- “No country for working women,” (Pakistan Express, March 10, 2018)
- “Should Pakistani women get a job? Yes but.. Say Pakistani men,” (World Bank Blogs, April 5, 2019);
- “Problems working women face” (Dawn, May 9, 2019)
Culture
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[post_date] => 2020-12-17 19:24:22
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[post_content] => A Washington, D.C. rally held by pro Trump evangelicals revealed the fascism in their worldview.
Prominent right-wing Christians organized a prayer rally and an affiliated “Jericho March” in Washington, D.C. last Saturday. The ceremonial act, which also took place in a number of state capitals across the U.S., was meant to echo the Biblical story about the Israelites bringing down the walls of Jericho by circling it while blowing trumpets; in its modern iteration, evangelical Trump supporters walked seven times around various government buildings while praying to “bring down the walls of voter fraud” and undo the presidential election results. Although there is no evidence of widespread election irregularities, and the Trump administration’s frivolous lawsuits have been shut down—most recently by the Supreme Court—the rally-goers and marchers believed they were engaging in an act of spiritual warfare that would “reveal” the election had been stolen and prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Michele Bachmann, former Congresswoman from Minnesota and a notorious evangelical conspiracy theorist, said in a video posted on Facebook that this was “a Hebrews 11 moment,” referring to what Christians sometimes call the Bible’s “Faith Chapter,” which recounts the righteous deeds of Biblical heroes.
Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow and a prominent Trump supporter, addressed the D.C. rally, while several other speakers peppered their talks with plugs for his company. The headliner was Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, who was compromised by Russia while in office and whom the president recently pardoned after he was convicted of lying to the FBI. At the rally in Washington, Flynn, who recently called for “limited martial law” to impose a new election, said: “We’re in a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of this country.” And, as might be expected for an event based around the invocation of a trope from what Christians call the Old Testament, the D.C. rally featured shofar blowing and “a prophetic word” from Curt Landry, a so-called “Messianic Jew”—i.e., a Jewish convert to Christianity.
Evangelicals have deservedly received negative press for their efforts to convert Jews; indeed, America’s Christian nationalism goes hand-in-hand with an appropriative Christian Zionism that has profoundly influenced Trump’s foreign policy, not least in his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Mike Pence invited a Messianic “rabbi” to a 2018 campaign rally to mourn the then recent shooting deaths at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue; this was a stunningly tone-deaf insult not only because Jews don’t recognize Christian “rabbis,” but also because most evangelicals subscribe to the belief that Jews who do not convert to Christianity are damned to hell.
The philo-Semitism of Christian nationalism is never very far from anti-Semitism. This is neatly illustrated by the fact that the emcee of the D.C. rally, evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, recently released a racist, conspiracy-mongering “parody” music video about alleged election stealing that depicts four Jewish men—Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Jerry Nadler, and Chuck Schumer—as puppet masters manipulating Biden’s “strings.”
Once a writer for the relatively innocuous evangelical cartoon series “Veggie Tales,” Metaxas has more recently made headlines for writing fascist children’s books like Donald Builds the Wall, and for sucker-punching a protester after a Republican National Convention event. At the opening of Saturday’s rally, he “joked” about someone in the audience taking out a bazooka and shooting down a media helicopter. Metaxas clearly embodies the values and desires of most white evangelicals, but his recent behavior has alienated right-wing Christians invested in respectability. Phil Vischer, the creator of “Veggie Tales,” has rejected Metaxas’s brand of culture warring. And Rod Dreher, the reactionary editor of The American Conservative and a convert to Orthodox Christianity, referred to Metaxas’s extreme rhetoric in a recent interview with Charlie Kirk—for example, Metaxas said that calls to concede that Biden won the election are “the voice of the Devil”—as “hysterical.”
Since Saturday’s bizarre spectacle in D.C., some of the more prominent “respectable evangelicals” have been trying to distance themselves from both Metaxas and the charismatic excesses of Trump’s most enthusiastic Christian supporters, who are holding out for a “miracle” that will somehow overturn the 2020 presidential election.
For example, Southern Baptist author Beth Moore tweeted that Trumpist Christian nationalism is “not of God.” Similarly, conservative commentator David French called Christian Trumpism “idolatry” and Metaxas’s rhetoric “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.” Of the Jericho marchers, he wrote: “They believe that Trump had a special purpose and a special calling, and that this election defeat is nothing less than a manifestation of a Satanic effort to disrupt God’s plan for this nation.” French added that far from “holding their nose” to vote for Trump, his evangelical base was “deeply, spiritually, and personally invested in his political success.”
I am glad that French has called out this dangerous language and dehumanizing rhetoric, which he correctly identifies as a common precursor to physical violence. But when he writes, “A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic,” I can’t help but focus on that little word “now.” The abusive, authoritarian nature of right-wing Christianity is not new.
How do I know? I could point you to reams of well-sourced writing by myself and others on the topic, but what I want to say here is that my most visceral and primary knowledge comes from the simple fact that I grew up in the trenches of the culture wars that men like David French and Michael Gerson, who also recently criticized Metaxas, helped to build and further. From the time I was five or six years old, I remember the churches my family attended, as well as my Christian school, drilling into our heads at every opportunity that abortion was “murder,” a “literal Holocaust,” and that we needed to do everything we could to stop the “baby-killing” Democrats. I remember being taught through the 1980s and 90s to see our society and current events not just in starkly black and white terms, but as reflections of “spiritual” warfare being fought by the forces of God and the forces of Satan through human agents.
And the God and country Christian nationalism of my childhood was hardly subtle. One of my elementary school’s walls was emblazoned with Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” and our talent shows ended with an audience sing-along of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”
Fascism backed by Christians does not emerge ex nihilo. And in our current case, it did not emerge without significant contributions from men like Gerson and French (and women like Moore), along with other “respectable” evangelicals. And until they are willing to take accountability for that, and to discuss explicitly how they might have to examine their theology and rethink its authoritarian components in order to avoid enabling the worst of Christian nationalism in the future, they should not be heralded as heroic for reaching the low bar of opposing violence based on obviously false conspiracy theories.
Religion journalists and political pundits are still far too favorable toward the idea that there is a meaningful rather than superficial ideological gap between “respectable” evangelicals and the types that showed up at the Jericho March. Remember the reaction to the December 2019 op-ed by Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today? Titled “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” it stirred up a storm of reaction and was covered by legacy media platforms as evidence of a schism within Trump’s evangelical base. For journalists, the temptation to see greater diversity of views within the right-wing, mostly white evangelical establishment than is actually present there can be difficult to avoid. Given the extent to which Christian hegemony influences our society, criticizing the beliefs of any large Christian demographic is still largely taboo. But the truth is that white evangelical subculture, in both its “respectable” and its rabidly pro-Trump varieties, is thoroughly authoritarian; the divisions in play here are much less significant than they may seem.
The real story about respectable evangelicals is that they still want to have their cake and eat it too. They reject loudly the never-say-die Trumpist Christianity that Metaxas has embraced, but they have failed to acknowledge their complicity in the current conservative Christian circus—or to examine the authoritarian nature of their own theology. We should not let them get away with such “cheap grace” by applauding them for enabling the worst of Christian nationalism, only to then shrink from the monster of their own creation. Nor should we read into the current divisions between evangelicals the seeds of any forthcoming substantive internal reform, given that authoritarian evangelical subculture is impervious to any such possibility.
[post_title] => 'A spiritual battle for hearts and souls': white evangelicals grapple with post-Trump America
[post_excerpt] => So-called "respectable" evangelicals are distancing themselves from Trumpism, but without accepting responsibility for their ole in creating the Christian circus that brought him to power.
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[post_content] => To break down the structures of racism and oppression, start with an act of radical solidarity: listening.
A memorial gathering for David Graeber, the activist-anarchist and anthropologist who died unexpectedly in September, was held on October 11 in Berlin. The invitation described it as part of an intergalactic memorial carnival. In memory of Graeber’s activism, the masked attendees shouted “off with their heads!” while gleefully popping balloon heads of Trump, Erdoğan and Bolsonaro, who represented “kings to topple”.
They also chanted against patriarchy, imperialism and racism in the direction of the nearby Humboldt Forum, a controversial project to repurpose the former Prussian Berlin Palace as a museum for ethnographical collections from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Opponents of the project say it perpetuates Germany’s legacy of colonialism with a collection of stolen objects housed in a building that symbolizes European imperialism.
In Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Azoulay, an artist, critical theorist and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, describes the institutionalization of these “kings”, or the manifestations of political, social and economic control through physical violence and cultural erasure, as part of an interconnected system of imperial oppression stretching back to 1492. She proposes the urgent, imaginative task of unlearning these structures.
In many ways, this aim to rethink imperial societal structures is present in the global wave of demonstrations inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests that started in the United States last spring, sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black American, by a white Minneapolis police officer. Black Lives Matter protests have been ongoing since the 2013 founding of the group after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The recent protests, which also build on the decolonial and antiracist efforts against institutions and monuments by groups such as Decolonize This Place, Museum Detox and the Monument Removal Brigade, have triggered a renewed debate on the imperial legacies of Western Europe and the United States, especially the perpetuation of these histories via the institutionalization of material culture.
In June, the King of Belgium responded to a mass Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels by apologizing for his country’s brutal colonial history in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Activists emphasized that this apology was informal, lacked concrete political action and came sixty years too late. In the United States, Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, D.C. toppled a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike after Juneteenth rallies. In September, Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza staged a widely-reported protest with his attempt to take back a nineteenth century African funeral pole that was on exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. In October, London police arrested eighteen-year-old Benjamin Clark for tagging a statue of Winston Churchill with “racist”.
Diyabanza, the Congolese activist, is part of the pan-African Les Marrons Unis Dignes et Courageux, which has enacted similar actions in the Netherlands and southern France. For the Quai Branly intervention in June, he worked with other activists to live-stream the event; in the video he calls for the French government to stop collecting stolen colonial objects. But the judge who presided over his case stated that it should focus only on the specific funerary pole and not the broader context of ongoing colonial reparation efforts. Diyabanza argued that the museum action should not be considered a crime because, “We get our legitimacy from the perpetual idea of trying to recover our heritage and giving our people access to it.”
In Potential Histories Azoulay stresses this idea of legitimacy in which stolen material culture is often used to prop up state, colonial and imperial actors as a basic premise that underlines the (fraudulent) idea of History. While she draws on her scholarship and activism in Israel and Palestine and research on slavery in the United States, Azoulay’s aims to illustrate the international embeddedness of such imperial and colonial structures.
Azoulay’s ongoing critical photographic theory research plays an important role in unpacking this History. She suggests that the “shutter” of photography, which dates back to the late nineteenth century, was a technology that aided imperial conquest. The shutter “acts like a verdict” in that it initiates a linear before and after and results in a document narrating a specific historical vision—i.e., the vision of the (colonial) photographer and the ruling institution that he represents. She describes the use of photography as a means of recording the attempted erasure of native cultures, which were and are territorially separated and ruled. The photograph is a format in which these results were used to create linear historical knowledge, such as how the creation of new borders renders some “undocumented” or “illegal aliens” and some “citizens.” This is upheld by institutions ranging from museums, universities and archives to contemporary formations of nation-based sovereignty and governance.
[caption id="attachment_2232" align="alignnone" width="1920"]
From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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[post_content] => Sixty years after James Baldwin fled to Europe to escape his native country's racism, Americans are once again leaving to seek a better life.
Election day in the U.S. is November 3, but some Americans have already voted with their feet, fleeing a country whose values have become anathema to them: racism, police violence, the bizarre fantasies of QAnon, exorbitant living costs and daily anxiety of life under a Trump administration.
The U.S. government does not collect data on Americans who leave the country, but estimates that 8.7 million live abroad. A website with information on how to leave says that since May 2020 it has seen its traffic surge by 1,605 percent, or sixteen fold, for Americans seeking information on which countries are open and how to move.
Even if Trump loses, it appears that none of them will be rushing back.
“We do not plan to return to the U.S., regardless of the election outcome,” said Corritta Lewis, who moved in August with her wife and their year-old son to Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Like Tiffanie Drayton, a Black American writer whose June 12 New York Times Opinion piece about “fleeing” America to Guyana went viral, Ms. Lewis sees no future in the United States. “A new president doesn't change the systemic racism, police brutality, wealth gap, and overall experience as a black woman in America. It took hundreds of years to build a society of oppression; that won't change in four.”
They left, she said, “due to the increased racial tensions, police encounters, politics, and overall safety. My wife and I are two Black women raising a biracial son, and we didn't want him to live in a country where his parents are harassed by police for being Black.” She continued, “On more than one occasion, we have been stopped and questioned by police for no reason. His first interaction with police scared him to the point that we cried for almost five minutes. It broke our hearts… We were simply two Black women in a nice neighborhood, taking a morning walk.”
“We haven't felt this free in our lives,” she added. “Mexico will probably be our home for the next several years… As the election approaches, I watch in horror and am scared for my family still in the States. I don't have confidence that things will get better anytime soon.”
For Black Americans, the choice to flee police brutality, racism and income inequality is compelling. For others, economic pressures can feel just as overwhelming. Why spend more than you have to for a safe and healthy life?
Tim Leffel, 56, and his family, chose Guanajuato, a colonial city in Mexico, in 2018; he has written a book explaining how to move abroad to more than 20 countries. “Our daughter is 20 now, but she went to school in Mexico for three years: one of elementary, two of middle school. Private school, but all in Spanish,” he said.
“We had no reason to stay in the U.S. and keep paying inflated prices for rent, healthcare, and other expenses. We own our home outright in Mexico. Living in Trump's America was becoming more stressful and unpleasant every month, so why pay a premium to put up with that deterioration?”
“It's doubtful we'll move back,” he adds. “The U.S. is just way overpriced for what you get, especially in terms of healthcare, the worst value in the world for self-employed people like me. If a new president and congress can get us to universal healthcare, different story.
For travel blogger Ketti Wilhelm, 30, being married to an Italian means moving back to his country of origin. Wilhelm has spent much of her life living and working outside the U.S. She and her husband have no children and can work remotely. “We'll most likely move back to Milan, because my husband's family is near there, and we both have friends and connections there.”
“Our motivations are political, but it's also about much more than that,” said Wilhelm. “It's what the politics means for living in the U.S.: minimal vacation time, no family leave, no pension, health insurance stress and massive health care costs. Not to mention safety concerns – guns, white supremacy, and mass shootings. All of this is because “socialism” is a dirty word in the U.S., whereas in all the other countries I've lived, it's just part of a modern, well-run and equitable society. There are other ways of living, both culturally and politically, and in plenty of ways, I think they're doing it better elsewhere.” Her recent blog post offers 11 ways to live and work overseas.
Working as an E.R. physician in training horrifies medical student Alex Cabrera, 30, who lives in Reno, Nevada. Now in his final year of medical school and taking an online degree in public health, he sees patients every day whose care, he knows, can medically bankrupt them—even with insurance. “It’s so hard to live here! Wages aren’t going anywhere, unemployment benefits have been cut, people have no health insurance and the rent here for a one bedroom is $1,200.” He recently drove a friend his age to her new home in Victoria, British Columbia and saw another leave for France.
He’s desperate to flee. “I feel like I’m screaming into the void. On one side, you have Donald Trump who just makes it up as he goes along and Biden promising to improve and expand the A.C.A. (Affordable Care Act), which the Supreme Court plans to overthrow.” He wanted to find a medical residency abroad but is resigned to doing his training in the U.S. for the next four years. “As a physician, it’s almost hard to practice medicine in this country when everything is about profit and patient care is secondary. I’m so tired of this system.”
Because the United States remains a global hot spot for exponential transmission of the novel coronavirus, most countries are no longer allowing its citizens to enter without a pre-approved visa. Exceptions among the European countries include Croatia, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine. “However all European countries are accepting and approving applications for resident and work visas for U.S. citizens,” says Cepee Tabibian, founder of a website with information for women over 30 who choose to leave the U.S. “They can't [currently] travel to most European countries, but they can still apply to move right now,” she said. And prior knowledge isn’t an issue, she adds. “You'd be surprised how many people move to a country they have never been to or have maybe visited once in their life.”
Tim Page is one. A Pulitzer-winning music critic and journalism professor at the University of Southern California, he boarded a flight from New York to Belgrade a few months ago, arriving to live in a place he’d never seen. He owns a house in Nova Scotia, but the Canadian border remains closed to Americans and he was deeply disturbed by the U.S. government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He wanted out.
“I'd had some students at USC who came from Belgrade and who kindly adopted me on Facebook and took me out once I had begun to acclimate myself,” he says. “My welcome was a warm one, and this may have been the most beautiful and radiant autumn I've experienced since childhood. It's a fantastic walking city and built in so many layers…I feel very much at home.”
“I'm unmated, I have no dog, my children are grown and doing well. I communicate with my friends through video conversations, phone calls, email, and I keep a nervous eye on developments in the States through on-line television. It's a much gentler life and, at 66, I appreciate the order,” Page adds. The rent for his one-bedroom apartment is $400 a month.
“I'll stay until I want to return,” he says. “Social Security has just kicked in. I have dear friends in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and London whom I'd love to see when things open up a bit, but life is startlingly less expensive here and I think this will likely be "home base" for me in Europe for however long I stay. I'm much more at ease than I've been in a while.”
[post_title] => 'Another Country,' redux: Americans are (again) moving abroad to seek a better life
[post_excerpt] => For Black Americans, the choice to flee police brutality, racism and income inequality is compelling. For others, economic pressures can feel just as overwhelming.
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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.”
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.
— Chillian J. Yikes! (@jilliancyork) September 13, 2020
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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[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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[post_content] => Even as femicide rates rise, conservatives in the ruling party want to roll back legislation designed to protect women.
For the last five years Turkish feminist movements have faced one backlash after another and are perpetually braced for the next one. “There is always this… feeling of insecurity, uncertainty, and inability to see the future,” activist Feride Eralp told The Conversationalist. “Your most basic rights are constantly under threat.”
Eralp has been advocating for women’s rights since she was 15; her mother was active in the founding women’s movements in the 1980’s. In recent weeks, thousands of women have been demonstrating on the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, and 35 additional cities across Turkey to demand their civil rights and to protest a shocking rise in rates of femicide.
The catalyst for this latest round of protests occurred in July, when police found the mutilated corpse of Pınar Gültekin, a 27 year-old student, in a rural area of southwestern Turkey. They arrested her ex-boyfriend, Cemal Metin Avci, who confessed to having beaten and strangled Gültekin, before burning her body and stuffing it into a barrel, which he buried in the woods. The horrific incident was heavily covered by Turkish media, eliciting widespread revulsion; the murder became a rallying cry for feminist groups, which had already been protesting for months the failure of government authorities to protect women from domestic violence and femicide.
The government’s obligation to protect women is enshrined in the Istanbul Convention, a groundbreaking human rights treaty against domestic violence that is aimed at preventing violence against women. It is formally called the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Turkey was the first country to ratify the treaty, signed on March 12, 2012. Since then, 45 countries and the EU have signed. No country has ever withdrawn from it.
Recently, President Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) suggested they would withdraw Turkey from the treaty.
The impetus for the Istanbul Convention was the 2009 decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Opuz v Turkey, which found that Turkish authorities failed to protect Nahide Opuz from her violently abusive ex-husband, even after he stabbed her repeatedly and murdered her mother.
So far this year, 285 women have been murdered in Turkey. That’s more than one woman murdered per day, the majority at the hands of their estranged spouses.
Despite these numbers, lobbying groups for political Islamists, composed mostly of conservative men, have been pressuring the government to withdraw from the Convention on the basis that it undermines ‘family structure.’ In fact, the Istanbul Convention truly aims to protect the most vulnerable members of the family from domestic violence.
Preservation of the traditional family structure has long been a foundation of values instilled by the Turkish ruling party, explained Sinem Adar, an Associate at the Center for Applied Turkey Studies in the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “I think the current government definitely has a very particular, rigid understanding of the family,” Adar told The Conversationalist.
Erdoğan has said numerous times throughout the years that women should have at least three children. The President has also referred to women who do not wish to have children as “unnatural” and “incomplete.” The deputy chair of AKP, Numan Kurtulmus, once described single women as “hedonistic,” and asserted that they put “dynamite in the foundations of the family.”
When Erdoğan, who was then prime minister rather than president, made his 2013 statement about woman having to bear three children, he played into this capitalistic driver of women’s oppression. As Eralp said, the family becomes a unit to keep women producing labor, inside and outside the home. Turkey does not have a strong social welfare system and it is on the brink of a financial crisis; under these circumstances, women become primary caregivers for children and the elderly. “With an economic crisis of this degree, you don’t want to lose free labor,” Eralp explained. As Erdoğan said in his speech: “One or two children mean bankruptcy. Three children mean we are not improving but not receding either. So, I repeat, at least three children are necessary in each family, because our population risks aging."
Turkish society invests the family with tremendous value and importance; the average Turkish citizen is inculcated from childhood with a strong sense of responsibility for relatives. But when the issue of gender is contextualized within the family, individual rights are undermined. “It’s almost like not seeing the woman as an individual but seeing them as part of a family,” Adar said. In other words, a woman’s safety, security and freedoms cannot be seen as intrinsic, but instead debatable within traditional family structures.
The government’s rhetoric and policy can be seen as systematic pressure to suppress individual liberties when it comes to family, sex, gender relations; they leave very little space for women to seek change. “It’s like making the voice of the women who need the help the most, less and less heard, because again everyone is packaged in the context of the family,” Adar said. “If they decide to abolish [the Istanbul Convention], it would definitely have an influence on individual liberties.”
Canan Güllüm, the president of the Federation of Women's Associations in Turkey, said during a phone interview that the Islamist lobbying groups have long advocated for the “protection of the holy family.” She agreed that this contributed to a culture that threatened women’s safety and freedom. “Family, where the violence is reproduced as it is happening now in the society, is not a safe place for women,” Güllü said.
The composition of the protests belies conservative claims that Turkish feminists are primarily secular. Practicing Muslim women wearing the traditional headscarf are as visible at demonstrations as their secular sisters; they are all willing to hold picket signs reading “We don’t want to die!”; the phrase recalls the last words of Emine Bulut, whose husband stabbed her to death last year in a café—in front of her 10-year-old daughter. Women who represent a broad swathe of political and religious views have come together in these protests to advocate for their right to life. As Güllü pointed out, they “do not feel comfortable in today's patriarchal and unequal family structure where their rights are not protected.”
Whether they are religious or secular, there is only one set of laws, and one path of recourse for all people in the country. “Women are aware of these rights and they’re not willing to give them up for any ideological or political reasons,” Eralp said. “I can’t imagine a woman who would push that away under her own free will.”
The debate around the Istanbul Convention in Turkey has also divided the ruling AKP’s base. Erdoğan’s own daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan Bayraktar has come out in support of the Convention. Bayraktar is the deputy chair of the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM), which is conservative on issues such as LGBT rights; it advocates for ‘woman’s human dignity’ and is often engaged in lobbying the government.
There is something religiously conservative in the family value model the government is trying to “preserve,” but it isn’t predicated on a secular vs religious binary. A more accurate analysis would emphasize the ongoing inequality between men and women, and how the impunity and lack of justice demonstrated in Turkey promotes it. In recent years, a more moralistic, conservative discourse has become salient in the public realm. At the same time, there has been an increasing intensity of violence by the state and break down of the justice system in order to consolidate power. As Adar put it; “it has to do with the institutional deterioration [and] the deterioration of the primary rule of law.” To a certain extent, the increase in violence now prominent in the public eye, reflects the socio economic situation of the country.
The rate of femicide has more than doubled in Turkey since the signing of the Istanbul Convention, which means that its legal and protective measures are not being implemented. Rarely is there justice for women who are murdered or abused, particularly if the perpetrators are well connected. For Turkish women, their rights, as Eralp observed, are transactional.
Güllü added that while the framework to protect women and promote equality is already in place, it hasn’t been prioritized. The government, she believes, has not upheld the values of civil and gender equality in the last 20 years.
The rhetoric employed by Erdogan’s conservative government further conveys to the public an implicit understanding that this type of discourse and behavior is acceptable; this acts as a legitimizing power. In general, there is an acceptance and understanding of men’s motives to commit violence towards women, which ends up being passed from one generation to the next. Amnesty International went so far as to say in an August statement on the rise of femicides that “even the discussion of a possible withdrawal [from the Convention] is having a huge adverse impact on the safety of women and girls.”
At the same time, women in Turkey are clearly going through a period of consciousness raising and are becoming much more politically assertive. But unless the value of gender equality is internalized throughout all levels of government and civil society, the task of protecting individual rights in Turkey will continue to be challenging. What’s needed is a widespread understanding that no one “deserves” to be subjected to violence.
Turkey’s feminist activists are hopeful, given the increasing numbers of women coming out to protest and stand up for their rights. “The women's movement in Turkey is very strong and consolidated, and we will not give up fighting,” Güllü said, emphatically.
[post_title] => "We don't want to die!" Turkish women demand government action to end femicide
[post_excerpt] => Women who represent a broad swathe of political and religious views have come together in mass demonstrations to advocate for their right to life in a deeply patriarchal society, under a government that has failed to implement the laws that should protect them.
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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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[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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[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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[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:
- they have failed to convince their coreligionists that supporting Trump is hypocritical or damaging;
- 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;
- 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.
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[post_date_gmt] => 2020-07-23 17:14:58
[post_content] => A secret language, Láadan, allows women to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.
In May of 2017, while many were still reeling from shock at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen called “The Autocrat’s Language.” Gessen, a non-binary person who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was rapidly taking their place as a Trump explainer, drawing upon years of covering the Putin presidency in their native Russia to position themself as an expert in contemporary authoritarianism. In their piece for the NYRB, Gessen explained that because autocrats distorted the meaning of words by using them to lie, journalists were forced to use an impoverished vocabulary in order to report the truth. Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and novelist, uses a variation on this scenario to inform her 1984 science fiction novel, Native Tongue; it is set in a patriarchal future United States of 2205, a place where the nineteenth amendment was repealed in 1991, stripping women of their rights. To combat male dominance, a group of female linguists invent a language of their own. Today the question posed by Native Tongue seems especially relevant to Gessen’s warning about language manipulation: is it possible to restructure language to re-alter our reality?
A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel A Handmaid’s Tale describes a dystopia in which women’s civil rights had been rescinded; they could not vote or control their own procreation. Adapted for television in 2018, the steep erosion of rights didn’t seem so far-fetched in the Trump era. The dramatic series reflected the emerging reality that resulted from what Gessen describes as Trump’s ability to invert phrases and words dealing with power relationships into their exact opposite, thus doing “violence to language.”
This violence was strongly exemplified in Trump's July 3rd speech, given in the context of the recent protests demanding that Black lives matter as well as the Covid-19 crisis. In an attempt to discredit those calling for change, Trump spoke of a “new far-left fascism.” He argued that, “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” In twisting these words to speak of discrimination against those in power rather than those who are oppressed, terms such as “fascism,” “censor,” “banish,” “blacklist,” “persecution” and “punishment” are stripped of their original meaning and begin to become hollow.
Native Tongue, the first of a three-book series, envisions repairing this damage to language. In Elgin imagined United States of 2205, women effectively belong to men. They are not allowed to own their own property, or to work outside the home without permission from a male relative. Because interplanetary exchange and colonization are crucial for the United States, linguists play a central role in society as interpreters for extra-terrestrial negotiations. Due to the strong demand for translation, linguistic “lines,” or dynasties, have evolved; each child of the lines is trained in at least one alien language and in multiple human languages. Native Tongue follows a group of linguist women whose secret language, Láadan, allows them to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.
Artificial, or constructed and imaginary, languages (conlang) are spoken in popular television series like Star Trek (Klingon) and Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian). They are also seen in a wide array of speculative fiction by authors like Francis Godwin and Thomas More. Artificial languages have been used in fiction to explore imaginary voyages and worlds, but in a 2007 interview Hadan Elgin described Láadan as a “thought experiment” with directives for women’s change within society. Elgin, who had a PhD in linguistics, was a writer and poet best known for a series called The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense. She also subscribed to the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which she described in her book Language Imperative as the idea that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways”.
Accordingly, speakers of different languages see the world in very divergent ways: how one perceives the world is based both on linguistic structures in chosen words and their corresponding broader metaphors. For example, binaries such as male/female are often paired with other associations, such as strong/weak or active/passive. Elgin believed that English is dominated by male perception; that its lack of a vocabulary for women to discuss their feelings and experiences directly structures societal inequality. She argued that this configuration is upheld by societal metaphors, such as “women are objects,” reflected in cultural production ranging from fashion magazines to sitcoms. These structures, she posited, must be directly challenged by language itself. “By the technology of language– we insert new metaphors into our culture to replace the old ones, just as we have done in turning ‘war’ into ‘defense’. You don't use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE.”
Native Tongue provides a fictional blueprint for how these metaphors can change lived reality. While it takes several lifetimes and one more book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the linguist women eventually finish Láadan; they spread it secretly among themselves and then to some of the wider female population. Once enough linguist women have learned Láadan, the male linguists notice a startling change: their spouses, daughters and relatives have stopped complaining. Frustrated by the lack of nagging, which they realize had spurred them to respond, react and experience a sort of catharsis, the men eventually build separate houses for the linguist women. Left to their own devices, the women are freer to live, interact and express themselves, thus reveling in the real change produced by Láadan.
Láadan attempts to enable this freer expression through modifications to both the structure and intent of the language. Much of Native Tongue is occupied with “encodings”, new words for previously unexpressed experiences. The book includes part of a Láadan dictionary, available entirely online, which contains many words that feel very contemporary:
- ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so
- rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
- rathom: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
- bíili: “in love, I say as a statement…” (bíi + li)
- bóoya: “in fear, I request…” (bóo + ya)
- béed: “in anger, I say in warning…” (bée + d)
