Race

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    [post_content] => No Black mother has ever had the privilege of living in ignorance of the dangers America poses to her children.

While George Floyd took his final breaths under the knee of convicted murderer Derek Chauvin, I was frantically working on my Russian reading skills. I was due to begin my Ph.D. in the fall, and the Russian reading exam loomed large in my head. Then George died.  The police murdered him. My Black life shifted in a way that was, and is, hard to articulate. I did not expect his death to become the symbol of an international movement to show the world that Black lives mattered. But it did.

I do not believe in characterizing George Floyd as a martyr because he did not intend to die that day. He did not choose to give his life to force this country to come to terms with its racism. I was raised Catholic. I know that martyrdom implies agency, willingly giving one’s life for God. George Floyd had his agency and his humanity denied. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Daunte Wright. Adam Toledo. Their names, their lives, their last moments on Earth, taken from them. So, I disagree with Speaker Pelosi, who said, after the jury convicted Derek Chauvin of murder, that George Floyd had sacrificed his life for justice.

George Floyd did not give his life for America to learn or appreciate anything. He was sacrificed to the institution of white supremacy.

I was cynical at the outburst of activism following George Floyd’s state-sanctioned murder. Overnight, everyone had #BLM in their Tweets and Instagram posts. Amazon and Netflix wanted me to know that Black people mattered by enticing me to purchase goods packaged by non-unionized workers who have few labor rights. Suddenly, Blackness was profitable. What struck me—annoyed me—was the outpouring of posts on social media that expressed variations of, “When George Floyd cried out for his Mama, he called all mamas.” That angered me because it showed how white supremacy protected white mothers. Neither my Black mother, nor George Floyd’s Black mother, nor any Black mother has ever had the privilege of living in ignorance of the dangers this country poses to their children.

My younger brother is a shy, powerlifting 19-year-old. His body is seen as a threat. I’ve always known, and my parents have always known this. I did not understand why my parents were so strict with us, but now I do. There was a reason I could drive at night only after I let them know where I was going and what route I was taking. The same rule applied ten years later to my little brother. They needed to know because if anything happened in our small town with the police, they could get there. They could protect us as much as they could. I was not allowed to drive in the city. I could not have more than two additional people in my car. My parents were trying to protect me from a world that wanted to destroy my Black life and body. It is hard to mold these life experiences into a marketable Instagram post, but every week we see a new hashtag dedicated to a Black life the police have taken.

That George Floyd and Daunte Wright cried out for their mothers should not comfort us. It should not be a slogan. It is the damnation of this country and how it ends Black childhood much earlier than white. I am struggling with my own decision to have children. I do not know how Black mothers in this country bear this. Every time my brother gets behind the wheel, I am worried. When he comes over to mow the grass, I watch him buckle up and pull out of the driveway. I call our mom to let her know he just left and should be back within 25 minutes.

I do not know if I can carry a child for nine months—never mind my chances of surviving childbirth as a Black woman—to worry about that child’s life constantly. Black children deserve joy, happiness, a safe childhood. I do not know if I can guarantee that for my child. I recall a quote from one of my favorite films, The Crow.  In it, Eric Draven holds an intoxicated woman’s head up and says to her, “Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” That quote has stayed with me since I was 13. When I think of George Floyd calling out for his mother (I refuse to watch the video of his murder, or anyone else’s), his name for God, before his last breath, I break down. How can I bring a child into this?

Honestly, Chauvin’s trial was not high on my radar. As I mentioned on my social media, I learned long ago not to expect this country to find guilt in state-sanctioned murder. I remember waiting with bated breath for Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, to be found guilty. Nothing. Eric Garner’s killer? No criminal charges. Michael Brown’s killer? No indictment. As the saying goes, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. I believe America. I did not expect a guilty verdict. When I saw the verdict was to be handed down while I was in a seminar, I told myself I would check Twitter after, so my anger would not interfere with my processing of the talk. That’s how I cope with the constant anger and grief I hold in this Black body, avoidance and keeping busy. This is not healthy, but it is how I can function.

My phone went off a few times during the talk. My Black friends. “GUILTY.” “WE GOT HIM.” I had to turn my camera off and cry for a few minutes. I cannot tell you why crying was my immediate reaction. Perhaps I felt relief. Finally, they see what they do to us. The jury found him guilty on all three counts, but without the video provided by a 17-year-old Black child, would the verdict be the same? I doubt it. And at what cost did the judgment come? Darnella Frazier is traumatized. I want to shield her from this world that brutally ended her childhood as she bore witness to his murder. This country devours its Black youth.

My joy about the verdict was fleeting. One of the first thoughts in my head, after I finished crying, was, “we need to be careful.” I believe America. I did not expect this triple guilty verdict to go down peacefully. I even tweeted that Black folks need to be careful (as usual) because they (the police) still expect their pound of flesh. I was right. Near the time of the announcement of Chauvin’s verdict, another Black child, Ma'Khia Bryant, was shot to death by the Columbus, Ohio police. I did not expect the pound of flesh to be taken so soon.

In my sociology seminar, my professor had us watch a short clip of Maya Angelou. In it, she quotes another scholar, who says, “I am a human being, and nothing human can be alien to me.” It is impossible to improve on the words of brilliance, but I would say, “I’m a Black American woman, and nothing American can be alien to me.” I believe America. Black people have always believed America. We do not need slogans, nor Kente cloth-clad Members of Congress who maintain the institutions that oppress us. We need systematic, intentional, deep-seated foundational change. Our oppression, our struggle, our humanity must be recognized because it most certainly exists. Most of all, we need everyone else to believe America because it sure as hell sees Black people, and America takes what it wants.
    [post_title] => My joy over the Derek Chauvin verdict was fleeting because I know America
    [post_excerpt] => That George Floyd and Daunte Wright cried out for their mothers should not comfort us. It should not be a slogan. It is the damnation of this country and how it ends Black childhood much earlier than white.
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My joy over the Derek Chauvin verdict was fleeting because I know America

by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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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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‘Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism’: A review of Ariella Azoulay’s new book

by Rachel Pafe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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    [post_date] => 2020-06-05 00:59:27
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    [post_content] => “We built this country, and we can burn it down." — BLM protester in Washington D.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by M. Shadee Malaklou

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-14 21:23:43
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    [post_content] => The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, but Covid-19 has brought some painful clarity.

On January 24, the day I went into labor, only two people in the U.S. had been diagnosed with the coronavirus that still had no name. That afternoon, I stumbled out of our Brooklyn apartment building under the watchful eyes of whichever neighbors happened to be in the courtyard or peering out their windows at that moment. In recent months, as I started growing more and more rotund, neighbors who had generally offered no more than a passing nod in the elevator or by the front gate began holding doors for me, inquiring about my pregnancy, and telling me tales of their own. I started to enjoy shifting my distinguishing characteristic in the building from my whiteness, which marked me as a gentrifier in a borough of gentrification, to my belly, which marked me as a beleaguered woman in a world of beleaguered women.

The demographics inside my 120-unit apartment building on the border of two Brooklyn neighborhoods—one already thoroughly gentrified, another well on its way—reflect the demographics on the street. In the building, longtime black residents get replaced, vacancy by vacancy, with mostly white, highly educated newcomers like myself, whose rent-stabilized apartments are still a bargain at twice the price many of the older families are paying.

The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, particularly in a city like New York, where racial differences persistently track onto income levels and health outcomes, and whole communities get displaced by predatory developers. My also-white partner is an artist and I’m a graduate student. As far as annual income is concerned, many of the longtime residents are probably in better shape than we are. But as is playing out so blatantly during this crisis, social class isn’t just about income. This lesson has never been clearer than from where I write this, perched under a skylight at a friend’s childhood home in Connecticut, where we have been hiding out for the last six weeks.

We spent the first four weeks of my son’s life in the normal self-isolation of new parenthood. The news about the spread of the virus was ominous, but felt distant. Family visited, friends brought food. The only visitors we restricted were my aunt and uncle, who had returned in mid-February from a cruise in the Far East. All others were welcome, as was the friendly up-close cooing of our neighbors. When I was finally able to move around again after a few weeks of what is euphemistically referred to as postpartum “discomfort,” I delightedly walked down the block to my favorite coffee shop and down a couple more to another, just because I could.

But soon the three of us came down with a cold and again began receding from the world. It was just as well, because days later, on March 4, a Covid-19 cluster surfaced just north of the city. As we monitored our temperatures and the baby’s cough—which is one of the saddest and scariest sounds I have ever heard—and gradually nursed ourselves back to health, the city got sicker and sicker all around us.

A neighbor posted to the building’s invite-only Facebook page, which is populated almost exclusively by the building’s gentrifiers, expressing concern for elderly residents and for the woman who cleans the hallways and takes out the trash. Ideas were circulated about how to help: sign-up sheets, phone calls, pros, cons.

At the same time, discarded latex gloves started littering the streets and sidewalks like a dystopian second autumn. At first we spotted just one or two each time we took the dog out for a walk, but soon there were scores of them clustering in slow-moving eddies.

Headlines forecasting calamities bled into each other across all our devices, the drumbeat growing louder and closer, and the warm exchanges we had been having with neighbors gradually fizzled into a mutually fearful, distanced dance when negotiating doorways in common spaces. The streets began feeling empty. Normally coveted parking spots opened up as people with means packed up and drove away. At the same time, the building’s Facebook page went curiously quiet. Had the other gentrifiers left the premises?

Since we had no country house to flee to nor the means to indefinitely rent one, we figured we would just stay put. We signed up for new internet service that week; if we were going to stay, we were going to do it with high-speed broadband.

But what might have been even more contagious than the virus so many were fleeing was the panic it induced. When close friends also with a newborn and also without a country house announced their decision to flee the city, we finally accepted that the postpartum back-to-work routine we had so meticulously planned and were started to look forward to implementing had become obsolete. So had the need for a new internet provider. The elevator, which we needed to ride up and down twice a day with our 12-year-old dog, started to feel like a death trap. High-touch zones like the front doorknobs seemed to glow, radioactive. The day Governor Cuomo finally announced the closure of public schools, I started feeling desperate. We tapped into our networks, learned that a friend’s parents had left behind an empty house in the suburbs when they decamped months earlier to the Virgin Islands, and that they would let us have it. Two days later, we made our first of several car trips to the midcentury house on a wooded road which would become our temporary home.

After hearing that we were leaving, friends in our building who had been planning to ride it out decided that they would follow suit. As they wheeled their suitcases packed with dried beans and all-season clothing through the lobby, a young black resident standing with a friend by the elevator muttered after them: “Have fun in the Poconos.”

Our friends, who are also white, weren’t going to the Poconos, and we weren’t going to the Virgin Islands. But what difference does it make? Whether their family’s empty suburban condo or our friend’s empty suburban house, we have options because the people in our communities have options. And the fact that neither we nor our friends are even paying for our temporary housing only underscores the inequality of our opportunities.

Packing up the car in front of the same neighbors who saw us off to the hospital just two months earlier is not an experience I will soon forget. As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure. Ethically speaking, by most accounts, fleeing to an empty house with two weeks’ worth of groceries was the best thing to do. Three fewer people in the building means three fewer disease vectors, and three fewer hospital beds to take up if we fell ill. Our presence helped no one and was only a risk, and a potential resource drain.

And yet. Leaving behind the neighbors whose outpricing our presence only accelerated felt like a betrayal. Not that anyone seemed sorry to see us go. Maybe, just maybe, some felt a certain satisfaction at being right: that we might be friendly, we might move secondhand furniture ourselves out of our 15-year-old Honda, and we might hold doors whenever there isn’t a pandemic, but at the end of the day, we have choices, and many of them do not. The virus itself might be equal opportunity, but the crowded conditions and impossibility of remote working are not.

Maybe in the end it’s just as well the Facebook group never really integrated. If our good intentions didn’t bear fruit, at least their transience could go largely unnoticed. Except, that is, by those of us who spoke and then fell silent.
    [post_title] => Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You're probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors
    [post_excerpt] => As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure.
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Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You’re probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors

by Ilana Sichel

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    [post_date] => 2020-04-10 17:36:04
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    [post_content] => In northern British Columbia, a female chef draws on her native heritage and introduces diners to local, pre-European cuisine.

Generations ago, Indigenous communities living in harsh environments found comfort and sustenance in a basic bread recipe. 

For many remote First Nations communities throughout North America, flour wasn’t available, so bread was made with ground-up roots, bear fat and berries to sweeten, it was then cooked in an open fire or wrapped around a stick to bake.

This bread, called bannock, changed over the years incorporating ingredients like flour, fat, and sugar that were rationed to people after the government forcibly removed them from their land. It was then fried and became an important staple at powwows. Indigenous people took the scraps of oppression and made something delicious with it.

Powwows are a meeting, a chance for Indigenous people to get together and showcase dancing, singing, artisan creations and spend time in cultural appreciation and celebration. They have also served as an act of powerful resistance against continuous attempts to destroy, legislate and remove Indigenous culture. They are a demonstration of pride.

Sharon Bond, who is from the Nooaitch Indian Band in Merritt, British Columbia, has made her “bannock and butter” from bringing this ancient food to modern diners and the public can’t get enough.

“Bannock was a survival bread that really brought communities together through celebrations and gatherings. And it was one of the roots of keeping people alive,” she says.

Bond owns Kekuli Cafe, which has become the first Indigenous-owned restaurant franchise in Canada. With two locations and a third set to open in the near future, Bond’s long-held desire to run her own restaurant has come to fruition. But it doesn’t stop there; by offering franchising opportunities, Bond is helping to empower another generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs to taste success with bannock too.

“Indigenous youth can be supported from the time they are in high school. We need to bring entrepreneurs and business people into schools to teach and inspire youth, to bring out their ideas and to be creative and know that they can make their dream into a business. Mentors are needed,” she says.

She herself guides and empowers youth and aspiring business owners through an initiative called Futurpreneur and through monthly Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. She also sees mentorship as a cycle and continues to benefit from her own mentor, a successful restaurant owner, who she can talk to about any industry-specific questions she may have.

Her journey to becoming a restaurant owner was a long process, in part because she wanted the endeavor to be a success and took her time to design a winning product.

“It took a few years to do the business plan, we took our time to make sure that everything was going to be just right, the colors, the logo, the slogan. We just wanted to have a very strong business. It took time to get to that point and then when we finally opened our doors people thought we were a franchise which was pretty cool. So, I said, Well, we're not, but we will be now!”

One of the decisions she grappled with was the name for the cafe, she eventually found the word “Kekuli” in a book by James Teit, a Scottish anthropologist who wrote extensively about the people of the Interior Salish First Nations.

It’s the name for a winter dwelling, found across the Okanagan region, a house built into the ground to provide shelter and warmth. Pronounced ke-koo-lee, it seemed like the perfect moniker for the type of space she wanted to create, she registered the business name the very same day.

Even though the process of launching the business was a slow burn, Bond has been interested in cooking since she was a child, when she was making a mess in her mom’s kitchen and watching her bake cinnamon buns and bread. She remembers enjoying the smell of spices and recently found an old recipe book with a missing cover, the pages of which were decorated with her childish doodles and colorings.

One of her mom’s regular recipes was chili, which also features on Kekuli Cafe’s menu, although Bond says its quite a different recipe. A staple offered at powwows; chili is traditionally served atop a piece of bannock to catch all of the meaty juices.

Bread forms a part of almost every human culinary culture across the globe and Bond has often been told that her bannock reminds customers of other fry bread that they remember from their childhood, whether that was in China, Scotland or anywhere else across the world.

Different Indigenous communities across North America make their bannock to their own unique recipes, in fact, at Kekuli they have their own ancient and secret recipe.

Bannock fans will find that the familiar frybread taste replicated perfectly at Kekuli Cafe with regulars often praising the softness of the bannock. But you can also find a number of innovative menu items like dessert topped bannocks, BLTs and bannock-wich sandwiches.

“Time has evolved so now we've got flour and oil and cast iron pans and fryers. It’s bannock with a twist, you know a little bit more contemporary bannock,” she says.

That contemporary bannock topped with sweet treats remains very popular but the traditional bannock is favored by purists as are some of the sweet yet naturally Canadian flavors from the land like Saskatoon Berry, Maple Glaze, and Maple Walnut.

The restaurant’s slogan “Don’t Panic... We Have Bannock!” came about from one of the first customers who ran up to the counter worried that they may have sold out. Sharon reassured them by stating the now-famous line and they all broke into laughter.

Bond is an incredibly warm person who makes people feel at ease, no doubt due to her genuine care and concern for how others are feeling. One of the philosophies that Kekuli Cafe is built upon is that all her customers should feel acknowledged when they arrive.

“I wanted to open a restaurant for 20 years and I always thought ‘Oh I'm going to do this with my restaurant,’ I'm going to make sure everyone smiles and is acknowledged, you're not just someone who comes in and orders and sits down and that's it. You know, I engage with all my customers and I really felt that there wasn't enough compassion or empathy, it's important to make someone's day,” she says.

Bond is also humble and credits her success to the whole team. In fact, she was recently awarded the Indigenous Woman-Business Award of Excellence from The National Aboriginal Capital Corporation but was almost too shy to tell me. She admitted that she sometimes finds it difficult to enjoy her success without feeling like she’s bragging.

Where she excels, however, is in empowering other women to proudly and confidently promote themselves. A culture she is trying to develop in her local community through her Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. 

“I can see it becoming a very important networking group. I've been to other networking groups for women and sometimes I just feel out of place,  it doesn't seem to be me, I'm not a high heel wearing type person and everyone's all decked right out and I am more of a Doc Martens person!” she says.

Through mentorship, encouragement, and plenty of bannock, Bond is building a culture of shared success.
    [post_title] => In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine
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In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine

by Fiona Tapp

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    [post_content] => When I was 12 years old, a lonely black femme male child, I read The Bluest Eye in a single night. Every character was in me or a reflection of my life.

Toni Morrison gave me a blueprint for the meaningful exploration of love and trauma. She accomplished this by centering her narratives on the lives of black femmes, people like me, whom society has traditionally devalued. As a result of this precise focus, Morrison’s body of work surpasses identity politics; it heals us from within the deep darkness of our society and elevates us to its bright but colorless peaks.

I spent my early childhood in a  single-parent home full of affirmation and stability. But when my mother descended very suddenly into the thick of her addiction, my life changed radically. Today, drug addicts are called victims of the opioid crisis, and there are empathetic national calls for resources to be invested in finding a therapeutic solution for them. When I was a child in the 1990s, people like my mother were called crackheads and super predators. The only solution offered to them was a well-trained beast called the prison industrial complex. Later, I would learn that the well-trained old beast was excited by a charismatic young presidential hopeful I saw playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. That beast chased and found my mother: she was incarcerated when I was 12 years old, and I entered the worst period of my life.

I was sent to live in a group home for teenage boys, a house full of strangers and staff supervisors that would come and go based on work shifts. It was cold and did not feel like a home at all. School was no longer the fun, curiosity-inducing place of learning that it once had been. Instead, it was a place where bullies of all genders were waiting around every corner to hurl a fist, or to yell the insults “nigger” and “faggot.” I suffered from both the fists and the insults because I was a black femme male child. Socially isolated, I floated through each day finding solace in the hope that my mother would soon be free and my life would return to normal.  

My English teacher became my unlikely savior. Mean as a rattlesnake, she was a stern-faced, pale white woman with piercing eyes and a manner of speech so acerbic that she terrorized even my bullies into silence, thus safeguarding me from their venom at least while I was in her class. One day she arrived in an unusually good mood, holding a cloth bag that contained copies of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I understood that she’d had to fight for permission to teach this book, which she distributed with the admonition that it was a treat for which we should be grateful. 

That night I sat in my room and read this book with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt since I devoured Gertrude Warner’s The Boxcar Children, years earlier. Every character in The Bluest Eye was within me or a reflection of my life. I didn't know the word “transgender,” but I strongly believed my life would have been much better if only I had been born a girl. So I identified with Pecola, the violence-damaged, impoverished foster girl who escapes into a fantasy world; but instead of longing for blue eyes to make me beautiful, I longed for female genitalia. I come from a color-struck family so I was my mother’s “dream high yellow child” and treated with care and protected as such. I was Maureen, the light-skinned black girl, and Claudia, who comes from a poor family. I had aunts that were Miss Marie, the overweight and kind prostitute, and a few that had upper-class aspirations like Geraldine. My step father was Cholly, the destructive man who lives on the margins of society.  I finished the book and rushed back to class, flushed with enthusiasm. By the end of the semester, I had read Beloved and Song of Solomon. That experience sparked a lifelong love for Toni Morrison and the characters in her novels. I was anchored in the humanity of Pecola, of Sethe in Beloved, and of the women of the Convent in Paradise. 

I understood the pathology of Pecola’s request for blue eyes because I was bombarded with the same ideals of eurocentric beauty. My advantage was in being born later, by which time there was a well-established counter-narrative: James Brown had been singing “I'm Black and I'm Proud” for decades; Beverly Johnson and Naomi Campbell had appeared on the covers of glossy magazines and modeled haute couture at the Paris fashion shows; and Dorothy Dandridge had broken down barriers so that Angela Bassett could show me what’s love got to do with it. I was surrounded by beacons of light, from Grace Jones to Oprah, so I did not aspire to any attributes of whiteness. I identified with Pecola because she wanted something very badly, but as a child dealing with dysphoria without understanding the bio-psychology of transgenderism, I did not understand the pathology of my own desire. I was told was that I was delusional, mentally ill, and that I needed prayer. 

After finishing The Bluest Eye, I wondered if the happy ending for Pecola was being lost in the delusion that blue eyes would make her more beautiful. My 12-year-old heart was full of empathy for Pecola; I felt that, had she been given time and care before trauma ravaged her, she would have learned to appreciate her own beauty. It was this insight, gained from reading Toni Morrison’s great novel, that made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood. My rock-solid belief that I was a human above all else centered me; I had no doubt that I deserved empathy and dignity while I figured out the rest of my identity.

Beloved tells a story of complicated motherly love that is different from the romantic image sold by Hollywood. Sethe saves her daughter, named Beloved, by making a horrible, complicated decision for which she suffers intense emotional trauma. My mother was raised by her abusive schizophrenic grandmother with her four cousins. Although she was the color of peanut butter, she was the darkest girl. Her childhood was filled with physical and sexual abuse all rooted in religion and the color of her skin. She felt that her mother had abandoned her, which undermined her self-esteem and made her feel out of place in the world. So when I was born, a high yellow blue-eyed curly haired infant, she treated me like a baby doll. She said “I just could not believe that something so beautiful could come from me.” She showered me with praise and adoration and told me that no one would ever hurt me, that nobody would ever take her from me. She was overprotective. She was loving. She was the perfect mother. So for all of my childhood I was certain that a mother’s love could never be broken — that it was the strongest thing in the world. I was thus completely unprepared emotionally for her fall into drug addiction and jail. 

As a teenager who did not understand the concepts of addiction and self-medicating to sublimate emotional pain, I felt betrayed and abandoned by my mother. Morrison’s novel Beloved helped me to understand that a mother’s love can manifest in a plethora of ways when she lives in a world of violence. Sethe, the runaway slave who kills her own child rather than see her returned to bondage, does the best she can to love and protect the children she has later. She is of course deeply traumatized, which hobbles her ability to nurture her living children. By analyzing Sethe’s response to having been given a second chance at mothering, I could see my mother through a completely new lens. I didn't want to haunt my mother like the ghost of Beloved. My mother is still battling her addiction, but I can see her humanity and love her, while holding her accountable for her decisions. We are on a journey of healing.

In a black trans woman’s life, community is intrinsic to survival. In 1997, when I was on the cusp of my life as an activist, I read Paradise. The novel is about a  black community led by men who turn their rage on a group of ostracized women who have found refuge in a place called the Convent. Three years after reading that novel, I won a First Amendment right victory when I successfully sued my high school for the right to attend the prom in the gender-affirming attire of my choosing. I began my matriculation as the first openly trans woman who was forced to live in a male dorm at the HBCU Jackson State University in the deeply conservative town of Jackson, Mississippi. 

I could not have survived those ordeals without the help of community. I owe my emotional well being to the black and or femme community; to my white feminist English teacher, who gave me the phone number of the ACLU, which helped me win my case in high school; to the gray-eyed Alpha Kappa Alpha at the college admission office who waived my out-of-state fees so that I could afford to be admitted; to the tall, dark dean of students who protected me from expulsion after I got into a fight with a bully during my sophomore year of college; and to my natural hair Aunt Georgia, who filled my refrigerator with food when I had no money. I owe much to the black young femme students, male and female, who showed me love and support while I went through the perils of being first to do what I was doing. Like the women in Paradise who found refuge in the convent, I found a safe haven in the black femme community. Because of them, I knew that I would never be alone and that somebody always had my back, and that I would survive because I had a safe place to be. 

Toni Morrison’s characters are complex and unique. By focusing in her novels on the least among us, Ms. Morrison transcended identity barriers. Her stories help me heal and grow my relationships with myself, my family and my community. She will continue to be beacons of light for generations to come.

 
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Toni Morrison’s novels taught me to see the world through a lens of compassion

by Diamond Stylz

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    [post_content] => “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.” — Joe Biden to Kamala Harris at the June 27 Democratic primary debate

Responding to Biden's comment, investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, explains in the New York Times why busing succeeded in some parts of the country and failed in others — and also why the term "busing" is inaccurate for what was, in fact, "court-ordered school desegregation."

[The fact that] Americans of all stripes believe that the brief period in which we actually tried to desegregate our schools was a failure, speaks to one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the last half century.

If there was a problem with busing, Hannah-Jones continues, it was that it was too successful, too good at desegregating schools in segregated cities and towns. Between 1964 and 1972, the proportion of black children attending white schools in the South rose from just two percent to nearly half. "The South," observes Hannah-Jones, "Had gone from the most segregated region of the country for black children to the most integrated, which it remains 40-some years later.”

In the northern states, however, wealthy white urban parents organized against enforced busing so effectively that the policy eventually failed. Today, most school districts in cities like New York and Chicago are de facto segregated.

Brown v. Education was not a court case about a child’s right to a better school on the other side of town, Hannah-Jones points out, but one about a child’s right to attend the school in her own neighborhood. The issue that Biden and others opposed was always integration, not busing.

Now, three years into the Trump presidency, we are seeing the consequences of segregated neighborhoods and schools. 

“De facto segregation of public schools continues to thrust aside the critical democratic experience of learning and conversing with racial Others during the formative years of human and citizen development,” MIT professor J. Phillip Thompson wrote in 2017, not long after Donald Trump took office. Segregation, he explains, means that people "are less likely to recognize commonalities in their values – concern for family, respect for hard work, willingness to help others." In the absence of mutually acknowledged humanity, it's a short step to "scapegoating and divisive politics."

Segregation affects individuals and society in a variety of ways. One study by Boston University showed that black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods are policed differently, which accounts for the racial disparity in police shootings.

“A common refrain in the age of Trump is: ‘This is not who we are,’” David Smith writes in The Guardian. “A common riposte is to point to America’s long history of slavery, segregation and violence and say: ‘This is exactly who we are.’”

Most alarming about the racism exacerbated by segregation is that it has led to domestic terrorism, with mass shootings that target visible minorities.

Segregated online spaces are fostering racist vitriol. “He truly believed wild conspiracy theories he read on the internet, many of which vilified Democrats and spread rumors that Trump supporters were in danger because of them,” wrote the defense lawyers for Cesar Sayoc Jr., who sent bombs to Democrats and journalists who had publicly taken on Trump.

The hope and inspiration during these dark times lie with people and groups working to desegregate our society in different ways. In Houston, a city program called Build Up Houston seeks to empower and hire black business owners. Black and white ministers are working together to bridge the racial divide in churches and other faith-based spaces. Latinx activists, sometimes excluded from the black/white dichotomy, are establishing social and political movements that are founded on neither “American exceptionalism [nor] American aversion.”

In 2017, Thompson identified "morally-based organizing" across races as an essential endeavor to combat white supremacism. "How to convene the public when the majority (including a majority of blacks and Latinos) is dispersed in segregated suburbs is a pressing practical issue," he wrote. If we want to save democracy, we'll have to figure out the means of traversing the physical and the racial divides. 
    [post_title] => Why Joe Biden's former position on school busing is anti-democratic
    [post_excerpt] => Between 1964 and 1972, court-enforced busing successfully desegregated public schools in the American South. But in the north, white parents in urban centers organized to oppose the policy — which eventually failed. Today, southern public schools remain integrated while northern public schools are de facto segregated. 
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Why Joe Biden’s former position on school busing is anti-democratic

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-07-19 20:06:03
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    [post_content] => Is racist the new four-letter word?

On Wednesday night at a rally in North Carolina, President Trump falsely claimed that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a refugee from Somalia who became a U.S. citizen when she was a child, was a supporter of Al Qaeda. Then he stood and watched as his supporters chanted “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back..!” That rally capped several days of Trump’s well-publicized incitement against the four junior congresswomen known as the Squad — Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Presley, and Ilhan Omar — who have been vociferously critical of President Trump and his policies.

“If they don’t love [America],” said the president, “tell them to leave it.”

In their coverage of this story, legacy media outlets ranging from The New York Times to CNN finally embraced the term “racist” to describe the president’s words. Their use of this word became a story in itself, with Trump supporters denying the president’s words were racist. “It’s not racist to say love it or leave it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. He added: “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back.”

 



Even if one were to agree with Graham that “send her back” was not necessarily racist, one would be hard-pressed to reconcile the core right to freedom of expression in a democracy with the idea that an immigrant who exercised that right by criticizing the president's policies should be deported.

Other Republican representatives were clearly uncomfortable with the “send her back” chant, but they didn’t want to label the president a racist, so they split the difference: The crowd was wrong, said Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN), but the president “didn’t have a racist bone in his body.” Emmer did not comment on the fact that the president stood silently for 13 seconds as the crowd he’d been working into a frenzy for the previous quarter of an hour chanted rhythmically.

Trump is, of course, notorious for his misogyny. But besides their gender, the four Democratic representatives he attacked are also all people of color. Bernie Sanders shares the same political views, but Trump did not single him out. Sanders is, of course, a white man. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi — who has a testy relationship with the Squad — successfully pushed through a House resolution to condemn Trump for his racist comments, overriding Republican objections and a parliamentary ruling that deemed the term an insult and thus not allowed.

The partisan argument over what constitutes racism is the driving force behind the reluctance of legacy media outlets to use the term. Editors are afraid that if they label someone a racist, the media outlet will no longer be considered an objective source of information. There is a whole separate argument over whether or not objectivity is possible or desirable in these troubled times. When, for example, The New York Times published a controversial profile of a white supremacist that made him sound like an ordinary guy who loved his family but happened to hold some extremist views, critics charged that the paper had lent credibility to a Nazi by presenting a humanizing portrait in the pages of the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

One expert argued that using the term "racist" was counter-productive because it made the person accused of racism defensive, and that the ensuing argument over whether or not the term was appropriate deflected attention from meaningful and substantive policy discussions.

But as Trump engages increasingly in overt racist incitement, the legacy media are re-examining their editorial policy. Over the past two days, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and other prominent reporting platforms have all used the term “racist,” to describe the president’s comments. As Maria Bustillos explains in the Columbia Journalism Review: “The language of distance and delicacy is based in good faith; where good faith is absent, delicate language does little more than normalize things like racism and cruelty.” In other words, sometimes going high when others are going low can be counter-productive.
    [post_title] => Why editors are so reluctant to label Donald Trump a racist
    [post_excerpt] => The use of the term "racist" became a story in itself, with Trump supporters denying the president’s words were racist. “It’s not racist to say love it or leave it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. He added: “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back.”
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Why editors are so reluctant to label Donald Trump a racist

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-28 16:16:18
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    [post_content] => Even peaceful, prosperous Canada is not immune from the populism that thrives on tribal anxiety and prejudice. 

Last week Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province, passed a law that bans public employees from wearing religious symbols at work. Known as Bill 21, the law would force public school teachers, police officers, Crown attorneys, and judges who wear hijabs, turbans, or yarmulkes, to choose between their religion and their profession.

Quebec is not the only democracy to enforce this type of ban in the name of separation of religion and state: France bans Muslim women from wearing a burqini to the beach or a headscarf to teach in public schools; and Turkish law prevented women who wore the hijab from working as public servants or even attending university until 2013.

But Canada’s international reputation is, not unjustifiably, one of tolerance and acceptance. The federal government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism since 1971, and more recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set a widely lauded example when he opened Canada’s doors to over 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Across Canada, Quebec’s new law is controversial at best. Legal scholars have suggested that it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the city of Brampton in the neighboring province of Ontario has voted to support a legal challenge against the law. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Quebecois — beyond the multicultural city of Montreal — approve of the new law. 

Why do Quebec attitudes toward multiculturalism and religious practice differ so starkly from those held in the rest of Canada? The complex answer is found in Quebec’s post-World War Two history.

During the 1960s Quebec underwent a radical social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution. In a single decade, the once impoverished and largely agrarian province transformed itself from a society dominated and controlled by the Catholic church, which overwhelmingly dictated public mores and laws, to a modern, staunchly secular province that rejected religion and its institutional power. Between 1960 and 1970, Quebec’s birth rate declined from Canada’s highest to its lowest; and its once heavily attended churches are now used as restaurants, gyms, and performance spaces.

The process of secularization applied to all of the province’s public institutions, from its schools and universities to its hospitals and welfare system. It was accompanied by a resurgent national identity that rested on the twin pillars of the French language and secularism. Quebec is today a prosperous middle class society with a comprehensive social welfare system administered by the province rather than by the Church.

Sixty years later, many in Quebec see Bill 21 as the next necessary step in that evolution and an extension of that same social project. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Quiet Revolution was a peaceful social movement that forever altered Quebec’s political and social landscape. It allowed the French-speaking majority to establish its primacy on the political, social, economic and cultural stage at both the provincial and the federal level. But the current movement is not about promoting the rights of the majority. Rather, by seeking to establish secularism as part of Quebec’s national identity, the provincial government is sacrificing the rights of the province’s minorities. A movement that was once about positive self-affirmation is now simply a reactionary rejection of others.

Ignoring its critics and refusing to debate, the government’s center-right Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), led by Premier François Legault, rammed Bill 21 through the legislature by preemptively invoking Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a rarely-used override power often referred to as the “notwithstanding” clause. In other words, the CAQ circumvented both the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thus preventing the new law from being struck down in court for the next five years. It also shut down debate by invoking closure, and by introducing last-minute amendments that outline surveillance powers for the ministry and rules of enforcement.

The secularism championed by Quebec’s Quiet Revolution stemmed from a deep-rooted and understandable desire by the French-speaking majority to rid itself of the Catholic Church’s asphyxiating control over the government and reaffirm its proud transformation into a modern, secular French-speaking state. In sharp contrast, Bill 21, a far more restrictive form of secularism imported from France, is primarily motivated by Quebecers’ antipathy for religion — primarily non-Christian faiths. This is not religious neutrality: it is religious persecution. The overwhelmingly white French speakers of Quebec are succumbing to anti-Muslim prejudice.

The populist CAQ tapped into this prejudice during the November 2018 election campaign; it now bases many of its legislative decisions on people’s fears rather than on facts.

Bill 21 is a response to the zeitgeist. The fear of Muslims that started with 9/11 spread to Quebec, bringing with it the impression that the government was making too many concessions to religious minorities. In 2006, Quebec created a special commission to study the “reasonable accommodation” of cultural minorities’ religious practices, in response to the perception that religion was making a comeback in the public sphere. In 2013, the Parti Quebecois, the nationalist party that ascended to power on the back of the Quiet Revolution in the mid-1970s, attempted to implement their questionably named Charter of Quebec Values, which sought to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols. The initiative failed miserably and the party was defeated by the Liberals. In 2015, Quebec’s Liberal government introduced their own version of secularism in Bill 62, which would prevent Muslim women wearing a burqa or a niqab from receiving government services. That, too, failed.

In 2019, Premier Legault’s government decided to circumvent the democratic process and put an end to long-standing debates on how to accommodate cultural minorities, by basically not bothering to accommodate them at all. His party’s goal is a homogeneous public face.

Legault, who denies that systemic racism or Islamophobia exist in Quebec, readily admitted in an interview with Radio Canada, Canada’s French-language public broadcaster, that Bill 21 “was a concession to people who are a little racist and don’t want to see religious symbols anywhere in public.” In a follow-up televised interview with the English-language CBC, Legault side-stepped the question of whether he felt empathy for a public school teacher who would have to remove her hijab if she wanted to keep her job. 

Exclusionary populism is defined by pandering to irrational fears and “solving” non-existent problems. Quebec has seen no incidents of religious proselytism or registered any complaint of bias by a public servant wearing a visible religious symbol. And yet hate crimes against Muslims have increased. Only three years ago, Alexandre Bissonnette entered a Quebec City mosque and gunned down six worshippers. 

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the same Quebec government that demands concessions from people who wear visible religious signs has decided that schools and hospitals will not have to remove the crucifixes from their walls because they’re classified as “heritage” items. Private schools, most of which are Christian, are also exempt from Bill 21. In the meantime, a crucifix still hangs on the walls of the National Assembly and most schools and city streets are still named after Christian saints. 

Despite the CAQ’s insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. Numerous French-language columnists and TV shows routinely discuss the “Muslim invasion” and a need for Quebecers to reassert themselves “before its too late.”

Meanwhile, Quebec’s largest French-language school board has announced that it will not apply the religious symbols law until it studies it further. The English School Board of Montreal has also said it will not comply with the law, although the government insists that it will not accept any delays. Civil liberties and Muslim groups have already vowed to challenge the bill and have filed an injunction in Quebec Superior Court, where a hearing is scheduled for July.

Bill 21 might feel like a win for the Legault government and its supporters, but it has created a divisive and contentious social climate. The legislation has been met with many legal challenges and by stinging criticism around the world. It could lead to a brain drain, as people who feel unwelcome in Quebec decide to live elsewhere. The CAQ might soon discover this “win” is more akin to a smugly defiant Pyrrhic victory.

In many ways, the legislation is an unfortunate manifestation of increasing concerns over immigration and its impact on Quebec’s national identity. But populism, which often seeks to provide simplistic solutions to complex problems and encroaching fears, is all the rage these days and certainly not unique to Quebec. From Brexit in the U.K., to The League in Italy, to Trumpism in the U.S., to Marine Le Pen in France, homogenous majorities struggle to come to terms with increasing diversity and religious plurality. In a 2005 opinion piece for The Times, Salman Rushdie writes:

In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact. Like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace.

The shifting relationship between nationalism, religion, and secularism continues to inform current debates about Quebec’s identity. Unfortunately, the deep-seated anxiety French-speaking Quebecers feel about their demographic future has caused it to justify exercising the same dogmatic social control on people’s appearance and way of life that, ironically, the Church once held.
    [post_title] => In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession
    [post_excerpt] => Despite the government' insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. 
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In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-21 17:23:28
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    [post_content] => America's foreign policy and international image would be improved if the foreign policy community were more diverse.

I am a black man in America, which means I am physically vulnerable all the time. The United States leads the world in police killings of its own black and brown citizens, and ranks first in incarcerating them. Its education system disproportionately funnels black children through the school to prison pipeline. Millions of people  — many of them black — are disenfranchised from voting because they served time in jail for felonies. In many cases they never regain their right to participate  in American democracy. Despite all these obvious and well-documented injustices, the white majority believes America has the moral pedigree to tell the rest of the world how to handle its own internal affairs. 

This attitude among white Americans speaks to an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The people who dominate and shape global conversations in the western and English-speaking world — think tank presidents, diplomats, foreign correspondents, and business executives  — are almost exclusively white men. They have no experience of the America I grew up in, and this limits their ability to understand the world. 

 As a black man who grew up in Detroit and then spent a good part of his adult life traveling and reporting in Eastern Europe, I have learned that white supremacy and imperialism are the same. The difference is that one is global while the other is domestic. Africa is least responsible for global warming but suffers most of its consequences, which are caused by the world’s leading powers. This is the type of visceral understanding gained from lived experience that the white men who dominate and shape the foreign policy conversation do not have. Their understanding of the world is thus limited, and the consequences are becoming increasingly clear: the American conversation about the world lacks nuance and insight; this undermines our ability to engage effectively — which, in turn, weakens both our own society and our place in the world.

I welcome the conversations about the need for more ethnic diversity in foreign policy conversations. I am glad that people are beginning to understand that with more diverse voices, America could develop a foreign policy that was less expansionist in its global engagement. Unfortunately, however, these conversations are predicated on inaccurate beliefs.

A flawed democracy

America is not the world’s most successful democracy; nor is it an example for the world to follow. Its own legal system has kept black people from gaining any real electoral power at the local and national levels. In Florida alone, more than a million people convicted of felonies were disenfranchised from voting before a November referendum restored their rights; the current governor is trying to slow the restoration process. This is not a system to export. It is a system that must be changed.

If America’s white majority were truly interested in making sure that non-white voices were included in foreign policy discussions, they would first work to stop the disenfranchisement of people of color. Nor are teachers with unchecked racial biases qualified to shape the minds of the next generation of foreign policy thinkers.

Besides its many misguided military interventions, such as the now widely-reviled Second Iraq War, the U.S. also has a long-documented history of allowing its intelligence service to carry out assassinations against world leaders whose policies deviate from the administration’s. In the twentieth century the CIA backed the assassination of elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende because he was a socialist, and helped engineer the coup that deposed Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh because he wanted to nationalize his country’s oil reserves. 

The United States is accustomed to implementing its foreign policy via the barrel of a gun, which makes a twisted kind of sense for the most gun-toting country on earth with the second-highest number of gun-related murders of any industrialized nation. But if the United States wants to be an example to the world it must change its gun laws and change its ways. It must ban the sale and distribution of military grade weapons to law enforcement agencies that treat the communities they are supposed to serve like enemy combatants. 

There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.

I write for The Root, the largest black news site in America. I have the rare opportunity of covering national politics from the perspective of a black person with a black editor. I do not have to deal with a white male editor who might try to change my voice or question my using personal experiences to inform my reporting. I love working at The Root, but my ambition is to be a foreign correspondent. I have two graduate degrees in journalism and another in Russia area studies; I speak two Eastern European languages and can point to many other achievements. But I have never been invited to an interview for any foreign reporting job. 

An editor at a mainstream newspaper once told me that I wasn’t qualified to write about U.S.-Russia/Ukraine relations because I was not a diplomat. This same publication has hired white people without any relevant credentials for foreign reporting positions. One of the recurring claims one hears in foreign policy circles is there aren’t enough qualified people of color to fill open positions. And yet, despite my qualifications, I cannot find a job as a foreign correspondent.

Hypocrisy won't win hearts and minds

The lack of diverse voices in international news has a profound  impact on the coverage of countries like Russia, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. The foreign press corps in Moscow and Kiev are almost exclusively white. I am quite confident that the reporting from those regions would be richer and more nuanced if half the press corps were composed of black and brown reporters who had personal experiences of immigration and of police abuse.

In the United States the coverage of Russia over the past two years has been weak. Analysts have focused on Putin, at the expense of nuanced reporting about ordinary Russians. Our media has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to blame the Kremlin for the fact that millions of Americans decided to vote a white supremacist into the White House, even as they have refused to engage in a serious conversation about the white supremacy that played a far greater role in getting Donald Trump elected than Putin could have done.

Incorporating more ethnically diverse people into foreign policy spaces goes well beyond cherry picking brown faces that seem non-threatening to sit at the table. If the U.S. is to pursue an honest, effective foreign policy, it needs to recruit people who are willing to break from the neo-liberalism that underlies the racism in contemporary American society.

There is transparent hypocrisy in insisting that Russia remove its troops from Ukraine while threatening military intervention in Iran. America regularly condemns Russia and other nations over their abuse of LGBTQ people, even as black trans women in America are murdered at alarming rates. 

Why diversity is important

Too many of our white diplomats are blind to this hypocrisy, because they are the products of an America that was built by and for them. There are too few people like me representing the United States at the table of global affairs, and this undermines the effectiveness of its foreign policy. Take Haiti, for example. Under the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, the United States deployed Marines to the island in 1915 to fend off German influence during World War I. But instead of helping to protect Haiti’s independence, the U.S. occupied the Caribbean country until 1934, exacerbating the theft of resources and political instability caused by French colonization. More recent U.S. policy towards Haiti hasn’t been much better. During the 1970s and 1980s successive administrations supported the violent  regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, while Donald Trump stripped Haitians in the United States of their Temporary Protected Status and made them vulnerable to deportation. 

House Democrats have held hearings on reparations for the descendants of slaves who were brought to America from Africa. The conversation needs to go global in the case of Haiti, with a hearing to address reparations for that country — or, better yet, a Marshall Plan.

What is good for Europe is good for Haiti. 

Americans see their country as a global cop enforcing democracy around the world, but Putin, Kim Jong-un, China’s President Xi and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei see a state with dubious motives and a narcissistic worldview.

I am working to diversify the international affairs conversation through my fellowship at Global Strategists Association, a non-profit organization that helps people from the black diaspora to engage in foreign policy spaces. Most of our events are held in spaces that are majority people of color, and look at domestic and global issues through the lens of blackness. Founder Apprecia Faulkner created the organization after encountering obstacles that prevented her from persuading white-dominated organizations to open up for black participants. I and other fellows are benefiting from her efforts, but the fact that she had to build that space illustrates the problem: America’s foreign policy circles are not interested in being as diverse as the image of America they sell to the world. 

The United States needs to carry out a major makeover of its domestic politics so that it is committed to all of its citizens, and not just the white ones. Only then can America truly promote an honest foreign policy that is not predicated on exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people — which is precisely what it does to its own minority groups at home. 
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America’s foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men

by Terrell J. Starr

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-13 15:06:55
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    [post_content] => Social media platforms and authoritarian populists have a troubled, tangled, symbiotic relationship

Evgeny Morozov, a prominent culture critic and social media expert, argues in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian that the global right-wing populist movement is divided over Big Tech companies. Globally, populists see the platforms as a way to subvert mainstream media, but in the United States the right wing sees it as a target to attack.  Morozov's analysis overlooks, however, the fact that American extremists have been having it both ways: they capitalize off the opportunity to radicalize individuals on social media, while cynically complaining about “far-left” ideologues, as demonstrated by recent events.

Last week, YouTube initially declined to sanction the right-wing comedian Stephen Crowder for posting videos filled with racist and homophobic attacks against a Vox journalist. As HuffPo reporter Andy Campbell observes, this is a really bad sign for the company’s new anti-hate policy.

Then the company proceeded to prove, as Will Oremus describes it, “The One Rule of Content Moderation”: Namely, if a decision is too controversial, reverse it. YouTube’s decision to take away Crowder’s ability to make money off his videos is neither a “hard-won victory” nor “mob rule,” but merely more evidence that the tech companies have no idea what they’re doing.

As this story by New York Times reporter Kevin Roose demonstrates, the recommendation engines that power platforms like YouTube are as influential as content moderation — if less visible. Roose reports that a series of tweaks to the recommendation system on YouTube made it even easier for white supremacists and other right-wing populists to radicalize their audiences.

However, Roose also reports that some left-wing YouTubers are hacking the system by mimicking the video style, lingo, and subject matter of right-wing populists, and then debunking their messages. These activists are modeling their tactics on successful de-radicalization by co-opting the medium, meme by meme. While this community-driven strategy is promising, its creators are ultimately at the mercy of the same algorithms as their far-right colleagues: if YouTube switches things up again, who knows whether they can still get their videos in front of the people who need them.

In other news:

States race to ban styrofoam in the latest skirmish of the much-needed war on plastic. Read more.

How an “innovation team” is ending blight in Mobile, Alabama. Learn more.

The small Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i is modeling a post-carbon future for us all. Here’s how.
    [post_title] => How the far right games social media platforms
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How the far right games social media platforms

by Jessica McKenzie

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