a benevolent face on them;
  3. they have failed to maintain control of the national conversation around evangelicalism to the extent they once did, which contributed to the major U.S. media’s tendency to normalize extremism.
If the United States is to have a healthy democratic future, Americans will have to reckon with the consequences of these failures. Wehner and company still represent the conventional wisdom, but their hold on the dominant narrative is cracking. Increasingly, ex-evangelical and other critical voices are breaking through, because the would-be respectable conservative Christians have failed to provide a satisfying answer to the nagging American question, “What’s wrong with evangelicals?” I will be devoting this and my two upcoming monthly columns here to addressing each of these three failures, starting with the first: the failure of the Wehners and Gersons of the world to influence white evangelicals away from support for Trump. As I will argue in subsequent months, this failure is essentially a symptom—a reflection of respectable evangelicals’ complicity in fueling the culture wars, which they can no longer contain. The fallout from the culture wars has also finally allowed ex-evangelicals to begin to be heard in the public sphere. Wehner argues that Trump is a cause of authoritarian Christianity’s rise, rather than the symptom of a decades-old movement, which he helped build, that is centered implicitly around protecting white privilege and explicitly around paranoid sexuality politics. In his recent article, Wehner writes, “The Trump presidency… has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement.” He is particularly concerned with the reputation, or “witness,” of evangelicals, which is vitally important to members of a faith community grounded largely in valorizing the conversion experience and the concomitant drive to convert others. But while the reputation of the evangelical movement has deservedly suffered greatly in the Trump era, we now have the data to show that, despite warnings from men like Wehner and Gerson, most conservative evangelicals simply don’t see this. The vast majority of white evangelicals support Trump because they believe he is doing the will of God. There is some disagreement among them over whether Trump is a Christian or simply an irreligious man willing to fight for Christians, but his white evangelical base does not doubt that the president fights for them. Of course, when they maintain he fights for Christians, they mean Christians “of the right sort”—i.e., those who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion, and who dislike immigrants and refugees. If a large, powerful body of Christians insists that backing a strongman credibly accused of sexually assaulting numerous women in order to grab power is Christian behavior, then, empirically, it is Christian behavior. Religions are complex cultural systems with traditions and texts that are subject to communal mediation and interpretation, which means that well-meaning liberals who dub Christian Trump supporters “fake Christians,” fail to see that authoritarian Christianity is just as “real” a version of the faith as any sort of progressive or liberationist Christianity. Meanwhile, “respectable” commentators like Wehner who mostly agree in substance with the majority of white evangelicals’ illiberal Christianity may see Trump support as a bridge too far, but their cries to this effect fall on deaf ears among their more uncouth brethren. According to findings by Denison University political scientist Paul A. Djupe, about three quarters of white evangelicals either disagree (46.5 percent) that “Christian support for Donald Trump has hurt Christian witness” or believe that it has neither hurt nor helped Christian witness (28 percent). Probing further into the influence of whether respondents to his study perceive their friends as mostly supportive or mostly opposed to Trump, Djupe argues, “these results help us see that, at this point, it is difficult, for instance, for evangelicals to see that the Christian brand has been damaged in society by its close association with Donald Trump. In part, that is because it has probably not been damaged among their bits of society.” Men like Wehner interact with a much more ideologically diverse crowd than rank-and-file evangelicals do; they are able to see the damage that evangelical support for Trump has caused, and thus fret about their inability to rein it in. Wehner’s willingness to call out his fellow evangelicals for accepting Trump’s overt racism (for example, Trump’s pejorative use of “kung flu” to refer to COVID-19 and his pushing the birther conspiracy about President Barack Obama) accomplishes nothing except, perhaps, to assuage his own conscience. In his analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Wehner argues that evangelicals, despite their “devil’s bargain” with Trump, have largely failed to get what they want. This is simply wrong. Trump has delivered in numerous ways on what he promised white evangelicals; and while they might see Bostock as a setback, subsequent “religious liberty” decisions have granted evangelicals sweeping exemptions to civil rights laws and education regulations. Since I cannot see “his heart,” to use the evangelical speak of my youth, I cannot say whether Wehner truly believes that Roe v. Wade will remain settled law when it is very much threatened. I can say, however, that he is out of touch with the evangelical movement if he sincerely fails to see that their embrace of Donald Trump is not a betrayal of their values, but rather a reflection of them. [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism, part I [post_excerpt] => A minority of 'respectable' Christian conservatives who oppose Trump claim that he is responsible for the rise of authoritarian Christianity, rather than a symptom of a decades-long movement that is centered implicitly around protecting white privilege and explicitly around paranoid sexuality politics. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-failure-of-respectable-evangelicalism-part-i [to_ping] => [pinged] => https://conversationalist.org/2020/06/25/the-christian-right-the-bostock-decision-and-the-struggle-to-define-religious-freedom/ [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1921 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism, part I

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    [post_content] => The inequities New Yorkers accept as a part of life are immediate, and sobering.

Returning to Brooklyn after two months of hiding from the pandemic in the suburbs, I had the discomfiting feeling that I’d been sold a bill of goods about the charms of this city—that maybe we all had. As the scenery changed from trees to close-packed single-family homes to bleak public high-rises, I was struck anew by the contortions of aesthetic impulse that had me finding beauty in tiny apartments, excitement in trash-strewn sidewalks and a sense of possibility in packed subway cars. I found myself making an inventory of the places I had lived over the last 15 years, and it was as if I had finally realized that that multi-geared thing in my hands was a kaleidoscope. The same pieces, turned askew, suddenly told a different story, and my narrative of constantly moving back to New York became a story of my constantly leaving. I realized that that story had been there all along.

As a child of the East Coast, New York felt like the only and obvious city to move to after college. It was the hub of culture, it was the fulfilment of suburban childhood fantasies shaped by romantic comedies, it was the place that seemed natural for a writer to cavort among other writers and stir up material. The city promised romance, new friendships, political activism, millions of strangers whose lives I could imagine, a whole new type of landscape to negotiate and ladders to climb.

It was also the city my parents grew up in, and which I had spent my life ruing their decision to leave.

From the vantage point of my childhood in a cookie-cutter subdivision outside Washington, D.C., I was sure they had made a horrible mistake, and that my brothers and I were the worse for it. Growing up, I found the green lawns and shopping centers of suburbia to be stultifying in their homogeneity, which to me seemed tragically matched by the lives of their owners. In college, living in close quarters with my peers, I read Jane Jacobs, fancied myself a committed urbanist, and decided to continue living closely with others. After moving to New York, I reveled in how much richer and more textured a simple run to the neighborhood bodega felt than a late-night drive to the suburban supermarket.

When I started traveling abroad in my mid-twenties, I saw that living in a diverse, international city with a vibrant cultural life didn’t have to mean compromising on quality of life. On vacation in Berlin, I found apartments that were cheap and spacious, freshwater swimming lakes right off the U-Bahn, and dedicated bike lanes. In Tel Aviv there were verdant boulevards designed for strolling, ubiquitous balconies, and more outdoor cafes than a person could visit in a lifetime. Paris had a refreshingly human sense of scale in its proportions, and even its grandeur felt calibrated to a person’s ability to take it in. Dublin was full of leafy neighborhoods and small shops, and its museums offered reduced entry fees for the unemployed.

The governments of the countries in which all these cities are located offer heavily subsidized childcare, education and eldercare, too. Sure, they each have their own brand of reprehensible politics, their own blind spots and injustices and intergenerational calamities, but today’s citizens can at least progress through life with a sense of security that comes from knowing there’s a social safety net, and that their government feels responsible for protecting its citizens. Those governments took proactive measures to protect their residents from the coronavirus, while the Trump Administration remains mired in anti-science hucksterism and denial, continues to turn U.S. citizens against one other and generally lets us fend for ourselves.

If you’ve got either wealth or American-dream style luck, New York, like the rest of America, can be an amazing playground full of career and educational opportunities, culture, food, entertainment. But without a financial cushion, the inequities we live with here are immediate, and sobering. It’s no coincidence that one of the city’s main strategies to offer decent affordable housing is called a lottery. You literally have to win the lottery to obtain an affordable apartment for the long term. With the exception of those lucky few, the available housing stock for all but the top tier is small, cramped and prohibitively expensive.

Our schools are grievously segregated. Homelessness is exploding. The quality of a public university or college is grossly inferior to that of the private universities, which charge annual tuition that is higher than the city’s median income. While real estate prices skyrocket, rat colonies are overtaking even Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods, chewing through car wires and taking up residence beside cool engines. The city’s public transportation is frayed due to underfunding; meanwhile cyclists who avoid it get killed, and the cops ignore rampant motorist bike lane violations while overpolicing black neighborhoods.

For the millennials who migrated to the city after college, we can pretend all we want that New York is the city we want it to be, but in reality, it was always just the city it is, with its extremes of wealth and poverty and its uneven attempts at making it livable for all. In our twenties, my friends and I would strap towels and umbrellas to our backs and bike out to city beaches, battling traffic fumes and dodging collisions the whole way. By the time we got there and spread out our blankets, my heart would be racing more from adrenaline than from endorphins, but we’d pride ourselves on our grit and pretend we’d enjoyed it. On some level I did – who wouldn’t enjoy a survival tale that ends at the beach? But then of course, we’d have to face the return trip home.

This was all before the pandemic made New Yorkers with money flee like birds from a fire, while those without wondered how they could have so underestimated their neighbors’ wealth. For those of us who are privileged enough to think about moving our lives elsewhere but lack the wherewithal to do so easily, we find ourselves with actual decisions to make. For many in the middle class, living a good life in New York has always felt like a precarious balancing act that’s contingent on exactly the thing that Covid-19 has stripped away from us: comfort going out into the crowd. Without that, we are actually stuck inside apartments we only believed were as cozy and charming as the realtors promised back when we could leave them without fear.

As we drove into Brooklyn after our suburban retreat, we found ourselves in the middle of a BLM protest. My whorls of ambivalence about living in the city paused amid the chants. Being surrounded by marchers was exhilarating and encouraging and we tooted our horn in solidarity as they swarmed around us toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Every day since then has seen more demonstrations and masked young people, a striking number of them white, walking around the neighborhood with BLM posters made of cardboard delivery boxes. It’s reminded me why I do keep returning to New York, and why I still love the place in spite of its miseries.

But the truth is that right now I need the daily reminder. Maybe it’s political despair, or resignation. The racism of this country, the cruel pugilism of this political moment, the childish, criminal negligence of our leaders and all the systemic loopholes they’re exploiting in their self-serving campaigns – it all feels so much larger than us, so entrenched. And now that I have an infant to look after and provide a childhood for, I find myself focusing on attainable goals. Most are in the realm of the sensory: the air I want him to breathe, the landscapes I want him to explore, the feeling I want to have when I go about my day being his mother, the feeling I want him to have when he goes about his day being my son.

The problems are enormous, but the choices are individual. For my own little family it means cataloguing all the American cities out there and wondering if there’s another one we could imagine making a life in. It means ruminating on the small towns and rural areas I’ve loved and thinking through which are diverse and culturally rich enough to imagine wanting to live and raise a child in. It means wondering if we could feel at home in another country that offers the urban fabric we crave with the social safety net we desire.

How do you want life to feel? I asked my partner the other day on a masked walk to the park.

Not how do you want it to look, or what do you want to do. How do you want it to feel? At what point do we accept that the sensory is the level to focus on, that the rest is too far out of our control? And at what point do we shake up our lives in order to catch that feeling?
    [post_title] => The pandemic laid bare all the reasons I hate living in the city I love
    [post_excerpt] => New York can be an amazing playground full of career and educational opportunities, culture, food, entertainment. But without a financial cushion, the inequities we live with here are immediate, and sobering.
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The pandemic laid bare all the reasons I hate living in the city I love

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    [post_content] => By failing to invest in child care, the U.S. government is placing mothers in an impossible position.

Ashley Patrick was thrilled to land a full-time position at a prestigious publishing house in July 2016. The job came with smart, bookish colleagues, opportunities for advancement, a regular salary, and health insurance. For a Brooklyn-based writer and editor, it was a rare and valuable opportunity.

At the time she had two young sons, a husband who also worked full-time, and no flexibility. By the end of 2018, Patrick and her husband had three children. The combined monthly cost of full-time daycare for the baby and after-school programs for the boys was an unaffordable minimum of $3,250. In February 2019 she made the painful decision to leave her job.

“A big part of my decision to leave was the cost of child care,” Patrick told me in a recent phone conversation. “Which was a great disappointment because I was on an upward trajectory in the company.” She had been promoted shortly before the birth of her youngest and was on track for another promotion in the next year and a half. Getting that second promotion “would have made a big difference in terms of mobility from one publishing house to another.”

The kids are now nine, seven, and 18 months old. Patrick has managed to carve out a thriving freelance business, but, with schools and daycares closed due to the pandemic, she is now trying to work and supervise her boys’ online lessons from her small apartment. Her husband, who had been earning a good salary at a major company, was laid off eight months after she quit her own job—in part, Patrick suspects, because he took the family leave he was entitled to when their third child was born. She does not know what they’ll do when schools reopen—there is still no ideal option for the baby, and the boys attend schools in different neighborhoods with different start times, making pick-up and drop-off complicated and time-consuming.

Patrick and her family are hardly alone in finding the demands of child care and full-time employment increasingly unmanageable.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), there are only four countries in the world where couples with young children who earn the average wage spend more than 30 percent of their salary on child care: New Zealand, the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In Korea, Austria, Greece, and Hungary, the average couple spends less than four percent of their income on child care. Mothers in Sweden, France, and Canada report being satisfied with the overall quality, availability, and cost of child care in those countries, all of which have government-run or heavily subsidized child care systems.

Erika Gubrium, a professor at Oslo Metropolitan University who has two sons, ages eight and 11, explained in response to questions sent by email that child care in Norway is offered through a mix of public and private day cares partially subsidized by the state. The cost of a full-time spot at a daycare in Oslo is approximately 3,100 Norwegian krone per month (around $302 USD). Some families pay reduced fees if they earn less and in some areas, day care is completely free for children of certain ages. In Gubrium’s words, “There is NO opposition to government funding of child care, as there is strong sentiment across the political board that the state should support measures that enable both parents to work full-time.”

When child care is consistent, affordable, and easy to access, more women work outside of the home. Quebec’s government-subsidized child care program led to a workforce participation rate of 85 percent for women ages 26 to 44—the highest in the world, according to University of Quebec at Montreal economist Pierre Fortin. The increased tax revenue covers more than 100 percent of what the government spends on child care. “In other words, it costs zero, or the cost is negative,” Fortin told CityLab in 2018. The program also saves money by reducing the number of families on public assistance.

Hannah Selinger, a freelance writer in East Hampton, New York, has two sons, ages three and one-and-a-half. Finding convenient child care for both, she said in a phone interview, has been a “nightmare.” She quit her well-paid job to be a stay-at-home mother when she became pregnant with her first child because her partner’s salary was double what she made. Since then her freelance writing career has taken off, requiring more of her time, but the logistics of child care are making that nearly impossible. The fee for her eldest son’s preschool is $12,000 per year for three half days per week, and it’s a 30-minute drive from her home, meaning she spends six hours per week driving him (and his little brother) there and back.

Carolina Gonzalez-Villar lives in California’s Bay Area with her husband and their four-year-old son. Her father, who is retired, took care of her son until he was 18 months old. Without her father, she said, her family would have had to bear the expense of a nanny. She and her husband decided they couldn’t afford another child, given that child care where they live costs up to $2,500 per month.

A shorter workweek would reduce both child care costs and parental stress. “We have doubled productivity since the 1960s; there is no reason we shouldn’t make the same money or better and work fewer hours,” said Erin Mahoney, who lives in Queens with her 2-year-old child. Mahoney described the search for child care as one of the most stressful parts of her pregnancy. “A month before my maternity leave ended, I was still trying to figure it out.”

The burden of navigating America’s patchwork child care system falls disproportionately on mothers. Ashley Patrick recently wrote on Facebook, in response to a comment about child care centers refusing to disclose their fees until parents have scheduled a tour, “The last thing I wanted to be doing while uncomfortably pregnant and frantically prepping at work for maternity leave and scheduling and attending a zillion doctor’s appointments was making still more phone calls and sending more emails to check tuition fees.”

Liz Grefath, a mother of two young sons who lives in Brooklyn, recently wrote on Facebook that “people use words like ‘challenge’ to describe [the search for adequate child care] but that is such a neutral word.” What most U.S. parents are really engaged in, she added, is “all-out scavenging, plotting, and survivalism.”Another problem with the U.S. system is that child care providers and preschool teachers are among the worst-paid workers in America. As of 2018, 58 percent of child care workers in California were paid so little that they qualified for public assistance. Some cannot afford to have children of their own.

“One thing I find really frustrating about child care is that it’s almost prohibitively expensive for parents yet the teachers are paid close to minimum wage,” Arielle Harrison recently wrote on Facebook. Harrison, who lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two young sons, continued: “I don’t see how the economics work without some form of government subsidy.”

The U.S. provides limited subsidies to low-income families, she acknowledged, but providers are still grossly underpaid.

Historically, the U.S. government has found the money for child care when it needed women to work. President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort (remember Rosie the Riveter?). The centers were shut down under the Truman administration, despite a battle waged by mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators and social workers to keep them open. That was the last time the United States offered universal child care.

In May 1971, two New York congresswomen—Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan—introduced a bill that would have set aside billions of dollars in federal funds for child care. A watered-down version eventually passed the House and the Senate, only to be vetoed by Nixon, on the advice of his special assistant Pat Buchanan. Nixon described the bill as “radical,” “family-weakening” and tantamount to endorsing “communal” childrearing as opposed to “the family-centered approach.”

Jen Sunderland, a child care provider and mother of a 14-year-old in New York City, pointed out in a phone conversation that the U.S.’s “family-centered approach” is the problem. Instead of acknowledging that the entire society benefits when children are well cared for, our system places “all of the burden of that work on individual families.”

For women, child care decisions are inextricably tied to stagnant wages and unequal pay. The majority of mothers who “choose” the work of childrearing over a paying job do so because they would earn less or only marginally more than they would have to spend on child care if they worked.

The situation is even more dire for single parents. Nearly a quarter of U.S. children live in single-parent households, the vast majority of which are headed by women. Single parents earning an average wage spend 52.7 percent of their income on child care, which surely contributes to the fact that 30 percent of single mothers live below the poverty line.

Child care was a campaign issue in the 2020 presidential election cycle for the first time since the 1970s. Elizabeth Warren was the first to unveil a plan; Bernie Sanders’ plan was the most comprehensive. Joe Biden has not presented one. Earlier in 2020, he told Fortune that, under a Biden administration, children will be able to attend “high-quality, universal prekindergarten at no cost” and parents “will get up to $8,000 in tax credits” to offset child care costs. In 2016 the Center for American Progress, which advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, recommended offering child care tax credits of up to $14,000 per child.

The pandemic has brought the U.S.’s deepening child care crisis into even sharper relief. Daycares are closed and many schools will not reopen until the fall. Millions of parents are now either seeking work or attempting to hold onto their jobs while caring full-time for young children. In states where businesses are reopening, many now face a choice between returning to work and leaving their kids who knows where, or staying at home with their kids and losing their jobs or part of their income.

In a 1981 op-ed headlined “Congress is Subsidizing Deterioration of Family,” Joe Biden argued against expanding a child care tax credit to include families with higher incomes and labeled day care centers and nursing homes “monuments to our growing unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for those to whom we owe the most.”A lot has changed since 1981. What hasn’t changed is the need for the government to treat child care as a social responsibility, not a personal one.

Whatever happens in November, the U.S. will almost certainly end up with either a President Trump, who has agreed to spend more on child care block grants for low-income families and doubled the federal child tax credit to $2,000, or a President Biden, who has talked about “making sure that every single solitary person needing child care gets an $8,000 tax credit.” The average American family spends nearly $15,000 a year on child care.“We dread the idea that our day care might not come back from [the pandemic],” Josef Szende, who grew up in Canada and lives in New York City with his wife and their 15-month-old son, told me via Zoom. “We don’t know what we would do…we’d move from that lucky whatever percent who somehow made it work in New York City into the majority for whom it’s not working.”

Congress voted to invest billions in child care nearly 50 years ago. It’s past time to make good on that promise.
    [post_title] => The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care
    [post_excerpt] => The United States is one of only four countries in the world where couples earning an average wage spend more than 30 percent of their income on child care. Women are paying the highest price.
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The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care

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    [post_content] => “We built this country, and we can burn it down." — BLM protester in Washington D.C.

In my Black Lives (Don’t) Matter class, I teach students that the revolution BLM demands cannot be humanized. Rather, the movement asks us to burn down our ideologies as well as our structures—to burn them all the way down—in order to make a different society. Because the system isn’t broken; it was intentionally designed to exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections. And that system isn’t reducible to a nation-state built on slave labor and indigenous genocide.

It is a commonly accepted truth that black people built the infrastructures of what is now called the United States. Many also acknowledge that the exclusion of black people from our imagined community is what makes possible our superstructures—i.e., our culture, values, and power relations. We are less likely, however, to acknowledge that the entire enterprise of liberal humanism was built by black people, even or especially as they cannot participate in it.

Public officials in the Los Angeles judicial system routinely used the acronym NHI—short for “no humans involved”—to describe the black people who showed up to protest the Rodney King decision in 1992. The state’s response then, like its response to the BLM protests today, is to plow through what they perceive to be a black mass of flesh that is at once subhuman (like chattel) and superhuman—or, as ex-police officer Darren Wilson described Ferguson resident Michael Brown, like a “hulk.” Both messages serve to communicate that black persons are mindlessly and mercilessly aggressive and that the rest of us should fear for our lives.

The perception that black people are somehow bestial or not-quite-human serves but one purpose: to justify the innumerable ways in which nonblack people, including nonblack people of color like ex-NYPD officer Peter Liang, gratuitously police and kill back people—not just on the street, as George Floyd experienced, but also in the park, and even in their homes.

The American writer and activist Audre Lorde explained that “there is no rest” from anti-black violence. It “weaves through the daily tissues of [black] living—in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.” Antiblackness, in other words, is atmospheric. It is the air that nonblack people need to breathe and which makes it impossible for black people to also breathe.

Rather than acknowledge the vulnerability that black people experience, nonblack people continue to treat them as an ongoing threat. According to this logic, black people must be taken out back and shot like a dog and then left on the street to die—in the case of Michael Brown, for four hours—like roadkill.

When Enlightenment thinkers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume defined ‘the human,’ they could only ever arrive at a definition of what the human is not— i.e., the black African. They defined ‘the human’ as transcendent, of sound mind, in a state above nature, with the ability (and agility) to control the unruly instincts of his material body. In contrast, they imagined the black African as so irrational, so carnal—indeed, so bestial—that she could not pull herself out of a state of nature. She was unable to transcend the impulses of her flesh and climb the ladder of ‘the human,’ which is the ladder of whiteness. Hegel, Kant, and Hume suggest that this is also the ladder of civilization, modernity, progress, and history.

The racism expressed by these Enlightenment philosophers is not a thing of the past. Richard Spencer, the notorious alt-right spokesperson, argued in a November 2016 interview with African-American journalist Roland Martin that the black people who built the human world as we know it did not contribute to the making of human society—because they simply do not have access to the “genius” required to “create [human] systems.”

The fact that black lives don’t seem to matter is a problem not only for the settler colonial state in need of surplus labor—whether on the plantations of yore or the prison-industrial complex of today. It is also or primarily a problem for what the Jamaican critic and essayist Sylvia Wynter describes as the “genre of Man”—a racist and institutionalized standard of the human that (re)produces what feminist thinker bell hooks famously characterizes as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist (cis-hetero-) patriarchy.” The intersecting structures that hooks enumerates and which makes possible our modern world pivot on antiblackness.

The same genre of Man that denies the humanity of black people determines whether or how sex and gender minorities, persons with dis/abilities, and nonblack persons of color can access human recognitions and protections. Hooks’ inheritor, scholar Hortense Spillers argues that black lives are the “zero degree” of Man’s “social conceptualizations.” In other words, antiblackness is the foundation of the house of white, cis, able-bodied humans and makes possible everyone else’s exclusion from humanity. It is the genre of Man, Wynter and Spillers suggest, that we must burn down in order to make black lives—and thus all lives—matter.

It is no coincidence, then, that black people and those of us who stand with them take pleasure in the burning and looting of a human world that was built to ensure that black people die—for no other reason than, as Lorde painfully describes it, they are black. Those of us who are not black but who, indeed, embody difference know that we are next if we get too close to or approximate the non-human characteristics that white supremacist humanism has assigned to black people. Our pleasure is derived not from bloodlust for white or human death. This is about destroying the concept of whiteness as it informs the antiblack standard of human being.

The revolution espoused by Black Lives Matter cannot be humanized, because the white people who defined the human never intended to know black humanity, and because they can only ever contingently recognize the humanity of all of us other Others.

By excluding black people from human recognitions and protections, the prototypically white human produces other oppressions, too. The black person’s presumed sub-humanity locates them in a time before human time, as the furthest point away from the white, cis, able-bodied standard of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment. If black people represent absolute difference—the “zero degree” or foundation of everyone else’s oppression—then the genre of Man that excludes them is also responsible for producing this world’s other “-isms”—e.g., sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and ableism.

Stated another way, if humanism is a country, then antiblackness is the border that makes its other exclusions possible. BLM protestors who are burning it down know that the country they must dismantle is the world as it was defined by white men. If we are to make all lives matter, then we must question and, where necessary, destroy the structures and ideologies of the genre of Man. And we must remember, always, that the revolution we seek cannot be humanized.
    [post_title] => The revolution will not be humanized
    [post_excerpt] => “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin
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The revolution will not be humanized

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    [post_content] => The search for home can sometimes clash with the need for security.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with my nose pressed to the window of American life.

This was especially true in my case, because my mother was born in New York City and her mother in Chicago; my great-grandfather was a Chicago developer who built one of the city’s first skyscrapers. My American cousins intimidated me: they included an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, even a bullfighter. One of them was married to a woman who flew her own small aircraft.

I wanted to be like them — bold, adventurous, successful — and to understand what made them tick; I wanted to flee the quiet, polite country I was born and raised in, where ambition and strong opinions were frowned upon.

Canadian newsstands offered 80 percent American content and I knew the names of Buffalo’s suburbs, Lackawanna and Cheektowaga, because their television broadcasts reached Toronto. I caught deeper glimpses of American contradictions while attending University of Toronto, during a life-changing exchange week at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We attended a black Baptist church service where the preacher inveighed against abortion and the ladies waved paper fans. We listened to a black UNC administrator describe his life there…and begin to weep.

As someone from a multicultural city, Toronto, and a country where abortion isn’t demonized, both were shocking. Nor had I before imagined the daily toll that racism could play. It all deepened my curiosity about the U.S. even further, making me more determined to find a way to live there.

At 25, I won a fellowship to Paris, traveling Europe for eight months, then was a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Montreal, where I fell in love with a McGill medical student from New Jersey, soon to graduate and return south for residency.

I was able to follow him to the United States, although we were not married, because I was the daughter of a U.S. citizen, applying for “better work opportunities.” After I had taken an AIDS test, undergone a security check and been fingerprinted, an official at the consulate in Montreal interviewed me. I wrote, for a column in the national daily, The Globe and Mail, in 1988:

“The vice-consul asked me surprisingly little. When she approved my visa, after a brief but lively conversation, her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. Even the guard wished me luck. I felt I’d been invited to a terrific party. I was handed a brown envelope, stamped, signed and sealed. My future was in my hands.”

And so I left behind a perfectly good country, one with excellent and heavily subsidized university education, cradle-to-grave healthcare, a wide, deep social safety net, and a Constitution that promised “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” For years, Canadians had often guessed I was American, which is a veiled insult that means too bossy, too direct, too nakedly ambitious. I wanted faster decisions and a wider playing field, not the endless foot-shuffling of risk-averse fellow Canadians and a career limited to a handful of major cities. I’d thought American was more egalitarian than it is, but that turned out to be silly idealism. When I dared suggest to someone at Dartmouth that I audit classes there, since we were in the middle of nowhere for the next four years, pre-Internet, the university administration refused. How about part-time study? Also no. As I began to try to make sense of my new home, I read two seminal works of the early 1990s that explained the shadowed side of John Winthrop’s 1630 vision of America as a much-admired “city on a hill”: the first was Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a decrepit Chicago housing project during the 1980s; the second was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a study of two school districts, divided by wealth and class, which were allotted wildly unequal resources by the American way of funding education through housing taxes. This was a key difference between my experiences in Toronto and Montreal. In Hanover, a local social worker told me about the grinding poverty she saw on muddy backroads, the battered trailers with plastic on the windows, while Dartmouth’s most privileged students raced their shiny sports cars through town and dropped enormous sums in its few stores. There is poverty in Canada; this is particularly true for the shamefully neglected Indigenous people. But the shocking inequality of the United States, where the three wealthiest Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (while the middle class struggles to pay for healthcare and university tuition), is absent; Canada has its billionaires and millionaires, but they tend to be more discreet about their good fortune.

First American lesson: Prove you’re rich! Income inequality be damned.

I wanted my career back, so we moved to suburban New York, where I’ve lived ever since. After two years of marriage, my husband left and I started my American life yet again, without children. I’d insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement, which enabled me to survive financially and keep my home.

Second American lesson: Know your legal rights and be ready to fight hard for them.

Third American lesson: A tough lawyer is often your new best friend.

Single and lonely, in 1998 I answered a personals ad in a local alternative weekly — which brought a convicted con man into my life, who wreaked emotional havoc and cost me several thousand dollars.

Fourth American lesson: In a country so diverse, re-invention is easier. In a huge and mobile country, less fussy about one’s origins, he simply traveled east and started victimizing anew.

Fifth American lesson: Some Americans are wildly impressed with self-confidence and happily defer to material signs of success; before he was caught in Chicago, the conman had posed as a doctor and as a lawyer.

In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism. In 2002 and 2003, while researching my first book, I traveled to Ohio, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Texas to interview 104 men, women and teens about women and gun use, asking whether they owned a firearm or whether one had shattered their life. I spent three days learning how to fire a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, which gave me the street cred to speak with suspicious gun owners; their first question to me was always the same: Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

Sixth American lesson: It’s as if the Constitution’s ink were still wet, so often is it cited. And every time I ask someone about their concomitant responsibility to the common good I might as well be speaking Greek, so hollow does the phrase ring in a nation addicted to the primacy of individual rights.

I survived the financial crash of 2008, thanks to my second husband’s secure job and my work in a part-time retail position for $11/hour, an experience that was the subject of my second book. In two-and-a-half years, while selling $600 ski jackets, my hourly wage was raised by only 30 cents. The store’s wealthy customers recoiled in shock if I replied to them in French or Spanish. They automatically assumed anyone working at a low-level job couldn’t possibly be as well educated or well-traveled as they.

Seventh American lesson: A low-wage job de facto signals low status. One customer tossed a quarter at us, barking: ‘Go to college!” Every one of our 15-member staff had done so, and two were military veterans. I saw firsthand what $11/ hour could buy. Almost nothing. With college costs so high, how could anyone flee? 

Eighth American lesson: The stunning cost of American post-secondary education breaks as many as it helps. Two of our friends in their early 30s, both from blue-collar families, are crippled by their college debts of $60,000 and $100,000. My annual tuition in mid-1970s Canada was $660 a year; today, it would be $6,000.

In a country professing such deep allegiance to “liberty,” American workers have no right to paid vacation, sick leave or paid maternity leave. Union membership is low, and the federal minimum wage has been stagnant for decades. Since Donald Trump’s election, our Canadian friends have shifted from asking: “Will you come home?” to “When will you come home?” I struggle to find a response, even as I realize that most of my reasons for staying are predicated on privilege. I am an educated white woman, in good health; I have work, savings in the bank, and a gainfully employed husband who is also in good health. If I were poor and lived in a rural area, Canada’s social safety net might appear much more appealing than it does from a pretty and prosperous town within easy distance of New York City. Until we can afford to retire we need well-paid work, which, even in the worst of times, is more plentiful for us where we live now. My experience of trying to do business with Canadians has been frustrating: often they murmur encouragingly and then disappear, true to an aspect of the national character that places value on avoiding potential conflict. The U.S. feels more foreign now than it did when I first made it my home, nearly 30 years ago. It is tainted by mass incarceration, racism and daily violence. Shooters armed with automatic weapons have massacred thousands and schoolchildren practice “active shooter drills.” In a nation that never shuts up about “productivity,” retailers sell us scented candles to relax. No one seems to notice the contradiction. Soon, there will be more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19; meanwhile, the White House administration’s chaotic responses are a deadly roulette wheel. I love our historic, lovely Hudson River town and its ready access to the pleasures of Manhattan --- although they are temporarily off limits during the pandemic. The fact remains; unless we move to a rural, isolated area with poor medical access, we can’t afford comparable Canadian housing and my home city, Toronto, has become both violent and expensive, with tiny teardown houses selling for $1 million. I loathe Trump and fear four more years of this nightmare. I enjoy our life here— while knowing how deeply its systems punish so many others. It’s a moral thorn. Stay? Go? I still don’t know. [post_title] => America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave? [post_excerpt] => In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => america-is-home-but-canada-is-safer-a-dual-national-wonders-whether-she-should-go-or-stay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1778 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?