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Category: Race & Racism

  • ‘DEI Has Become the New N-Word’CounterSpin interview with Tim Wise on ‘DEI hires’

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed author and educator Tim Wise about ‘DEI hires’ for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Election Focus 2024Janine Jackson: While Republicans are clearly scrambling to find profitable lines of attack in a new presidential race, they’re deploying one line that draws on a lot of history: labeling presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a “DEI hire,” with reference to programs designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The notion, if anyone needed it spelled out, is that any Black or brown person or woman in a job is only there because employers were forced to hire them.

    To many, this sort of thing is transparent misogyny and racism, and then that special combination of the two. But being obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t impactful. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s built on decades of undermining any intentional efforts to dismantle or even acknowledge the living history of structurally embedded white supremacy in this country.

    Tim Wise is an anti-racism educator, author and critical race theorist. He joins us now by phone from Nashville. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tim Wise.

    Tim Wise: Thank you for having me.

    JJ: One official definition of DEI is “organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have been historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination.” We might add that could be historically and currently, but that’s the idea.

    Now, it used to be most everyone would say, “Sure, that’s a good idea,” but then maybe just not do it. Now, we seem to have slipped backward to where the right feels they can boldly say, “Oh, we don’t even support that idea.” It’s strange, isn’t it, to miss the good old days when people didn’t say what they thought?

    Tim Wise

    Tim Wise: “When you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression.”

    TW: Right—we’ve sort of gone from the days of the dog whistle to the air horn or bullhorn on these things. I remember, 30-plus years ago, when I started out doing this work in the campaigns against David Duke down in Louisiana. Duke felt the need to sort of hide his racism, to downplay his overt white supremacy.

    And it seems like the gloves are off now. And so DEI has become essentially the new n-word for certain folks on social media. They will apply it to any person of color, regardless of that person’s qualifications, regardless of that person’s accomplishments. And they’ll apply it to public officials who, after all, pass the only test one needs to determine qualifications, which is, they got elected, right?

    So if the mayor of Baltimore happens to be a Black man, and a barge hits a bridge and the bridge falls down, they call him the DEI mayor. What does that even mean? I mean, you get elected by getting votes, just like white mayors. And if the mayor had been white, I don’t think there would’ve been some special white man superpower that would’ve kept the bridge up.

    But what that is is a way of reminding people, or telling people, these folks are less qualified, and they’re taking your stuff.

    And I think the reason that they’ve ramped that up, and the gloves have come off, is that unlike 30-some odd years ago, 20 years ago, we suddenly have white folks confronted with a couple of realities. One is that the culture and the demographics of the country are changing, in a way that renders us less hegemonic than we once were. And when you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression. You feel like the wheels are coming off the bus. And so there’s this perfect storm of white anxiety that we are in the midst of, and we’re going to have to figure out how to respond to that.

    JJ: And we’ll come back to that. Just doubling on what you’ve just said, folks may remember this 1990 ad for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms that showed white hands crumbling a job- rejection letter with the voiceover, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”

    1990 "White Hands" ad for Jesse Helms

    “White Hands” ad for Jesse Helms (1990)

    It’s powerful, in part, because of what it glides over. How does our dude know he was the best qualified? And then the implication that decades of rejecting minorities because they weren’t white represents the state of fairness that we’re trying to get back to. And, I was just going to say, even though these current campaigns are more overt, they’re still drawing a lot of power from what they don’t say. And why does that work? Who does that work on?

    TW: I think it works because, first off, we have a long history of believing, No. 1, of course, that folks of color are less qualified, and whites are more qualified. That’s always been a problem in our country.

    But I think there’s an even more fundamental thing at work, and that is, if you think about the most dominant ideological underpinning of America, what is it? The core of our belief system is this belief in meritocracy, rugged individualism, the idea that wherever you end up is all about you. So if you work hard, you can make it, anyone can.

    And that’s, in theory, a race-neutral ideology, it’s also the secular gospel. If America were a Bible, it would be Genesis 1:1.

    The problem is, once you imbibe that, once you internalize that belief, and you look around, and you see a society of profound racial inequality, of gender inequality, of class inequality, what is the logical thing for a person to do? And by a person, I don’t even mean an overt bigot. I mean an everyday average person who thinks about that, goes, “Gosh, if where you end up is all about your own effort and anyone can make it, then I guess these people on the bottom, maybe they are lesser, right? And the people on the top really are better.”

    And so racism and sexism and classism can all be reinforced in people who are not actually particularly hateful, prejudiced or bigoted, but simply put two and two together: the idea of rugged individualism, and the objective reality of social stratification or inequality. So we really have to address that, because that suggests that a core element of American political thought is going to reinforce this kind of thinking. And once it does that, it can reinforce the very systems that promote that thinking.

    JJ: Republicans may have faith that they can just say “DEI” and their work is done, because of the success of other recent efforts. I will never get over how Christopher Rufo just called his shot. He just said:

    The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

    And news media, who were in a place to say, “Well, no, you can’t just take a term and say it doesn’t mean what it claims to, it means whatever you say it does”—they didn’t do that. They simply folded this intentional misrepresentation into the public dialogue. I feel like they got played like a fiddle, and for reasons. But it didn’t just allow, but promoted, the notion that these attacks were some organic bottom-up thing, rather than an orchestrated campaign. What do you see as the current or potential role of the press in this?

    TW: I think the media have done a miserable job, as you suggest, in responding to the blatantly, transparently dishonest narrative that folks like Rufo are spinning, when he says, as he has on his Twitter thread—he’s amazingly transparent about this—that we’re basically going to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We’re just going to name things what we want to name them. We’re going to tell people, this is what it is. We don’t even care.

    He’s been quoted in a speech saying he doesn’t give a—and I know I can’t say the next word, because we’re on radio—about what CRT actually is. He doesn’t care about it. He, in fact, wants us to debate the specifics of it, while he just uses it as a propaganda cudgel.

    Intercept: Funded by Dark Money, Chris Rufo’s Nonprofit Stokes the Far Right’s Culture War

    Intercept (6/8/23)

    And the media, rather than exposing that, have done piece after piece after piece, and I’m talking puff pieces, about Christopher Rufo, where they don’t dig into the funding, for example, the multi-billionaire dollar stuff that’s coming in for him and the organizations he works for.

    This is not some grassroots, bottom-up campaign of some simple guy sitting at his computer in his home, taking on the powerful. This is somebody being funded by the powerful. But hardly any of the media have really attempted to pull back the veil on who he is and who is funding him and what their agenda is. And we know what their agenda is, because it’s the same agenda they’ve had for 50 years or more, really more than that, going back 60 years.

    These are the ideological descendants of the people who never supported the civil rights movement, who never supported the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act. They’re the ideological descendants of the folks who used to write, at the National Review, that Black folks basically weren’t ready for the right to vote. They weren’t civilized enough yet. That was the official position of Bill Buckley’s magazine back in the ’60s. So that’s who these folks are, and if the media really believed in investigative journalism, they would expose that.

    JJ: And then the other line that bugged me was, “Well, they aren’t even teaching CRT in elementary school,” as if that was a pushback.

    TW: Yeah, there was sort of a capitulation, right? This idea that liberals, rather than standing up and fighting the attacks, said, “Oh no, that’s not us, my goodness.” Because the implication is, “Well, thank God it’s not, I mean, thank goodness we don’t do CRT with children, that would be poisoning their minds.”

    But all CRT tries to do, and this is so important for people to understand, is to provide a theoretical grounding so that when you look out and you see racial disparity, you have a framework and a lens for understanding it. And without a systemic lens, frankly, the only explanation left is the one the right prefers, which is, these Black and brown folks are broken. And CRT is saying, “No, it’s not Black and brown folks who are broken.”

    It’s not necessarily that white people are bad. CRT doesn’t bash white people. That’s a great myth. CRT doesn’t really say anything about white people as people. It says something about white supremacy as a system, historically and contemporaneously. And if you don’t have that framework, I don’t know how you can make sense of the world around you, except by blaming the people on the bottom for being there.

    JJ: Finally, you travel the country, and have for years, talking to people about these issues. What’s the vibe? Where do you find hope right now?

    TW: I find hope in the young folks, disproportionately, who led the uprising, obviously, in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. I find hope in the young people, disproportionately, who have stood up for the rights of Palestinians and the lives of Palestinians in this moment as well.

    Dispatches From the Race War, by Tim Wise

    City Lights (2020)

    I find hope in the enthusiasm that we’re seeing right now in the newly refashioned presidential race. I think there’s a lot of energy to realize that there is an opportunity to defeat Trumpism. There is an opportunity to beat back these folks who say they want to make America great again, by which they obviously mean a directional reference to the past.

    I think there’s hope in knowing that the vast majority of the people in this country believe in democracy, want democracy, reject things like Project 2025, and want to move the country forward, rather than moving it backward where those folks want to go.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Tim Wise. The most recent book is Dispatches From the Race War, from City Lights. Tim Wise, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    TW: Oh, you bet. Thank you.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Tim Wise on ‘DEI Hires,’ Keith McHenry on Criminalizing the Unhoused

     

     

    This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.

     

    National Park Police evict homeless encampment for McPherson Square Park, February 15, 2023 (photo: Elvert Barnes)

    (photo: Elvert Barnes)

    Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.

     


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Good Patient

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • ‘You Have People Who Only Look at Marijuana Legalization as Another Way to Make Money’: CounterSpin interview with Tauhid Chappell on cannabis equity

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Thomas Jefferson University’s Tauhid Chappell about cannabis equity for the June 28, 2024 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Extra!: The Origins of Reefer Madness

    Extra! (2/13)

    Janine Jackson: Marijuana use in this country has always been racialized. The first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, including the message that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” So concerns were justified about what the legalization and profitizing of marijuana would mean for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization.

    Tauhid Chappell has worked on these issues for years now. He teaches, at Thomas Jefferson University, the country’s first graduate-level course studying the impact and outcomes of equity movements in the cannabis industry. And he joins us now by phone from Maine. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tauhid Chappell.

    Tauhid Chappell: Always a pleasure.

    JJ: When we spoke with you last year, you helped debunk a lot of Reefer Madness–style fear-mongering around supposed social harm stemming from the legalization of marijuana. There was old-school “gateway drug” language, marijuana was going to on-ramp folks to opioid use. It was going to lead to traffic accidents, and use among teenagers was supposedly going to skyrocket. We are further along now; what more have we learned about those kinds of concerns?

    TC: I can happily report that as far as the ongoing reports that are coming out of what we call “mature markets”—states like Colorado, Washington, Oregon, even California—teen use has not been severely impacted. In fact, I believe that there’s a Colorado study that says that teen use has actually declined with legalization.

    Opioid use has not suddenly gone up because of marijuana legalization. In fact, many states, in their medical marijuana programs, have used opioid reduction as a reason why patients should be using cannabis, to actually get them off of opioid addiction, until we are actually seeing a reverse, of people who get on cannabis actually now starting to lessen the amount of opioids they use in their regimen.

    JJ: Well, the worry of many of us was that marijuana becoming legal would just blow past the fact that there are people in prison, mainly Black and brown people, for what now some other folks stand to profit from, that legalization would not include acknowledgement, much less reparation, for the decades in which whole communities were critically harmed. And then we just kind of say, “Hey, we’ve moved on, and now everybody loves weed.” What can you tell us about efforts to center those harmed by illegality in this new landscape of legal cannabis?

     

    Tauhid Chappell

    Tauhid Chappell: “How can we broaden our pardons and broaden our expungements, and expedite and automatically create these opportunities for people to move past these convictions?”

    TC: There is still much work to be done in the social and racial justice that would bring a reparative nature to the people, to the individuals, and their families and their communities, that have been impacted by cannabis prohibition and the war on drugs. Some states are trying to really focus on justice-impacted people to participate in the cannabis industry. Others are focusing on just trying to expunge records, pardon people, and that’s that. And then other states are not even contemplating or really moving to center people who have been impacted by incarceration, or are still incarcerated for marijuana, and other related offenses, too.

    So you have a patchwork of states that are doing well and can be doing better, and then other states who really need to prioritize and focus on individuals and families and communities who’ve been impacted by the war on drugs.

    Most recently in the news, Maryland’s governor has just pardoned 175,000 people for simple possession of marijuana, a typical charge that has impacted so many people in the past. That is something that I encourage other states to look at as advocates for more healing and repairing to happen for those that have been previously and currently impacted from their incarceration due to cannabis prohibition.

    And then the one thing that I’ll also mention, too, in terms of focus on those that have been impacted by the war on drugs, I encourage other states to look at Illinois’ R3 Program, which I believe is the Repair, Reinvest and Restore program, that specifically designates cannabis tax revenue to be utilized as grants, not loans, as grants that different organizations can apply for to help expand their programming that goes into communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs.

    You don’t have a whole lot of states that are utilizing cannabis tax revenue to go back into communities that have been disproportionately harmed. And you don’t have a lot of states that are trying to figure out: How can we broaden our pardons and broaden our expungements, and expedite and automatically create these opportunities for people to move past these convictions and get back into society as a normal, average citizen?

    So there is more work to be done. I don’t think it’s ever going to be over, in terms of people asking, calling for repair from the harms of the war on drugs. But if we can continuously see more governors, more legislatures expand the definition and criteria of who can get a pardon, who can get an expungement for marijuana-related arrest, that’s going to help a lot more people out.

    FAIR: ‘A Marijuana-Related Charge Can Still Impact Somebody for Life’

    CounterSpin (12/18/18)

    JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about journalism. When I was talking on this subject back in 2018, with Art Way from Drug Policy Alliance, we were talking about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at that point, saying “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” That was the level of the conversation. I know it might sound clownish to some people, but you’d be wrong to imagine that those attitudes are not still in the mix somewhere. You have worked in news media, you know the pushes and pulls on reporters. What would you like to see in terms of media coverage of this issue?

    TC: I would like to have a lot more reporters be serious about the ongoing, what I believe is nefarious behavior by a lot of these large, well-capitalized—I’m talking tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars—capitalized multi-state operators that are really scheming to try to have a monopoly in different states. You have different large companies that have started early in other states like California, Oregon and Washington, realize that there’s too much competition and now are actually shutting down their operations on the West Coast and focusing on strongholds that they may have in other states, that may not have as much of a mature or expansive market.

    There are companies like GTI that are really trying to capture Massachusetts’ market, for example. We have other major companies, like Trulieve, that are trying to really own their monopoly in Florida, right? You have other companies that exist in states like Pennsylvania, where it’s only medical, where the only dispensaries and processors, the majority of cultivators, are all out-of-state operators, people who don’t even live in Pennsylvania. You have companies like Curaleaf—Curaleaf is one of the largest cannabis companies in the country—really trying to double down their efforts in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey and other states, and make sure that no one else can really participate in the market.

    I would really love more investigative journalism done to see how are these businesses forming? How are they collaborating and working with each other, even as competitors, and what are they doing at the policy and law level to change regulations that make it more favorable to them, and cut out small-business operators, justice-involved operators, equity operators? What are these large companies doing to lobby? Because, as cannabis legalization continues to be expansive, and now we’re talking about potential rescheduling of marijuana, to Schedule 3, at the federal level, you’re going to see these bigger companies come in and try to capture the market share and push everybody out.

    We understand that people who have been directly impacted by a marijuana arrest, if they want to get into the business of marijuana and get a cannabis license, it makes sense for them to be supported and to be educated and to be nurtured for success, because that’s what they deserve after everything that they’ve been through.

    Not everyone believes or cares about or shares that same sentiment. You have people who only look at marijuana legalization as another way to make money, and that’s all they want.

    And so many of these bigger companies are doing all this shadow work behind the scenes. I would really love more journalists to really look at that, really connect the dots. This isn’t just a state-by-state level. These are companies that are working collectively together in multiple states to make sure that they’re the only players in the market. I would love more investigations behind these bigger companies.

    JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note for now.

    We’ve been speaking with Tauhid Chappell of Thomas Jefferson University. Tauhid Chappell, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    TC: Thank you for having me.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Establishment Press Hails Big Money Crushing a Black Progressive

     

    Election Focus 2024A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

    Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman’s 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman’s campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24).

    Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) celebrated Bowman’s defeat in the June 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman’s defeat “an act of political hygiene.”

    Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

    That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman’s loss was about “voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics,” and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.

    ‘Veered too far left’

    WaPo: Jamaal Bowman was a Democratic Trump. Now he’s gone.

    Dana Milbank’s evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24) of Jamaal Bowman’s “bigotry” included doubting dubious reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups do.

    The Atlantic (6/25/24) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24) said Bowman’s defeat was “a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism.”

    Then there’s Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (6/25/24), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, “Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He’s Gone.” Milbank wrote that both politicians were “scoundrels” and “extremists,” with “a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr.”

    The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). Milbank’s parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws.  (Will we next hear about Bowman’s parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting “freaking cowards!” at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies “vermin,” or being found guilty of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24).

    Egregiously misleading

    NYT: Jamaal Bowman Deserved to Lose

    For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24), if you’re critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate “the Jews.”

    At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

    We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

    First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals “the Jews,” when many Jews are critics of Israel and many non-Jews are a critical part of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

    This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

    The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

    Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It’s a claim that was central to Latimer’s campaign (Slate, 6/24/24), but it’s also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

    In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden’s original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21). The progressives failed, but their vote “against” Biden’s bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.

    ‘Pendulum swinging back’

    NYT: Bowman Falls to Latimer in a Loss for Progressive Democrats

    The New York Times (6/25/24) called Bowman’s defeat “an excruciating blow for the left.”

    In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24) said:

    The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

    To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21; Jacobin, 2/16/24). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day (“What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left,” 6/26/24), the Times subhead argued that “in 2024, the center is regaining power.”

    The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

    Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24–and it is also archived). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

    The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24). Once again, Bowman’s race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don’t expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Reflections on Yoorrook and Palestine

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • Yoorrook Justice Commission: Jarvis’ Story

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • The power of Aboriginal literature in the wake of Australia’s ‘No’

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • Impact statement from Nathan Booth’s family

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • The Royal Commission Report into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody shows a history of no police accountability

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • ‘When Hasn’t Journalism Been in Crisis for Black People?’CounterSpin interview with Joseph Torres and Collette Watson on media reparations

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Media 2070’s Joseph Torres and Collette Watson about media reparations for the May 3, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Janine Jackson: The idea of some form of public, communal recognition and redress, or reparation, for Black Americans for centuries of systemic, state-sanctioned harms, and their lasting and continuing impact, is not new. But our guests’ work considers the particular meaningful and sustained harms of news media, of journalistic institutions charged with informing the public without fear or favor, that historically and currently have used their special place and power to help drive the oppression of Black and brown people—through storytelling, and through overt support for racist practices, policies and ideas.

    Media 2070 was co-founded by Joseph Torres, who is senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press—and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media—and writer, musician and communication strategist Collette Watson, who is co-founder of the new group Black River Life. Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

    And they both join us now by phone from Washington, DC, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joe Torres and Collette Watson.

    All right, well, “crisis of journalism” is going to be a phrase that a lot of listeners are familiar with. It’s a conversation among people, and among philanthropists, about how we can “save journalism.” But it’s unclear to us at FAIR, as to many others, if some of those folks in that conversation really understand that corporate journalism, US mainstream, so-called, journalism, has always contained its own poison. And if they are actually willing to address that, or if the goal is more of the same elite conversations that have excluded lots of people, but to do them in a more genteel way than maybe Fox News.

    So I want to ask you both, to start: What is missing from current diagnoses and remedies for what we’re told is the crisis of journalism?

    Collette Watson: I guess I’ll kick us off, and just say that what’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.

    When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.

    We know that from that earliest route, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.

    Joseph Torres: I’ll add, Collette and I, we began writing this essay over a year ago for this political journal, and Collette, one of the co-creators of 2070, but also the senior director of the 2070 project until recent weeks, and what we try to do in this essay is: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.

    At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question:  when hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.

    Kansas City Star: The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star

    Kansas City Star (12/22/20)

    And in recent years, we have the Los Angeles Times apologizing for it being the paper of white supremacy for at least its first 80-plus years. We have the Oregonian saying that it was a paper, when it began, to try to ensure that Oregon remained a white state. The Baltimore Sun apologizing for its role in upholding the housing segregation in its editorials in the newspaper in support of it in Baltimore; and the Kansas City Star did much the same. The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized.

    These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized.

    What are we creating that’s different? How do we address issues of racial hierarchies, and that these institutions have played a role in undermining democracy for Black folks, and for other folks of color? So if we think the current democracy can be equated with the right to vote and equal-protection rights being reinstated 60 years ago, local journalism by dominant news organizations have played a role in undermining democracy, so-called democracy, for Black folks and other folks of color since the get-go, and still are today.

    And so we are just trying to make an intervention into this debate, because the debate is happening; there’s a lot of money being invested in the space. There’s a lot of policy work happening—not just with the federal government, in local states—trying to make an intervention in funding local journalism. And we are afraid we’re just going to be replicating the same kind of harms.

    JJ: Yeah, saving democracy via local journalism seems to mean, for a lot of folks, just shore up and sustain these local journalistic outlets. There’s the missing piece of acknowledgement of the harms that those outlets have done, and it’s clear that some people view the whole idea of reparations more broadly as “something bad happened to people in the past,” and so people that “look like them,” to put it crudely, are looking for resources now.

    But I feel that, particularly if you look internationally, and even within this country, that understanding is shifting, so that people see, not just that harms on individuals, but on communities, are unending, but also that they see that truth and reconciliation processes, that they’ve seen in South Africa or in Argentina or in El Salvador, for example, they involve healing for the whole community.

    And the starting place is not only about debts unpaid, but it’s about acknowledging that there’s been a distorted understanding of history, that everyone has been harmed –, particularly the people who have been specifically oppressed and harmed, but reparation involves acknowledgement first. It’s not a question of throwing money at the issue. There is an acknowledgement, and a truth-telling, that has to happen first.

    That’s my rambling, you can call that a question, but you know what I’m saying, that it’s not enough to say, “Oh, we did a bad thing,” as some papers are doing. “Back in the 18-dickity-do, we wrote a bad thing, but we’re sorry about it.” That’s not what is being called for.

    CW: Absolutely. And I think one key part of this is really seeking to broaden, not only our sense of journalism and its history and its future, but our sense of what repair and reparations involve.

    When we created the Media Reparations Project, we also sought to really spread the understanding that reparations has to be a holistic process. We took a lot of inspiration and leadership from people who have been fighting for reparations ever since emancipation. And when we are speaking to what reparations is all about, often in community, people sort of reduce it to this idea of a check.

    As you just said, Janine, it’s not just this one-time apology, or even a one-time payment. It has to be holistic and understood as a process, a journey rather than a destination. And speaking of folks we took inspiration from, our friends at Liberation Ventures, which is a reparations organization, they describe reparations as a comprehensive process that involves reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability and redress.

    And when you’re talking about the realm of journalism, Joe mentioned a couple of different platforms and papers that have issued apologies and sort of stopped there. And we know that this entire conversation around the future of journalism is one that should really inform what next. After the apology, and after the investigation, what is it that newspapers and other media platforms can and should be doing to rectify the different types of harm that they have wrought—whether that be sensationalistic headlines and false headlines that led to racial terrorism and lynching, whether that be the ways that, even to this very day, it’s nearly impossible for journalists to sustain careers because of toxicity in newsrooms. And there’s so much more that we could name, but it has to be an ongoing process that’s engaged with people who have been directly impacted, and defined by community.

    Joe Torres

    Joe Torres: “For us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too.”

    JT: When we’re talking about these papers, we talk about narratives, right? And narratives are a political tool. Narratives are used by those in power, and these media companies, to uphold racial hierarchy. And “uphold racial hierarchy” means not just within those newsrooms, but within the society as well. So these newsrooms are playing an outsized role in shaping what local communities look like. And we talked about the example of segregation in Baltimore, and wealth creation and wealth death and all that.

    And so these media companies are playing a role in reinforcing the racial hierarchies throughout each community they serve, whether schooling, housing, just name it, right? They’re playing a role in shaping the society with their narratives. Because these powerful media owners are political players within the society in which they exist.

    And so the idea of acknowledgement, it’s just the beginning, as Colette is saying, and you’re talking about, too, Janine; it has to be like, how do we get to redress?

    Because what’s happening, they reinforce structural racism in our society in all these various ways.. And for us, we’re just focused on the media part, because structural racism also exists in the media system. So for us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too, for our own communities to be able to own and control the creation and the distribution of their own narratives.

    And so this is what we’re fighting for. If we can shift how media functions, I think there’s a better chance, or a greater chance, that we could actually address all the other underlying causes that are affecting society, that newsrooms play a role in promulgating in all these different ways.

    Colette Watson

    Colette Watson: “There’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.”

    CW: Joe, I think in addition to changing the way that the media has perpetuated hierarchy and harm in society, this discussion around repair, and really reframing the way we understand the future of journalism conversation, is also an invitation to actually save journalism. And I think that there’s a lack of understanding of the fact that journalism being white-dominated, and being steeped in a worldview of Black inferiority and a worldview of racial hierarchy, has very much been a part of why we find this industry to be faltering at this point.

    It’s policies and culture and so much, but it’s all grounded and rooted in journalism’s early rootedness in racism. And what I mean when I say that is, we talk a lot and we hear a lot about community trust and community engagement and different things about how audiences perceive the field, and how they’re willing to even maybe invest in it, whether that be investing time or what have you. But there’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.

    And then there are so many journalists of color who have tried to be truth tellers, and tried to embody the true purpose of journalism in holding power to account, who have found it next to impossible to do that, because of toxicity inside dominant and corporate newsrooms, and because of the underfunding and underinvestment in Black-serving and other-serving, different religious minorities and other groups, LGBTQIA+ community—all of the newsrooms that serve these marginalized identities have been woefully under-resourced by the public sector and by philanthropy, when compared to their white counterparts.

    Dissent: Multiple Mainstreams

    Dissent (Summer/21)

    And so, whether it be on the part of journalists of color or communities of color, there’s this deep divide, and this sense that the main, dominant media doesn’t care about our lives, and doesn’t think of us when they’re talking about journalism and democracy. And when I talk about that to people, I like to always say, there’s two words you can add on, in the ways you’re talking about these issues of the future of journalism, that’ll take you so much further than where we usually go. And those two simple words are “for who.” Journalism for who? Democracy for who? Who are we serving?

    Carla Murphy talks about “multiple mainstreams,” and thinking of the future of our media system as one that is steeped in serving the information needs of just so many different kinds of folks, and serving the creation of conditions for different kinds of justice. And I think that when you begin to think about who we are wanting to serve and whose needs we’re centering, that opens up so much more opportunity and so much more oxygen around what journalism can be. But we can’t get there if we just talk about it the same old way and really are using legislation and policy ideas and philanthropy to shore up the status quo.

    Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders

    Kerner Commission (1968)

    JJ: Absolutely. I just want to say that, for some folks, this might sound out of pocket; it might sound like a new idea. But the truth is, this is drawing on roots. The Kerner Commission, just to say one thing folks remember, but they remember it as saying, media should do better by Black people. And that’s not what it said. It said news media are failing everybody and failing the future with their white-centric perspective. It challenged the whole thing. So there are historical roots that you’re pulling on here. There are traditions here, there are examples here. It’s not out of whole cloth. There is something to connect to here that gives strength to the ideas that we’re putting forward here.

    CW: Yes. I mean, Joe Torres, for my money, is one of the most incredible researchers and minds that we have in this field, and I really encourage folks to dig into the essay, because throughout these pages, as you’re describing, Janine, there are just so many examples from throughout history.

    A lot of people don’t realize, for instance, that the earliest FCC broadcasting licenses were issued during the Jim Crow era, and so to white men only. And so that leads us to the present day, where we have a media system where just a very scant percentage of our TV and radio are Black-owned.

    And we could go on and on, because, like I said, Joe has just done exhaustive effort here in making sure that we have the evidence when we talk about this. Joe, I know you don’t like getting credit, but….

    JJ: But, hey, when you have to, you have to, because voids need to be filled, frankly. It’s not a conversation that folks have. Folks have it rhetorically: “I bet there’s things missing here,” but they don’t know what’s missing, and that’s—they need work like you’re doing.

    The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

    The Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922)

    JT: I appreciate that. Collette knows I don’t like that, but I appreciate it. One of the things we learned in putting this essay together four years ago, was that in Chicago, there was a commission formed to study the causes of the upheaval, the Chicago race riots. And it came out in a report in 1922, and it devoted a significant portion of the report to the media’s role, the white media’s role, in fomenting this. And so here was an example of a multiracial commission that said, “Hey, the media, especially the white media, played a role in this racial, so-called, unrest, the violence that happened in this city.”

    Then you talk about the Kerner Commission, Janine, and then 50 years later after that, what we have in 2020, the uprisings, and all these folks within journalism circles calling on their newspapers or their media institutions to address racism in their own newsrooms.

    And one of the things that’s really understudied, it’s a really unbelievable example to me: In 1964, the Community Relations Service was created. It became, soon after that, an agency within the Department of Justice. And the peacekeepers, the mediators, they realized early on, within the first few years of its founding, that a major obstacle to integrating our society, to people adhering to Brown v. Board, was journalism, was the media, and that they had to try to not just integrate the media systems, but they started to hold conferences for Black and brown folks, and for people to fight license challenges against broadcast, and they brought in experts who came in and taught activists how to challenge broadcast licenses. This is within the Department of Justice, and that part of its mission was basically not funded anymore, following the Nixon administration, right?

    Here’s a government agency within the Department of Justice, realizing that the biggest obstacle to people adhering to the decision of Brown v. Board, and integrating our society, was the media. That’s another indictment, as you’re saying, about the Kerner Commission, a little over 50-plus years ago.

    And so we’re still dealing with this. We’re still dealing with that we don’t have our own institutions, that the first chairman of the FCC was the former chief justice for the Mississippi Supreme Court. Of course Black and brown people wouldn’t get licenses during this era. It’s all been baked in, right? It’s all been baked in. And since then, consolidation has only put things out of reach for us, compounding the lack of wealth that exists in our community because of the extraction of our nation’s political project, right?

    JJ: Absolutely. Well, I’ll just ask, finally, what do folks who think, media reparations? Is that going to restrict what I get to see and hear? Is that going to police what I get to see and hear? That’s not the conversation that we’re talking about having, right?

    CW: Absolutely. I mean, Joe, I will defer to you.

    JT: Well, I mean, we talk about abundance. It should be an abundance of voices out there. And there’s no reason we have such a concentrated media system, where you have a few companies; and here we talk about the cable/broadcast model, for example, which—television is still making a lot of money, and news is driving that. So while we’re talking about a so-called crisis in journalism, we talk about, normally, print media. Broadcast media is trying to get in the action too, and trying to take legislative efforts to get their piece of the pie, while they’re making a lot of money, right?

    And so, it’s like, how can we have an abundance of Black and BIPOC media outlets out there that’s serving local communities, that’s providing a variety of perspectives. And we are fighting for not only the variety of perspectives, but also a tether to serve the health and well-being of the community, not out there for bottom-line profits, right, and to maximize profit. How can we have an abundance of this?

    The idea is, it’s not what’s being taken away from you, it’s what’s going to be added to your life, to ensure the health and well-being of the communities. How is it serving the health and well-being of the needs of people in local communities and local society? And media can play an instrumental role in ensuring that, in advocating for that. Or it too often plays a detrimental role, as we see, in taking away those kinds of rights that allow people to have their basic needs served, in housing and food and schooling.

    And so, the vision for an abundance of media outlets that are well-funded? There’s no reason why we can’t do that. We invest so little in this country into media, and especially in public media, and we can create something different, and something better.

    JJ: That’s beautiful. All right, we’ve been speaking with Joe Torres from Free Press and Collette Watson at Black River Life. You can tap into the work that we’ve been talking about at MediaReparations.org. Joseph and Colette, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

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  • Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice

     

     

    We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.

    Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.

    Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).

     

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  • WaPo Lets Bigots Frame School Culture War Conversation…Again

     

    WaPo: They quit liberal public schools. Now they teach kids to be anti-‘woke.’

    The Washington Post (4/15/24) published a glowing profile of two former public school teachers who had “grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist.”

    In the latest multi-thousand word feature depicting America’s “education culture war,” the Washington Post’s “They Quit Liberal Public Schools. Now They Teach Kids to Be Anti-‘Woke’” (4/15/24) fawningly profiled Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, the founders of the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K–12 school that aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools.”

    The piece was written by Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who regularly contributes longform features that platform anti-trans and anti–Critical Race Theory views through a palatable “hear me out” frame, while including little in the way of opposing arguments—or fact checks (FAIR.org, 5/11/23, 2/12/22, 8/2/21).

    This profile of the Fontanillas—two former California teachers who left their jobs and moved to Florida in 2020, “disillusioned” by school shutdowns and colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement—shows the Post once again depicting efforts to address racial and gender bias as a bigger problem than racial and gender bias themselves.

    ‘Direct from the classroom’

    “The claim that public schools teach left-wing ‘indoctrination, not education’ had become a commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians and pundits,” Natanson wrote:

    But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools—and offer families an alternative.

    The irony of the Fontanillas founding a far-right Christian school to fight “indoctrination” is lost on Natanson, as she, too, uncritically repeated these claims, as though the couple’s experience as teachers legitimized the far-right ideologies they peddle.

    Natanson reported that Kali’s social media presence has attracted people to her school—despite her being “regularly suspended for ‘community violations.’” The article does not specify what those violations are, but on Instagram, Kali herself shared a screenshot of her account being flagged for disinformation, and another video talking about how a post she made about “newcomers” (i.e., migrants) received a “violation,” in calls to get her followers to follow her backup account.

    The piece refers to her ideas—including referring to Black History Month as “Black idolatry month” and encouraging her followers to be doomsday preppers—as “out there.”

    Kali is half Black and half white, and Joshua is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent—a fact that is mentioned alongside the couple’s gripes with the idea of slavery reparations and the concept that America is systemically racist.

    Hate and conspiracy theories

    Instagram: My posts are being hidden from you all!

    The punchline here is that Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 4/5/24) ought to be able to call members of groups she dislikes “freaks.”

    Kali brags that the more right-wing her ideas, the more families she attracts to her school. “But they also spurred thousands of critical messages from online observers who contended she was indoctrinating students into a skewed, conservative worldview,” Natanson wrote.

    The “hate” that these videos “inspire,” Natanson wrote, is from commenters who oppose Kali’s messages:

    Online commenters regularly sling racial slurs and derogatory names: “slave sellout roach.” “dumb fukn bitch.” “wish dot com Candice Owen.” “Auntie Tomella.”

    Never mind the hate and conspiracy theories Kali spews in her videos. A recent video on Kali’s Instagram begs followers to follow a backup account, because a video she made about migrants was taken down by Meta as a violation of community standards. She says she believes her account has been “shadowbanned”—or muted by the platform.

    Even the posts that remain unflagged by Instagram are full of bigotry and disinformation, including a cartoon of carnival performers being let go from a sideshow because they’re “not freaks anymore,” a compilation video of trans women in women’s restrooms with text that reads “get these creeps out of our bathrooms,” and a photo of a trans flag that demands, “Defund the grooming cult.”

    An ad Kali posted for an emergency medical kit claimed that the FDA had “lost its war” on Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that the right has latched onto as a panacea for Covid-19. In reality, the lawsuit the FDA settled with the drug company involved an acknowledgement that the drug has long been used to treat humans, not just livestock—but for parasites, not viruses (Newsweek, 3/22/24). The National Institutes of Health (12/20/23) report that double-blind testing reveals ivermectin is ineffective against Covid.

    Evidence of ‘indoctrination’

    Instagram: Facts over feelings!

    For Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 1/9/24), the “facts” are transphobic, and “feelings” are to be disregarded—other people’s feelings, anyway.

    Kali, who regularly mocks trans women and left-wing activists, apparently couldn’t take the heat. The backlash got so bad, Natanson writes, that

    coupled with her chihuahua’s death and an injury that prevented her daily workouts, it proved too much for Kali. She went into a depressive spiral and had to take a break from social media. She barely managed to film her lessons.

    In the Fontanillas’ lessons, the existence of white Quakers who fought against slavery is proof that racism is not institutionalized in the US. It’s also evidence of an “overemphasis” on reparations, even though, as Natanson mentioned toward the very end of the piece, many Quakers did take part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later chose to pay reparations.

    In addition to Covid shutdowns, other evidence of left-wing “indoctrination” offered by the Fontanillas included a quiz that asked students to recognize their privilege, the use of a Critical Race Theory framework in an ethnic studies class, announcements for gay/straight alliance club meetings (with no announcements made for Joshua’s chess club meetings), and the work of “too many” “left-leaning” authors—like Studs Terkel, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman—in the English curriculum.

    Natanson includes a positive testimonial from a mother whose son Kali tutored before her political shift rightward, who remembers how “Kali let him run around the block whenever he got antsy,” and a screenshot of a review from a current student, who says they “love love LOVE” Kali’s teaching, because it exposes “the stupid things on the internet in a logical way.” Natanson also quotes an employee of the company that handles the logistics for Southlands Christian Schools, the entity from which the Fontanillas’ school gets its accreditation, who says, “Josh and Kali are good people, they have a good message, there is definitely a market for what they’re doing.”

    The only opposition to the Fontanillas’ arguments in the nearly 3,000-word piece, beyond incoherent social media comments, come in the form of official statements and school board meeting soundbites.

    Natanson includes a statement from the school district the Fontanillas formerly worked, saying that the ethnic studies class Kali resigned over was intended to get students to “analyze whether or not race may be viewed as a contributor to one’s experiences.” Another statement from the district denied Joshua’s claims that his school privileged certain clubs over others, and upheld that its English curriculum followed California standards.

    The only direct quotes from students opposing the Fontanillas are two short comments from students at a school board meeting who said they enjoyed the ethnic studies class. It does not appear Natanson directly interviewed either student: One statement was taken directly from the school board meeting video, and the other from a local news article. The lack of any original, critical quotes in the piece raises the question: Did Natanson talk to anyone who disagreed with the Fontanillas during her reporting on the article?

    Bigger threats than pronouns

    The Washington Post depiction of Kali and Joshua Fontanilla

    The Washington Post profile presents the Fontanillas as pious and principled—leaving out any imagery of their hate-filled ideology.

    The article included a dramatic vignette of the couple bowing their heads after seeing a public art exhibit with pieces depicting a book in chains and a student wearing earrings that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS”—”just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray,” Natanson wrote.

    While thus passing along uncritically the Fontanillas’ take on what’s wrong with the world today, the article made no mention of more substantial threats bigotry poses to children and society at large.

    LGBTQ youth experience bullying at significantly greater rates than their straight and cisgender peers (Reisner et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2021), and bullying is a strong risk factor for youth suicide (Koyanagi, et al., 2019). LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their straight and cisgender peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). However, bullying of LGBTQ youth occurs less often at LGBTQ-affirming schools (Trevor Project, 2021).

    A recent study found that about 53% of Black students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression, and 20% said they were exposed to racial trauma often or very often in their lives (Aakoma Project, 2022).

    Individuals of Black and Hispanic heritage have a higher risk of Covid infection and hospitalization from than their white counterparts (NIH, 2023). Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker (4/24/23) found that during the pandemic, communities of color faced higher premature death rates.

    The migrants at the US border that Kali demonizes in her videos are seeking asylum from gang violence, the targeting of women and girls, and oppressive regimes propped up by US policy.  Undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely as US citizens to be arrested for violent crimes (PNAS, 12/7/20). They are also being turned away at higher rates under Biden than they were under Trump (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).

    Not the censored worldview

    Pen America: Book Bans Recorded Per Semester

    Far from being suppressed, the “anti-woke” movement is very effective at suppressing ideas that it disagrees with (Pen America).

    The idea that left-wing “propaganda” is “infiltrating” public schools is upside-down.  If there’s a particular ideology that is being systematically censored in this country, to the point where it deserves special consideration by the Washington Post, it is not the Fontanillas’.

    Since 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to ban Critical Race Theory in schools. Eighteen states have already imposed these bans or restrictions (Education Week, 3/20/24). The right is pushing for voucher schemes that transfer tax revenues from public to private schools, including to politicized projects like Exodus Institute (Progressive, 8/11/21; EPI, 4/20/23).

    In the first half of this school year alone, there were more than 4,000 instances of books being banned. According to PEN America (4/16/24), people are using sexual obscenity laws to justify banning books that discuss sexual violence and LGBTQ (particularly trans) identities, disproportionately affecting the work of women and nonbinary writers. Bans are also targeted toward literature that focuses on race and racism, Critical Race Theory and “woke ideology.”

    It is dangerous and backwards for the Washington Post to play along with this couples’ delusion that they are free speech martyrs—even as their “anti-woke” agenda is being signed into censorious law across the country.

    The piece ended back in the virtual classroom with the Quakers, as Natanson takes on a tone of admiration. Kali poses the question to her students, “What does it mean to live out your values?”

    “Kali smiled as she told her students to write down their answers,” Natanson narrated. “She knew her own.”

     

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    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Black Life, Black Solidarity, and Late Stage Settler Colonialism

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • WSJ Speaks Out Against Threat of Politicians Responding to Voters

     

    The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) is concerned that they live among us. They are Arab Americans. And what are they doing to threaten the United States? Voting.

    The Journal’s editorial board sounded the alarm in response to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian American and a member of the left-wing voting bloc known as the Squad, calling for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan presidential primary. “Will Dearborn, Michigan, Determine US Israel Policy?” the headline wondered ominously. The subhead explained: “The pro-Palestinian Democratic left wants to force Biden to stop the war in Gaza against Hamas.”

    At issue was that Tlaib’s mobilization of the large Arab-American community of Dearborn, Michigan, against Biden’s pro-Israel stance could put Michigan in play in the 2024 presidential election, thus potentially swaying the incumbent to be more critical of Israel.

    Voting as subversion

    WSJ: Will Dearborn, Mich., Determine U.S. Israel Policy?

    The Wall Street Journal (2/26/24) frames the question of whether to keep supplying an Israeli war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians as “another test of how much Mr. Biden is willing to bend to the left.”

    Expressing alarm at the idea of a president adjusting policy in response to democratic pressure, the Journal warned that the “left’s threats are already influencing Mr. Biden’s foreign policy”: As “domestic criticism of Mr. Biden’s support for Israel has increased…Mr. Biden has become much more critical of Israel.”

    The editorial board continued:

    The problem is that if the Arab Americans in and around Dearborn begin to set US policy, Hamas and Iran will be the beneficiaries. Ms. Tlaib and others claim not to support Hamas or the October 7 massacre, but the ceasefire they want would have the effect of leaving its fighters alive and free to rebuild their terror state. The suffering in Gaza is terrible, but the main cause is Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields.

    What the financial class’s top paper is saying is that an ethnic voting bloc in Dearborn might “claim” not to be a Fifth Column—but in fact they are at best unwitting stooges, and at worst lying traitors, effectively supporting official enemies of the US government. (The Journal‘s logic would delegitimize virtually all opposition to US violence—since ending such violence would no doubt be welcomed by its ostensible targets, who are by definition enemies.)

    Of course, opposition in Michigan to Biden’s Israel policy extends well beyond Arab Americans (or Muslims). A recent poll of likely voters found that nearly 74% of Michigan Democrats favored a unilateral ceasefire. And voters yesterday in Minnesota—a state with no sizable Arab-American population—cast “uncommitted” votes in such high numbers that it has stunned political analysts and raised alarms about the president’s viability in the general election (Reuters, 3/6/24; NBC, 3/6/24). A “no preference” campaign did surprisingly well in the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts (WBUR, 3/6/24).

    Arab Americans in Michigan do have a small degree of political power now, because Michigan is a critical swing state. But that’s not a unique position for an ethnic enclave in American politics. Does the Journal also have a problem with the outsized role South Florida’s Cuban-American population plays in a state with so many electoral votes (Politico, 11/4/20)? Is the Journal concerned with the influence Hasidic voting blocs have on New York City’s politics (New York Times, 10/30/22)?

    The uncommitted vote was successful; the AP (2/28/24) called it a “victory for Biden’s anti-war opponents,” reporting that the state will send two uncommitted delegates.

    ‘America’s jihad capital’

    WSJ: Opinion Commentary Cross Country Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital

    While the Wall Street Journal‘s subhead (2/2/24) refers to “politicians in the Michigan city [who] side with Hamas,” the only official mentioned is Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who criticized Biden for “selling fighter jets to the tyrants murdering our family members.”

    This editorial came just a few short weeks after the paper ran an op-ed (2/2/24) by Steven Stalinsky of the pro-Israel group MEMRI. Stalinsky declared Dearborn “America’s Jihad Capital,” reaching back to stale 9/11 hysteria:

    Support for terrorism in southern Michigan has long been a concern for US counterterrorism officials. A 2001 Michigan State Police assessment submitted to the Justice Department after 9/11 called Dearborn “a major financial support center” and a “recruiting area and potential support base” for international terror groups, including possible sleeper cells.

    That piece claimed that the problem in Dearborn was that its Arab-American residents were would-be criminals. “What’s happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats,” Stalinksy said. “It’s potentially a national security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention.”

    The fallout from the op-ed was immense. Fox News (2/5/24), which like the Journal is a part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, reported that Dearborn’s mayor said that “city police increased security at places of worship and major infrastructure points as a ‘direct result’” of the article. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (2/3/24) tweeted that the op-ed “led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.” Biden, along with Michigan elected officials and Arab-American community leaders, condemned the article (Detroit News, 2/5/24).

    State Rep. Alabas Farhat (AP, 2/6/24) co-sponsored a resolution demanding a retraction and public apology, saying the piece “fanned the flames of hatred and division in our country during a time when hate crimes are on the rise.” He added, “It makes it so that it’s normal to question how patriotic your neighbor is.”

    The Journal editorial board doubled down with its own racist, Islamophobic tirade. This vilification of Arab-Americans is the same kind of thinking that led this country to force Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the face of a war against Japan. Enlightened society would like to think that times like that have been relegated to the dustbin of history, but the fact that we’re seeing this today in the Journal is proof that scary times are here again.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

     

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  • Is it possible to be racist to white people?

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • Still too many coppas, not enough justice

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • WaPo Owes an Apology to the DC Mayor It Drove From Office

     

    When I became a journalist over 15 years ago, I did so to highlight the voices of activists—not top city officials. But things took an unexpected turn in 2014, as the Washington Post sought to end DC Mayor Vincent Gray’s career.

    As his reelection bid neared, Gray comfortably led all polls—much to the chagrin of the Post, which hadn’t forgiven him for winning office four years earlier.

    In that prior 2010 contest, Gray, riding a wave of Black support, upended the incumbent DC mayor, Adrian Fenty. It was an act for which the Post never forgave Gray, as Fenty was the paper’s dream come true.

    Fenty had run as a progressive in 2006, and won in a landslide. But upon taking office, Fenty flipped and adopted the Post’s anti-labor, pro-gentrification agenda as his own. The shocking about-face earned Fenty the Post’s ever-lasting love, but cost him Black voters—and his reelection.

    While Fenty conceded to Gray in 2010, the Post had a harder time moving on. And the paper would spend the next four years attacking Gray, particularly on the eve of the 2014 election.

    Dog-whistling

    As the 2014 election neared, anti-Gray editorials, already commonplace, started running multiple times a week, and then nearly daily. In the nine days leading up to the start of early voting, the Post (3/9–17/14) ran an incredible seven editorials targeting Gray.

    And it wasn’t just the editorial page that was busy electioneering.

    WaPo: In Marion Barry, Mayor Gray gets what he deserves

    To the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (3/19/14), DC Mayor Vincent Gray “made a lamentable decision to stoke the city’s racial politics” by endorsing the statement that “Washington has become a city of the haves and have-nots.”

    Two days into early voting, Gray received the endorsement of Marion Barry, the former four-term DC mayor. In his column on the endorsement, the Post’s Dana Milbank (3/19/14) dismissed Barry, who came out of the civil rights movement, as an “old race warrior” who “has inflamed racial tensions for decades.”

    Milbank opened by taking advantage of the slurred speech of the ailing Barry (who’d live just eight more months):

    Embattled Washington Mayor Vincent Gray called in a notorious predecessor, Marion Barry, to prop up his reelection campaign Wednesday afternoon. Gray got exactly what he deserved.

    “Vince Gray,” Barry told a modest crowd in a church basement in Southeast Washington, “is a leader with a solid crack record.”

    The self-proclaimed mayor for life caught this Freudian slip. “Track record,” he corrected.

    Barry, now a 78-year-old City Council member in failing health, is, famously, the one with the crack record.

    WaPo: Is Vincent Gray dog-whistling to black voters?

    As an example of Gray’s potential “subtle but divisive appeals to African American voters,” the Post‘s Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) offered, “To some in our city, I’m just another corrupt politician from the other side of town.”

    Milbank’s racialized attacks were not a one-off. A week earlier, Post columnist Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) gratuitously dropped Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s name into the mix, in an attempt to tie him to Gray:

    If Gray is engaging in tribal politics, he’s certainly doing it more subtly than the master of the trade, Marion Barry…[who] after his 1990 drug arrest…was not shy about sending signals to his African-American base—embracing the support of Louis Farrakhan and other controversial activists.

    Not only does Gray lack ties to Farrakhan—notorious for his history of antisemitism—but as a student at George Washington University, Gray joined a Jewish fraternity, where he was one of three Black students to integrate the school’s all-white fraternity system.

    DeBonis was too busy dog-whistling to white voters to mention this in his column, ironically headlined “Is Vincent Gray Dog-Whistling to Black Voters?”

    The day before DeBonis’ piece, Jonetta Rose Barras’ Post column (3/12/14) associated Gray with “some Third World dictatorship” and “snake-oil sellers.”

    ‘Growing ex-prisoner vote’

    WaPo: In D.C. mayor’s race, embattled Gray may have a secret weapon in growing ex-prisoner vote

    “Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away,” the Post‘s Aaron Davis (3/22/14) reported, and “no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray.”

    Meanwhile, with early-voting underway, here’s how Post reporter Aaron Davis opened his story, “In DC Mayor’s Race, Embattled Gray May Have a Secret Weapon in Growing Ex-Prisoner Vote” (3/22/14):

    Above an official portrait of Mayor Vincent C. Gray, crisp silver lettering spells out a welcome to one of the shiniest new places in DC government—the Office on Returning Citizen Affairs.

    And on a flier lying nearby: “YOU CAN LEGALLY VOTE!”

    The bustling facility is designed solely for convicted criminals…a slice of the population growing by thousands each year. Ex-offenders account for at least one in 10 DC residents and perhaps many more…. Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away in favor of winning a few thousand votes that could tip the balance in a close race….

    [And] no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray, the embattled mayor seeking a second term.

    In case the dog-whistling wasn’t loud enough, Davis all but accused Gray of buying the votes of ex-offenders, who in DC are disproportionately Black. He wrote that under Gray, DC

    has hired 534 former inmates—most for positions with benefits, including hundreds into jobs that were once off-limits because of their proximity to children, such as school bus attendants, drivers and camp directors.

    Despite the Post’s racialized attacks, the paper’s editorial board (3/12/14)—in a textbook example of projection—accused Gray of “injecting race” into the election.

    ‘Charges should be brought now’

    WaPo: Vincent Gray: Fool or Liar?

    “A lot of seamy stuff might come to light,” Post columnist Robert McCartney (5/23/12) speculated. As it turned out, it didn’t.

    The Post’s dog-whistles to white voters could get the paper only so far—because DC is nearly half Black, and Black DC voters have a history of stubbornly defying the Post at the ballot box.

    Knowing this, the Post sought to preempt DC voters by getting rid of Gray before he stood for reelection—via an indictment over his campaign four years earlier.

    Gray’s 2010 campaign was aided by $650,000 in undisclosed funds. While Gray maintained he didn’t know about the funds (and he may not have), the Post had what it needed to get him indicted—at least if the US attorney was willing to play ball.

    Flattering portrayals of Gray’s would-be-prosecutor, US Attorney Ron Machen, were commonplace in the Post; he was even hailed as “DC’s person of the year” and “St. Ron” in the lead up to the election.

    In addition to glowing compliments, the Post also gave Machen his marching orders.

    “He already has enough evidence to indict the mayor,” insisted Post columnist Robert McCartney (3/12/14), who previously called Gray “a liar” (5/23/12) who’d “have to resign in disgrace” or go “possibly to prison” (7/14/12). Fellow Post columnist Colbert King’s instructions (3/7/14) to Machen were no less clear: “Charges should be brought now—before DC voters head to the polls. Just get on with it.”

    ‘Vincent Gray Knew’

    WaPo: Prosecutors: Vincent Gray Knew

    Less than a week before the start of voting in the mayoral primary, the Post‘s front page (3/11/14) all but announced an indictment of Gray that never came.

    While Machen was able to secure seven guilty pleas among Gray’s aides over their roles in the 2010 campaign, he didn’t have the evidence to charge Gray. So he got creative. Just as voters were set to go to the polls, Machen stood before a bank of TV cameras, with FBI and IRS agents as his backdrop, and all but promised to indict the mayor.

    The Post took it from there. Blazed atop the next day’s paper—”in type large enough for declarations of war,” noted the late housing organizer Jim McGrath—was Gray’s guilt. “Prosecutors: Vincent Gray Knew,” read the five-column headline (3/11/14).

    Only Gray was never convicted of a crime. In fact, he would never even be charged with one. But with the Post and Machen all but promising an imminent indictment, Black turnout was depressed—”suppressed” might be the more apt word.

    This is how Gray’s rock-solid lead vanished and he lost to the Post-endorsed Muriel Bowser—who remains mayor to this day, much to the paper’s delight.

    Do the right thing

    Once Gray was out of office, a new US attorney quietly brought Machen’s five-year investigation to a close.

    Gray, now 81 and facing health struggles, recently announced (Washington Post, 12/20/23) that he won’t seek re-election as Ward 7 councilmember, the position he’s held since 2017.

    With 2024 marking Gray’s last year in office, the Post should finally do right by him—and apologize.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

     

    The post WaPo Owes an Apology to the DC Mayor It Drove From Office appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • It’s time to reimagine our communities, not have the same Invasion Day debates

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • The Dystopian AI Future Some Fear Is the Present-Day Reality Others Live

     

    NYT: A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn

    The New York Times (5/30/23) directs attention toward a hypothetical future AI apocalypse, rather than towards present-day AI’s entrenchment of contemporary oppression.

    It’s almost impossible to escape reports on artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s media. Whether you’re reading the news or watching a movie, you are likely to encounter some form of warning or buzz about AI.

    The recent release of ChatGPT, in particular, led to an explosion of excitement and anxiety about AI. News outlets reported that many prominent AI technologists themselves were sounding the alarm about the dangers of their own field. Frankenstein’s proverbial monster had been unleashed, and the scientist was now afraid of his creation.

    The speculative fears they expressed were centered on an existential crisis for humanity (New York Times, 5/30/23), based on the threat of AI technology evolving into a hazard akin to viral pandemics and nuclear weaponry. Yet at the same time, other coverage celebrated AI’s supposedly superior intelligence and touted it as a remarkable human accomplishment with amazing potential (CJR, 5/26/23).

    Overall, these news outlets often miss the broader context and scope of the threats of AI, and as such, are also limited in presenting the types of solutions we ought to be exploring. As we collectively struggle to make sense of the AI hype and panic, I offer a pause: a moment to contextualize the current mainstream narratives of fear and fascination, and grapple with our long-term relationship with technology and our humanity.

    Profit as innovation’s muse

    So what type of fear is our current AI media frenzy actually highlighting? Some people’s dystopian fears for the future are in fact the dystopian histories and contemporary realities of many other people. Are we truly concerned about all of humanity, or simply paying more attention now that white-collar and elite livelihoods and lives are at stake?

    We are currently in a time when a disproportionate percentage of wealth is hoarded by the super rich (Oxfam International, 1/16/23), most of whom benefit from and bolster the technology industry. Although the age-old saying is that “necessity is the mother of invention,” in a capitalist framework, profit—not human need—is innovation’s muse. As such, it should not be so surprising that human beings and humanity are at risk from these very same technological developments.

    Activists and scholars, particularly women and people of color, have long been sounding the alarm about the harmful impacts of AI and automation. However, media largely overlooked their warnings about social injustice and technology—namely, the ways technology replicates dominant, oppressive structures in more efficient and broad-reaching ways.

    Cathy O’Neil in 2016 highlighted the discriminatory ways AI is being used in the criminal justice system, school systems and other institutional practices, such that those with the least socio-political power are subjected to even more punitive treatments. For instance, police departments use algorithms to identify “hot spots” with high arrest rates in order to target them for more policing. But arrest rates are not the same as crime rates; they reflect long-standing racial biases in policing, which means such algorithms reinforce those racial biases under the guise of science.

    Wired: Calling Out Bias Hidden in Facial-Recognition Technology

    Wired (10/15/19): Joy Buolamwini “learned how facial recognition is used in law enforcement, where error-prone algorithms could have grave consequences.”

    Joy Buolamwini built on her own personal experience to uncover how deeply biased AI algorithms are, based on the data they’re fed and the narrow demographic of designers who create them. Her work demonstrated AI’s inability to recognize let alone distinguish between dark-skinned faces, and the harmful consequences of deploying this technology as a surveillance tool, especially for Black and Brown people, ranging from everyday inconveniences to wrongful arrests.

    Buolamwini has worked to garner attention from media and policymakers in order to push for more transparency and caution with the use of AI. Yet recent reports on the existential crisis of AI do not mention her work, nor those of her peers, which highlight the very real and existing crises resulting from the use of AI in social systems.

    Timnit Gebru, who was ousted from Google in a very public manner, led research that long predicted the risks of large language models such as those employed in tools like ChatGPT. These risks include environmental impacts of AI infrastructure, financial barriers to entry that limit who can shape these tools, embedded discrimination leading to disproportionate harms for minoritized social identities, reinforced extremist ideologies stemming from the indiscriminate grabbing of all Internet data as training information, and the inherent problems owing to the inability to distinguish between fact and machine fabrication. In spite of how many of these same risks are now being echoed by AI elites, Gebru’s work is scarcely cited.

    Although stories of AI injustice might be new in the context of technology, they are not novel within the historical context of settler colonialism. As long as our society continues to privilege the white hetero-patriarchy, technology implemented within this framework will largely reinforce and exacerbate existing systemic injustices in ever more efficient and catastrophic ways.

    If we truly want to explore pathways to resolve AI’s existential threat, perhaps we should begin by learning from the wisdom of those who already know the devastating impacts of AI technology—precisely the voices that are marginalized by elite media.

    Improving the social context

    Conversation: News coverage of artificial intelligence reflects business and government hype — not critical voices

    Conversation ( 4/19/23): “News media closely reflect business and government interests in AI by praising its future capabilities and under-reporting the power dynamics behind these interests.”

    Instead, those media turn mostly to AI industry leaders, computer scientists and government officials (Conversation, 4/19/23). Those experts offer a few administrative solutions to our AI crisis, including regulatory measures (New York Times, 5/30/23), government/leadership action (BBC, 5/30/23) and limits on the use of AI (NPR, 6/1/23). While these top-down approaches might stem the tide of AI, they do not address the underlying systemic issues that render technology yet another tool of destruction that disproportionately ravages communities who live on the margins of power in society.

    We cannot afford to focus on mitigating future threats without also attending to the very real, present-day problems that cause so much human suffering. To effectively change the outcomes of our technology, we need to improve the social context in which these tools are deployed.

    A key avenue technologists are exploring to resolve the AI crisis is “AI alignment.” For example, OpenAI reports that their alignment research “aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent.”

    However, existing AI infrastructure is not value-neutral. On the contrary, automation mirrors capitalist values of speed, productivity and efficiency. So any meaningful AI alignment effort will also require the dismantling of this exploitative framework, in order to optimize for human well-being instead of returns on investments.

    Collaboration over dominion

    What type of system might we imagine into being such that our technology serves our collective humanity? We could begin by heeding the wisdom of those who have lived through and/or deeply studied oppression encoded in our technological infrastructure.

    SSIR: Disrupting the Gospel of Tech Solutionism to Build Tech Justice

    Greta Byrum & Ruha Benjamin (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6/16/22): “Those who have been excluded, harmed, exposed, and oppressed by technology understand better than anyone how things could go wrong.”

    Ruha Benjamin introduced the idea of the “New Jim Code,” to illustrate how our technological infrastructure reinforces existing inequities under the guises of “objectivity,” “innovation,” and “benevolence.” While the technology may be new, the stereotypes and discriminations continue to align with well-established white supremacist value systems. She encourages us to “demand a slower and more socially conscious innovation,” one that prioritizes “equity over efficiency, [and] social good over market imperatives.”

    Audrey Watters (Hack Education, 11/28/19) pushes us to question dominant narratives about technology, and to not simply accept the tech hype and propaganda that equate progress with technology alone. She elucidates how these stories are rarely based solely on facts but also on speculative fantasies motivated by economic power, and reminds us that “we needn’t give up the future to the corporate elites” (Hack Education, 3/8/22).

    Safiya Noble (UCLA Magazine, 2/22/21) unveils how the disproportionate influence of internet technology corporations cause harm through co-opting public goods for private profits. To counter these forces, she proposes “strengthening libraries, universities, schools, public media, public health and public information institutions.”

    These scholars identify the slow and messy work we must collectively engage in to create the conditions for our technology to mirror collaboration over domination, connection over separation, and trust over suspicion. If we are to heed their wisdom, we need media that views AI as more than just the purview of technologists, and also engages the voices of activists, citizens and scholars. Media coverage should also contextualize these technologies, not as neutral but as mechanisms operating within a historical and social framework.

    Now, more than ever before, we bear witness to the human misery resulting from extractive and exploitative economic and political global structures, which have long been veiled beneath a veneer of “technological progress.” We must feel compelled to not just gloss over these truths as though we can doom scroll our way out, but collectively struggle for the freedom futures we need—not governed by fear, but fueled by hope.

    Featured Image: “Robot Zombie Apocalypse” by Nicholas Mastello

     

    The post The Dystopian AI Future Some Fear Is the Present-Day Reality Others Live appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Cultural education has to be about improving outcomes for mob, not making white people feel better

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • Making Monsters: How Media Encourage Hatred of Immigrants

     

    NYT: The Story Behind DeSantis’s Migrant Flights to Martha’s Vineyard

    The New York Times (10/2/22) described the effort to trick migrants into flying to Martha’s Vineyard as an attempt to “force Democrats to deal with the migrants whom they profess a desire to welcome.”

    “Yahtzee!! We’re full,” wrote Florida state operative Perla Huerta, once she had tricked enough desperate migrants to fill two Martha’s Vineyard–bound planes (CNN, 11/15/22). In the days leading up to her celebratory text, the recently discharged Army counterintelligence agent scoured San Antonio gas stations, churches and McDonald’s parking lots for asylum seekers who would believe her when she promised them employment and three months’ free rent in Boston (Boston Globe, 9/19/22). All they would have to do is get on a plane.

    By September 12, 2022, she had convinced nearly 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, to depart Texas. On September 14, they landed unheralded, not in Boston, but in Martha’s Vineyard—an affluent island community largely closed for the season, and wholly unprepared to accommodate the aircrafts’ precious cargo.

    Immigration attorney Rachel Self told the MV Times (9/15/22) that

    not only did those responsible for this stunt know that there was no housing and no employment awaiting the migrants, they also very intentionally chose not to call ahead, to any single office or authority on Martha’s Vineyard…. Ensuring that no help awaited the migrants at all was the entire point.

    ‘Begging for more diversity’

    Huerta had lied. And it was a sadistic, labor-intensive and costly lie, designed to overwhelm “sanctuary destinations” (The Hill, 9/16/22) and thereby draw attention to the politician orchestrating and bankrolling the airlift: Florida governor and GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis (CNN, 9/17/22).

    Fox: The Most Democratic Towns Are the Least Diverse

    Fox host Tucker Carlson (7/26/22) proposed using refugees as props in a stunt to embarrass liberals.

    But, as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters (9/15/22) tweeted, “When GOPers do depraved stuff, it’s worth looking for the Fox host who suggested it.” It appears that DeSantis was taking notes when former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson declared on primetime TV (Fox, 7/26/22):

    Next stop on the equity train has got to be Martha’s Vineyard…. They are begging for more diversity. Why not send migrants there in huge numbers? Let’s start with 300,000 and move up from there.

    Characterizing human beings as pests that ought to be dumped onto others is regular programming at Fox, which unapologetically peddles white supremacist conspiracy theories (CounterSpin, 5/27/22), promotes alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric (Media Matters, 5/23/23) and portrays migrants as boogeymen (Washington Post, 12/18/18).

    However, this is far from a Fox-exclusive phenomenon. Established media—both conservative and centrist alike—treat the subject of immigration with stunning callousness. FAIR’s Janine Jackson (CounterSpin, 8/2/23) noted:

    Reporting evinces nowadays an implicit acceptance of the goal of border “management,” keeping things “under control,” keeping immigrants’ efforts to enter from “surging.” The way we’re to understand that the US is doing things right is if there are just fewer people trying to enter.

    The problem is not simply that media buy into sensationalist accounts of immigration. When the news amplifies anti-immigration hysteria, asylum seekers are drained of their humanity. Their mere presence constitutes a “crisis,” their desperation amounts to an existential threat, their movement must be sanctioned and scrutinized. In the public imagination, they are no better than monsters.

    As long as the US continues to manufacture conditions ripe for mass migration in Latin America, news readers must come to grips with how today’s journalism coaxes Americans into hating migrants. Only then can we begin to treat immigration rightfully—as a natural part of human history, to be celebrated rather than feared.

    The monster playbook

    Making Monsters, by David Livingstone Smith

    Making Monsters attempts to explain “why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed” (Harvard University Press, 2021).

    Turning migrants into monsters is simple. According to philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, all it takes is a combination of a physical and cognitive threat. Grizzly bears, he noted, may gnash and claw at us: They are physically threatening. But they are not monsters, because they are part of the natural order.

    A singing rose, on the other hand, challenges our conception of normalcy: It is metaphysically threatening. But it is not a monster, because it cannot hurt us.

    It is only when the physically and cognitively threatening intersect (think zombies, werewolves or Chucky dolls) that a monster is born. And this is precisely what media do to migrants.

    In their 2018 research, Emily Farris and Heather Silber Mohamed analyzed ten years’ worth of immigration coverage in Newsweek, Time and US News & World Report. They revealed that media have a “general tendency to frame immigrants in a negative light, consistent with a ‘threat’ narrative but inconsistent with actual immigrant demographics.”

    For example, while the vast majority of migrants—77%—are in the country legally (Pew, 8/20/20), the study found that news media overwhelmingly display photos of asylum seekers crossing the Southern border or cooped up in detention facilities, thus implying criminality (Washington Post, 7/27/18).

    In another instance, despite women accounting for a little over half—51%—of US migration (Migration Policy Institute, 3/14/23), national magazines play up the “bad hombres” archetype by picturing Latino migrant men at far greater rates than their female counterparts. This disparity fortifies the  “physical threat” mirage, as the perception of Black and brown men in the US is often blighted by the assumption that they are intrinsically dangerous (Atlantic, 1/5/15).

    This stereotyping is enforced when right-wing outlets work tirelessly to prove a nonexistent correlation between violence and heightened immigration. The trend is latent in the conservative media pandemonium surrounding the MS-13 gang:

    • “The Illegal Immigration/Crime Link Politicians Are Not Discussing” (Daily Caller, 2/2/23)
    • “How Many MS-13 Gangsters Is Biden Settling in the US?” (Washington Examiner, 3/2/23)
    • “Grieving Mother Demands ‘Secure’ Border, Vows to be Daughter’s ‘Voice’ After Alleged MS-13 Member Murdered Her” (Fox News, 5/23/23)
    • “Killer MS-13 Gangsters Are Being Bused Into Our Communities as ‘Minors’” (New York Post, 6/6/23)

    In reality,  the most recent estimates suggest that less than 1% of US gang membership can be attributed to MS-13 (Washington Post, 12/7/18), and native-born US citizens are over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as undocumented immigrants (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12/7/20). Despite that, these headlines represent only a drop in the right-wing fearmongering ocean (Media Matters, 6/30/21, 4/29/21, 8/6/19).

    Media scare tactics are not without consequence. According to a 2021 study, the preponderance of negative immigration news has engendered outgroup hostility toward asylum seekers and ingroup favoritism toward the native-born. It’s no wonder that many Americans have begun to believe it when the likes of CNN (Media Matters, 12/20/22), the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/24/21) and Time (FAIR.org, 6/2/23) deem the arrival of migrants a “border crisis.”

    But the real crisis at hand is the wanton depiction of migrants as physical threats.

    Infections and invasions

    Newsmax: Biden's Open Borders Mean Disease at Your Doorstep

    Newsmax (4/19/23) is not known for its subtle approach.

    Anti-migrant animus is now part of the zeitgeist, and Donald Trump is the poster child. “Everything’s coming across the border: the illegals, the cars, the whole thing. It’s like a big mess. Blah. It’s like vomit,” he said in a characteristic 2015 speech (HuffPost, 8/25/16). Trump likening asylum seekers to inanimate objects—like “vomit” and “cars”—is indicative of the dehumanizing language that afflicts contemporary immigration discourse.

    Media follow suit, discussing migrants as if they were devoid of human qualities. Valeria Luiselli (Literary Hub, 3/16/17) observed that “some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts!” Fox News’ Todd Starnes (Media Matters, 8/7/12) once actually compared undocumented immigrants to “locusts.”

    A scholarly investigation (Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Winter/08) into media representations of migrants asserted that there are two principal metaphors:

    When the nation is conceived as a physical body, immigrants are presented either as an infectious disease or as a physical burden. When the nation is conceived as a house, immigrants are represented as criminals, invaders, or dangerous and destructive flood waters.

    Heavy-handed right-wing media are more likely to employ the “disease,” “burden” and “invasion” tropes when referring to migrants:

    • “Medical Expert: Migrant Caravan Could Pose Public Health Threat” (Breitbart, 10/26/18)
    • “Border Crisis: ‘Invasion’ at the Border” (Washington Examiner, 11/1/22)
    • “Biden’s Open Borders Mean Disease at Your Doorstep” (Newsmax, 4/19/23)
    • “Migrant Crisis Sparked ‘Unprecedented’ Burden on NYC Shelters: City Hall Report” (New York Post, 1/31/23)

    Surges, floods and tidal waves

    CBS: "Tidal wave" of asylum seekers could head to New York City when Title 42 expires

    CBS (5/8/23) was one of many outlets that compared people seeking refuge from violence to a natural disaster.

    But water metaphors abound in both conservative and centrist sources:

    • “Immigration Crisis: Official: ‘A Tsunami of People Crossing the Border’” (Fox News, 5/7/15)
    • “A Migrant Surge Is Coming at the Border—and Biden Is Not Ready” (Washington Post, 4/1/22)
    • “’Tidal Wave’ of Asylum Seekers Could Head to New York City When Title 42 Expires” (CBS News, 5/8/23)
    • “Migrants Bound for US Are Pouring Into Mexico While Biden Takes Victory Lap on Immigration Crackdown” (Daily Caller, 7/29/23)
    • “New York’s Flood of Migrants Puts New Pressure on Adams, Hochul Bond” (Politico, 8/21/23)

    The water metaphors may be poetic, but they are insidious. In the 2014 fiscal year, the US saw a marked increase in unaccompanied Latin American minors hoping to reunite with their parents beyond the southern border (Vox, 10/10/14). A linguistic analysis (Critical Discourse Studies, 8/12) of New York Times and LA Times’ coverage of the child crossings found that “surge” appeared 91 times, “flood” 21 times and “wave” 14 times. The study remarked:

    This water-based terminology establishes a metaphor that represents immigrants as floods. Consequently, these representations call upon ideologies of immigrants as natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion.

    As Livingstone Smith wrote:

    When we accept the view that some group of people are less than human, we have to overrule the evidence of our senses. At this point a problem arises, because even though a person has accepted that these others aren’t human, they can’t stop themselves from recognizing the other’s humanity. The belief that these people are human coexists in your brain with the belief that they’re subhuman.

    The impossibility of migrants being simultaneously human and—as media have convinced many—subhuman generates a cognitive threat. The dissonance between the two statuses challenges our conception of natural order. And, thus, Livingstone Smith’s monster-making formula is complete; the media has provoked within us an unjustified hatred for migrants by successfully casting them as monsters—an affront to our safety and sense of reality.

    In describing the demonization of Black men in America in 1955, James Baldwin wrote: “And the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.” Likewise, today it is virtually impossible for Americans to accept migrants as human when the news persistently degrades, brutalizes and distorts their image. But not to accept them as such is to deny them their “human reality,” their “human weight and complexity.” It’s not a fictional caravan of monstrous migrants we should beware of; it’s the monster-makers in US media.

     

    The post Making Monsters: How Media Encourage Hatred of Immigrants appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition

          CounterSpin230811.mp3

     

    NYT: Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match (with photo of Porcha Woodruff)

    New York Times (8/6/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

    Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

    Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

          CounterSpin230811Narayan.mp3

     

    Newsweek: President Joe Biden's plan to cancel $39bn in student loans for hundreds of thousands of Americans

    Newsweek (8/7/23)

    Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

    Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

          CounterSpin230811Brewington.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

    The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

  • Black Grief and the Elimination of the Native

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ – CounterSpin interview with Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the African American Policy Forum’s Kevin Minofu about Say Her Name for the July 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: Like most powerful exercises, it’s a simple one. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw asks audience members to stand as she lists names of Black people killed by law enforcement in this country, and to sit when they hear a name that they don’t recognize.

    #SayHerName Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence by Kimberlé Crenshaw

    (Haymarket Books, 2023)

    For Eric Garner, George Floyd, Michael Brown, most of the crowd—whatever crowd it is, students, academics, the general public—stay standing. But when it gets to Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, it thins and thins.  And by the time it gets to Rekia Boyd and Michelle Cusseaux, generally everyone is seated.

    Is that because Black women’s deaths via the same state-sanctioned violence that kills Black boys and men are less compelling? Are the victims less worthy? Or do they somehow not matter?

    It’s hard to tease out and to talk about what’s happening. But if we genuinely want to address racist police violence, and bring all of us into the imagined future, we have to have the conversation.

    The Say Her Name project from the African American Policy Forum, on whose board I serve, has worked to lift up the names of women, trans women and girls killed by law enforcement on and off duty, and to talk about how their murders are the same as, and different from, police murders of Black men and boys.

    That project is now reflected in a book, Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence, out this week from Haymarket Books.

    Joining us now is Kevin Minofu, senior researcher and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kevin Minofu.

    Kevin Minofu: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be on. I’m very grateful for you making the time and, yeah, great to be on the show.

    JJ: Absolutely. Well, as you and I both know, the Say Her Name project encompasses activism, art, research and writing, and support for families. But the heart of it, the radiating center, is still this really simple thing: “Say her name.” Why is that so meaningful?

    KM: I think in describing that, it’s kind of useful to go back to the origins of the movement, because people are always interested in how it developed. People have probably heard about it, but oftentimes may be confused about its history.

    Atlantic: They Shouted 'I Can't Breathe'

    Atlantic (12/4/14)

    And so Say Her Name developed around December 2014, during the protests that were ignited in New York City after the acquittal of the police officer who had killed Eric Garner, at the march where thousands of protesters from across the country of all ages and all races joined together and were standing up against police violence against Black people, and mentioning the names of men who had been killed by police violence.

    In the context of that protest, the African American Policy Forum were, at the protest, trying to uplift the names of women who had been killed by police violence. And so in the process of being part of that activity, we were saying the names of these women, saying their names out loud, and looking at the looks of lack of recognition, of confusion, from the other participants at this protest.

    And I think that was emblematic of the erasure of these stories, and the ways in which by saying the names of these women, we were speaking them into existence in people’s minds, into people’s memories, and making them understand a problem that up until then they hadn’t been able to see.

    JJ: There’s a thing that we talk about, the loss of the loss, which is, there’s a horror that happens, obviously, when somebody is killed by police, and where you understand that it’s emblematic of the worthlessness of Black lives, in terms of law enforcement in this country.

    But when it’s a Black woman or a trans woman or a girl, and then it doesn’t get acknowledged, there’s a deeper level of loss there. And that’s kind of what this project is about.

    Kevin Minofu of African American Policy Forum

    Kevin Minofu: “Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.”

    KM: Exactly. As we’ve always described it, there’s the immense loss of what it means for a person to lose a daughter, a mother, a sister, a friend, in their families. These are women who all had incredibly full lives, lots of them had children, were all loved by family members and their communities. So there’s that loss that everyone who’s been through grief or has lost someone unexpectedly will suffer.

    And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them. So the police officers that we entrust with the safety of our communities and in our neighborhoods and in our cities are the people who are responsible for taking away these lives.

    And then once we understand that loss, there’s the secondary loss that the family members are burdened with, which is the loss of their loss. Their loss is not legible to people. People don’t recognize that this is something which is a tragedy. People don’t recognize that that’s something which is a problem.

    People don’t recognize the injustice of being killed if you are, in the case of one of the women, Miriam Carey, who was killed while driving with her 18-month-old child by the Secret Service in front of the White House. If you were killed like India Kager, who was also driving with her son in Virginia Beach, and killed in a hail of bullets. If you were killed in the context of your own home, over what was an outstanding traffic violation, like Korryn Gaines.

    So an inability for the general public to see the horror of these deaths, and the loss that those deaths mean for the family members that survive, is what we like to term the loss of the loss, and why this book is such a big intervention to try and publicize and get that loss into the public’s attention.

    JJ: And to inform the conversation about state-sanctioned police violence against Black people.

    But I just want to say, let me just intercede early: I want us to dispense early with the idea that Say Her Name is somehow an invidious project. And I think some listeners might be surprised to hear, but we know that this project has been met with the idea that if you are uplifting the names of Black women and girls who have been killed by police, that somehow that means you don’t think it matters that Black men and boys have been killed by police.

    LA Times: Black women are the unseen victims of police brutality. Why aren’t we talking about it?

    LA Times (7/21/23)

    But I will say, having done a lot of looking into media coverage of the issue, very early on, we absolutely saw the question of state-sanctioned police violence as a question about police killing Black men and boys.

    And to the extent that women were in the conversation, they were mothers and wives and sisters of Black men who were the victims of state violence. And so let’s just address the fact that this is not about saying that Black men and boys are not also [affected].

    KM: I think that’s a very vital thing to add. Thanks for making that, Janine, because the whole impetus of this campaign is stating that we need to expand the scope of our politics, not just replace the names that we include. So we’re not just replacing Black women and Black men in the conversation, but understanding that we need to have a gender-inclusive understanding of police violence.

    So of course we know that, across racial groups, that men are killed more often, Black men are killed more than any other race and gender group. But we do know that Black women represent about 10% of the female population in the United States, yet account for one-fifth of all women killed by the police. And more so, research suggests that three out of five Black women who are killed by police are unarmed.

    So there’s a particular vulnerability to being a Black woman that exacerbates the chance of being in a deadly and a lethal police encounter that other women don’t face, and even a lot of men don’t face as well.

    So being able to speak about that is able to make us understand how we should be able to hold the death of George Floyd in conversation with the death of Breonna Taylor, which happened only a couple months before George Floyd was killed. So that is the point and impetus of our project.

    JJ: And also, a problem that is not named is not studied, is not addressed, and then it’s easier for people to say it’s not really a problem, because we don’t have any data on it. So part of this is just to actually collect some numbers and to say this is happening.

    AAPF: Say Her Name: Towards aGender-Inclusiv Analysis of Rac e Violenceusive acializedowards a ender-Inclusive nalysis of Racialized tate ViolenceTowards a Gender-Inclusive Analysis of Racialized State Violence

    AAPF (7/15)

    KM: Absolutely. The kind of driving mantra of our work, and our broader work of the Policy Forum, is that we can’t fix the problem that we can’t see, that we can’t name.

    And so maybe to give a bit of background, this book is building on work that we did in 2015, which was the inception of our Say Her Name report.

    The Say Her Name report then looked at the ways in which Black women were killed. So, for example, driving while Black is something that we have a context for and understanding for, from looking at the history of how people commonly understand police violence.

    But looking at, for example, how often Black women who are in a mental health crisis are killed, that expanded the scope of how we understood police violence, because not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help.

    So giving ourselves these frames for understanding the ways in which this problem occurs, both gave us a comparison to link it back to the ways in which we commonly understand it, and also expanded the scope for how we want to respond to the crisis.

    JJ: Yeah, absolutely. There is a narrative, which maybe some listeners are not privy to or don’t understand, but there is a dominant narrative in which Black men who are killed by police are victims of state violence, but Black women who are killed, eh, what did they do to get themselves killed?

    And so introducing both the mental health vector, but just, there’s meaning in saying that it’s both the same—racist police violence is similar—and then there are also distinctions. And if we don’t pay attention to them, then we can’t address them.

    News 5: 'Tanisha's Law' Steps Closer to Reality

    News 5 Cleveland (11/11/22)

    KM: I think part of that work has been, there’s a policy intervention that is required, of course, there’s legislation both across the country and in certain states that needs to be effected to change this, but a big part of this is also just a narrative shift.

    So it’s how the media report on the ways in which Black women are killed, or decline to report on them at all. And I think the Breonna Taylor example is indicative of that. The fact that Breonna Taylor was killed in March, and very little was made of the fact at the time, on a national scale, and then a few months later, that’s when her name joined that conversation.

    The fact that Tanisha Anderson was killed only a few days before Tamir Rice was killed by the same police department.

    The ways in which the media can, frankly, just do their job better, to make sure that we have a more capacious and broader frame of police violence, and are able to tell the stories of these women in a way that doesn’t show deference to the narratives that emanate from police sources, and shows the full beauty of their lives.

    JJ: So important. To come back to the book, specifically, this book is not just a book. It’s meant to be a tool. It’s not meant to just sit on a shelf.

    And Fran Garrett, who is the mother of Michelle Cusseaux, who was killed by law enforcement, she talks in the book about how things are actually different based on the work around Say Her Name, and how the mental health response in her community, which happens to be Phoenix, Arizona, but now mental health wellness orders are handled differently, and it’s not necessarily law enforcement that comes first to your door.

    So the book is a way of also encouraging action. It’s not just documentation of sad things; it’s about how to make things different.

    Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout)

    YouTube (9/24/21)

    KM: Absolutely. At the heart of the book—and I would encourage all your listeners to go out and get it at a bookstore near you, and online—at the heart of the book is the Say Her Name Mothers Network. The Say Her Name Mothers Network was formed not long after the inception of the Say Her Name movement, and it represents mothers, daughters, sisters, family members who have lost women to police violence.

    And that community has existed, and has existed as a source of advocacy, a source of community. It’s connected them to women across the country, from Virginia to California, from New York to Texas.

    It shows that there is a community out there, and through this community, and then particularly through storytelling, artivism, using art to disrupt popular narratives, we released a song with Janelle Monáe, who also wrote the forward for the book, called “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout).”

    And that’s designed to just—all of these narrative interventions are the seeds for what becomes policy and actually becomes change. It’s a historical project that Black people have been doing in this country since our arrival. And it’s the Black feminist legacy that brings this book into fruition.

    JJ: And then, just on media, I think some listeners might think, well, media are covering police violence against Black women, and what they might be thinking about is these terrible, wrenching videos, or these just horrible images of Black women being abused by law enforcement.

    And we want to be careful about this, because I think for a lot of people, that might look like witnessing, that might look like seeing what’s happening, but that can’t be the end of the story.

    And certainly for journalists, the responsibility of reporters—but also for all of us—is to not just look at it, but to do something about it. And I wonder if you were talking to reporters or thinking about journalism generally, what would be your thoughts about what would be actually righteous response to what’s happening?

    Salon: She was guilty of being a black girl: The mundane terror of police violence in American schools

    Salon (10/28/15)

    KM: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, of course, we live in an age of spectacle, and there is still a great spectacle to Black suffering. And the visibility of that, that has increased with the internet and social media, has been important in being able to document abuses and violence across the country.

    But the story can’t end there. It can’t end there, just that particular moment. If this was a camera shot, the camera needs to be expanded to look at the dynamics of the communities, the relationship between police forces and these communities, and the patriarchal relationship between the male police officers and women, the racialized relationship between a police force which has been designed to serve white interests and Black communities.

    And so to do the vital work of understanding what led to that situation, what led to the Black girl being violently dragged out of a classroom, or beaten for swimming, or killed in a part of the misguided war on drugs. To understand that broader story is the vital work of journalism that we need at the moment, and the vital work that is actually going to save lives.

    JJ: Do you have any final thoughts, Kevin Minofu, about this importance and the place of this intervention in the public media conversation about Say Her Name, and about police violence against Black women?

    KM: The Say Her Name book, as I said, features different interviews with members of the Say Her Name Network. And so just hearing those stories and actually getting behind a news story and learning about the lives that should have been is really important for everyone to be able to contextualize and humanize the women that form part of the network and this broader movement.

    And looking at the ways in which the knowledge that is being lifted up here is vital to us understanding racism, sexism, and at the same time, being cognizant of the fact that that is the precise knowledge which at the moment a backlash to what is termed wokeness across the country is attempting to erase.

    I can imagine that the content of the Say Her Name book would inflame the sensitivities of various conservatives and right-wing people that are attempting to silence our ability to speak about our circumstances, because they don’t want us to change it.

    So in this context of that environment, reading this book, sharing it with your communities, letting people know about the problem, letting people know that to truly respond to structural racism, to racial injustice, we have to have a gender-expansive, gender-inclusive understanding of it…. I think that’s the work, that’s the mission of Say Her Name.

    And we’ve been very grateful to be supported by the public so far. We’ve seen the movement grow, but there’s still so much work to be done, and that’s the work that we’re excited to continue.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum. You can learn more about this work on the website AAPF.org. Thank you so much, Kevin Minofu, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    KM: Thanks, Janine.

     

    The post ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Covering ‘Racist State’ Backlash—but Not the Reality That Israel Is a Racist State

     

    Daily Beast: GOP Seizes on Pramila Jayapal’s Israel Misstep to Split Democrats

    Media coverage mainly focused on the politics of calling Israel a “racist state” (Daily Beast, 7/19/23) rather than on the question of whether Israel was racist.

    When Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D.–Wash.) called Israel a “racist state” at the Netroots Nation conference, corporate media dutifully covered the political backlash—but scrupulously avoided evaluating the veracity of Jayapal’s statement.

    Addressing activists who interrupted a panel to protest panelist Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s refusal to support a bill protecting Palestinian children, Jayapal said:

    As somebody that’s been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstrations, I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us, that it does not even feel possible.

    Republicans immediately jumped on the statement, working to cast the Democratic party as antisemitic for as many news cycles as possible (Daily Beast, 7/19/23). Top Democrats swiftly rebuked Jayapal, distancing themselves from her remarks and declaring that “Israel is not a racist state.”

    Jayapal offered a lengthy apology, explaining, “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” but rather that

    Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.

    Reporting the push-back

    WaPo: Democrats push back on Rep. Jayapal’s description of Israel as ‘racist state’

    A Washington Post article (7/17/23) quoted no one but US officials, making claims about Israel that many human rights experts would dispute.

    Most major US news outlets covered the blowup over Jayapal’s statement. But astonishingly few took the obvious and necessary journalistic step of factchecking it.

    NPR (7/17/23) discussed the events under the headline, “Top House Democrats Reject Rep. Jayapal’s Comments Calling Israel a ‘Racist State.’” CNN (7/16/23) went with “Top House Democrats Rebuke Jayapal Comments That Israel Is a ‘Racist State’ as She Tries to Walk Them Back.” The Washington Post‘s version (7/17/23) ran under the headline, “Democrats Push Back on Rep. Jayapal’s Description of Israel as ‘Racist State.’”

    NPR characterized her words as “controversial.” The Post and CNN quoted top Democrats calling the remarks “unacceptable,” and CNN added a quote from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz calling them “hurtful and harmful…wholly inaccurate and insensitive.”

    Both NPR and CNN briefly mentioned that progressive Democrats have “concerns” about “human rights” in Israel, but offered no further information about them.

    ‘System of domination’

    But, of course, progressive Democrats aren’t the only ones with concerns about human rights or racism in Israel, and Jayapal didn’t come up with the “racist state” characterization out of thin air.

    Amnesty International: Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians

    Human rights groups like Amnesty International (2/22) have condemned Israel’s apartheid system, which Amnesty defines as a “system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.”

    In 2021, Human Rights Watch (4/27/21) published a lengthy report spelling out its determination that Israel had committed crimes of apartheid against Palestinians, which is defined under international law as

    an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

    HRW explained, for those inclined to split hairs, that this applies to Palestinians because under international law, “race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories.”

    Earlier the same year, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (1/12/21) released a report declaring Israel an “apartheid regime.”

    Amnesty International (2/1/22) followed the next year, publishing a 280-page report titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians” that declared that

    Amnesty International concludes that the State of Israel considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group.

    These reports came about after Israel in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status that declares Israel is the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” and that “the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”—in other words, that Israel is not a nation-state for its Palestinian residents, whether accorded citizenship or not, and that Palestinians subject to Israel’s control have no right to self-determination.

    As B’Tselem explained in its report:

    It is true that the Israeli regime largely followed these principles before. Yet Jewish supremacy has now been enshrined in basic law, making it a binding constitutional principle—unlike ordinary law or practices by authorities, which can be challenged. This signals to all state institutions that they not only can, but must, promote Jewish supremacy in the entire area under Israeli control.

    Jayapal’s statement, therefore, that Israel is a “racist state” has clear grounding in international law, as multiple respected human rights organizations have documented.

    ‘Certain subjects are taboo’

    WaPo: It’s the Republicans, not the Democrats, who are radical on Israel

    Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor (7/19/23) was one of the few commentators who cited Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International‘s positions on Israel. But even he softened their critique, writing that they saw Israeli discrimination against Palestinians “as akin to apartheid.”

    But in the flood of coverage, mentions of any of the human rights organizations that have designated Israel an apartheid state were extremely rare—and only came after Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib highlighted them in a speech on the House floor against a House resolution declaring Israel “not a racist or apartheid state.” At publication, a Nexis search of US news sources found 474 articles and transcripts since July 15 that mentioned Jayapal and “racist state.” Only 24 of those mentioned Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or B’Tselem.

    The New York Times (7/18/23) quoted Tlaib saying, “Israel is an apartheid state,” and noted that in her speech she cited “determinations from United Nations officials, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounted to apartheid.” This was followed with three sources calling the “racist state” characterization “contrary to the facts,” “false” and “hateful.”

    The Hill (7/18/23) offered a brief article about Tlaib’s comments, and the Washington Post‘s follow-up article (7/18/23) mentioned them as well.

    Opinion columns in Newsweek and the Post were noteworthy standouts. Both noted the human rights organizations’ designations and explored the political context beyond the current theatrics. Ishaan Tharoor’s Post column (7/19/23), headlined “It’s the Republicans, Not the Democrats, Who Are Radical on Israel,” focused on the contradictions of growing US public support for Palestinians as the GOP moves radically rightward on Israel/Palestine foreign policy.

    The Newsweek column (7/18/23), by Omar Baddar, offered the only forceful defense of Jayapal’s remarks FAIR could find in establishment media. Under the headline “​​Rep. Jayapal Was Right: Israel Is a Racist State,” Baddar argued: “We cannot live in a functioning democracy and make informed policy decisions if certain subjects are taboo, and if acknowledging reality in them is derided.”

    Newsweek diligently countered Baddar’s column with another (7/18/23) under the headline, “No, Israel Is Not a ‘Racist State’.”

    When Amnesty released its report last year, the New York Times refused to even mention the report for 52 days (FAIR.org, 5/23/23). When journalist Katie Halper, in her new co-host position at Hill TV, recorded a political commentary about the human rights reports titled “Israel IS an Apartheid State,” the Nexstar Media outlet killed the segment and axed Halper (FAIR.org, 10/7/22). That we could find even one critical piece in the wake of Jayapal’s comments in an establishment publication was surprising, given the strong taboo against criticism of Israel that cuts across outlets.

    But it’s lamentable that when the controversy at hand is a politician calling Israel a “racist state,” most of US media can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that the human rights community has weighed in on this question in the affirmative.

    Featured Image: MSNBC (7/18/23)

     

    The post Covering ‘Racist State’ Backlash—but Not the Reality That Israel Is a Racist State appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name

          CounterSpin230721.mp3

     

    #SayHerNameBlack Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence by Kimberlé Crenshaw

    (Haymarket Books, 2023)

    This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them.  But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others.  It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum.

          CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls.

          CounterSpin230721Banter.mp3

     

    The post Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation

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    Good Jobs First: Power Outrage: Will Heavily Subsidized Battery Factories Generate Substandard Jobs?

    Good Jobs First (7/6/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report.

          CounterSpin230714Martinez.mp3

     

    Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs.

          CounterSpin230714Najera-Uresti.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs.

    The post Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • We don’t want ‘equity’, acknowledge our sovereignty

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • Fighting racism needs to go beyond banning symbols and ‘bad words’

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.