Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged supremacy

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

The Confederacy's 'Living Monuments' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ederacys-living-monuments.html

confederacy white supremacy history US culture racism

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • by World War I they were an army of 100,000 women, engaged in the fight to preserve and perpetuate the myths that the Confederate cause was a just and honorable one and that states’ rights, not slavery, was its call to arms. (Of course, a state’s right to maintain the institution of slavery was generally not part of that narrative.)
  • The Daughters’ ambitious agenda was not solely focused on monuments. They sought to collect and preserve the artifacts of war, as well as archival material, which they believed would help tell a “truthful” history of the Confederacy. Indeed, what they collected often formed the basis of the first state archives and museums of history in the South.
  • Members of the U.D.C. developed a multipronged approach to educating white children about the “truth” of the “War Between the States.” They developed lesson plans for teachers, a number of whom were members of the organization. They placed pro-Confederate books in school and public libraries, which they insisted students use when they competed in U.D.C.-sponsored essay contests. They led students in the celebration of Robert E. Lee’s life on his birthday and placed portraits of Confederate heroes, festooned with the battle flag, in classrooms across the South and even in some schools outside of the region. They also formed Children of the Confederacy chapters for boys and girls ages 6 to 16, intended to serve as a pipeline for membership
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Daughters’ primary objective, however, was to instill in Southern white youth a reverence for Confederate principles. Indeed, they regarded their efforts to educate children as their most important work as they sought, in their words, to build “living monuments” who would grow up to defend states’ rights and white supremacy.
  • The children’s organization is also where the Daughters taught the Confederate catechism, generally written by one of their members. Cornelia Branch Stone, of Galveston, Tex., wrote one of the earliest in 1905. The catechism, a call and response to a series of questions, was drilled into children at their meetings. “What causes led to the War Between the States, between 1861 and 1865?” was a typical question. “The disregard, on the part of the states of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slaveholding states” was the answer. “What were these rights?” The answer, according to Stone’s catechism, was “the right to regulate their own affairs and to hold slaves as property.” There were also questions and answers that led children to believe that slavery was a benevolent institution in which cruel masters were rare.
  • Those “citizens of tomorrow,” who drank from the cup of history brewed by the U.D.C. for generations, became the “living monuments” that Southern white women sought to build. In the 1950s and ’60s, they were segregationists who hoisted the Confederate battle flag with talk of defending states’ rights and who denounced federal intervention into their affairs. They were members of the White Citizens’ Councils who spoke of “states’ rights and racial integrity.”
Javier E

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583258

white supremacy history culture racism nazi eugenics genocide

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
  • History, though, tells a different story.
  • King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
  • What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
  • Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
  • Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
  • The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.
  • In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
  • In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
  • Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
  • In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
  • The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
  • In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
  • The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
  • Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
  • Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
  • President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
  • Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
  • On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
  • A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
  • Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
  • Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
  • t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
  • Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
  • What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,
  • “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
  • Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
  • He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
  • it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
  • The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
  • two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
  • Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
  • the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
  • The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
  • Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
  • The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
  • The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
knudsenlu

Vann R. Newkirk II: How to Kill a Revolution - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...552518

revolution culture mlk

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.
  • After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.
  • King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • As moderates abandoned him, King also faced a resurgence of the more virulent elements of white supremacy. The Klan firebombed the Forrest County, Mississippi, NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer to death in January 1966, and Klan night riders were suspected in the murder of the activist Clarence Triggs in Bogalusa, Louisiana, later that year.
  • The Kerner Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration to investigate the causes of the 1967 unrest, said plainly that racism was a major factor. Its 1968 report, authored by the commissioners, who were firmly rooted in mainstream racial politics, concluded, “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” But Gallup polls showed that a majority of Americans disbelieved that conclusion, and Johnson largely ignored the report in future policy making. The false tale of victory had sprung to life. White backlash and Johnson’s rift with civil-rights leaders who wanted to push further than he did slowed the White House’s efforts
  • y 1968, King had emerged from a series of trials with an understanding of the full breadth of white supremacy, and with no small despair at its depth. As he embarked on his Poor People’s Campaign, he braved dwindling funds, a loss of public support, and mounting desperation among the people on the margins of America. It became clear that King embodied the final seal of the eschaton—the urban apocalypse—that Baldwin had warned about.
  • In the immediate aftermath of King’s death, the intensity of the cataclysm became clear to all of black America. Three days after King’s murder, even as the fires across the country raged, Baldwin and King’s friend Nina Simone took to the stage at the Westbury Music Fair, on Long Island. The show had been scheduled long before, but now it had new meaning.
  • Even the ascendant Black Power movement, however, couldn’t withstand the might of the American status quo. In 1969, Chicago police and the FBI killed the Black Panther Party’s deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, dealing another blow to hopes for a visionary leader. The FBI’s continuing program of disruption, along with increasingly hostile public opinion among whites and the rise of “law and order” politics, had effectively destabilized the Black Power movement as a legitimate change-making force by 1970. Ever since, black activists have often been marginalized and widely discredited.
  • But Reagan did not mention the remarks he had made as the governor of California on the day of King’s funeral, when he had spoken of “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”—in effect, blaming King’s own campaign of civil disobedience for his assassination. Nor did Reagan mention that a majority of whites had felt the same way and that many of them had hated King. No mention, either, of the last three years of King’s life, other than his death.
  • How much has changed in the 40 years since that retrospective? Have politicians improved? If King were alive today, would he bask in the glow of achievement, or would he gird himself again to march?I pondered those questions on that January morning in Washington. Just a few days later, the manicured National Mall would be trampled by onlookers who’d come to see American democracy’s quadrennial spectacle, this time for a man who’d been endorsed by the Klan. And I considered one last question: Is this what victory looks like?
Javier E

Students Protest Intro Humanities Course at Reed - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...544682

humanities campus protest radicals free speech

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Of the 25 demands issued by RAR that day, the largest section was devoted to reforming Humanities 110.
  • outrage has been increasingly common in the course, Humanities 110, over the past 13 months. On September 26, 2016, the newly formed RAR organized a boycott of all classes in response to a Facebook post from the actor Isaiah Washington
  • A required year-long course for freshmen, Hum 110 consists of lectures that everyone attends and small break-out classes “where students learn how to discuss, debate, and defend their readings.” It’s the heart of the academic experience at Reed, which ranks second for future Ph.D.s in the humanities and fourth in all subjects.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • As Professor Peter Steinberger details in a 2011 piece for Reed magazine, “What Hum 110 Is All About,” the course is intended to train students whose “primary goal” is “to engage in original, open-ended, critical inquiry.”
  • But for RAR, Hum 110 is all about oppression. “We believe that the first lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy—by centering ‘whiteness’ as the only required class at Reed,” according to a RAR statement delivered to all new freshmen
  • The texts that make up the Hum 110 syllabus—from the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt regions—are “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid,” and thus “oppressive,” RAR leaders have stated. Hum 110 “feels like a cruel test for students of color,” one leader remarked on public radio. “It traumatized my peers.”
  • Reed is home to the most liberal student body of any college, according to The Princeton Review. It’s also ranked the second most-studious—a rigor inculcated in Hum 110.
  • A major crisis for Reed College started when RAR put those core qualities—social justice and academic study—on a collision course.
  • Beginning on boycott day, RAR protested every single Hum lecture that school year.
  • A Hum protest is visually striking: Up to several dozen RAR supporters position themselves alongside the professor and quietly hold signs reading “We demand space for students of color,” “We cannot be erased,” “Fuck Hum 110,” “Stop silencing black and brown voices; the rest of society is already standing on their necks,” and so on. The signs are often accompanied by photos of black Americans killed by police.
  • One of the first Hum professors to request that RAR not occupy the classroom was Lucía Martínez Valdivia, who said her preexisting PTSD would make it difficult to face protesters. In an open letter, RAR offered sympathy to Martínez Valdivia but then accused her of being anti-black, discriminating against those with disabilities, and engaging in gaslighting—without specifying those charges. When someone asked for specifics, a RAR leader replied, “Asking for people to display their trauma so that you feel sufficiently satisfied is a form of violence.”
  • But another RAR member did offer a specific via Facebook: “The​ ​appropriation​ ​of​ ​AAVE [African American Vernacular English]​ ​on​ ​her​ ​shirt​ ​during​ ​lecture:​ ​‘Poetry​ ​is​ ​lit’ ​is​ ​a​ ​form​ ​of​ ​anti-blackness.”
  • During Martínez Valdivia’s lecture on Sappho, protesters sat together in the seats wearing all black; they confronted her after class, with at least one of them yelling at the professor about her past trauma, bringing her to tears. “I am intimidated by these students,” Martínez Valdivia later wrote, noting she is “scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman.” Such fear, she revealed in an op-ed for The Washington Post, prompted some of her colleagues— “including people of color, immigrants, and those without tenure”—to avoid lecturing altogether.
  • what about the majority of students not in RAR? I spoke with a few dozen of them to get an understanding of what campus was like last year, and a clear pattern emerged: intimidation, stigma, and silence when it came to discussing Hum 110, or racial politics in general.
  • Raphael, the founder of the Political Dissidents Club, warned incoming students over Facebook that “Reed’s culture can be stifling/suffocating and narrow minded.”
  • The most popular public forum at Reed is Facebook, where social tribes coalesce and where the most emotive and partisan views get the most attention. “Facebook conversations at Reed bring out the extreme aspects of political discourse on campus,” said Yuta, a sophomore who recently co-founded a student group, The Thinkery, “dedicated to critical and open discussion.”
  • In mid-April, when students were studying for finals, a RAR leader grew frustrated that more supporters weren’t showing up to protest Hum 110. In a post viewable only to Reed students, the leader let loose: To all the white & able(mentally/physically) who don’t come to sit-ins(ever, anymore, rarely): all i got is shade for you. [... If] you ain’t with me, then I will accept that you are against me. There’s 6 hums left, I best be seein all u phony ass white allies show-up. […] How you gonna be makin all ur white supremacy messes & not help clean-up your own community by coming and sitting for a frickin hour & still claim that you ain’t a laughin at a lynchin kinda white.
  • Nonwhite students weren’t spared; a group of them agreed to “like” Patrick’s comment in a show of support. A RAR member demanded those “non-black pocs [people of color]” explain themselves, calling them “anti-black pos [pieces of shit].”
  • As tensions continued to mount, one student decided to create an online forum to debate Hum 110. Laura, a U.S. Army veteran who served twice in Afghanistan, named the Facebook page “Reed Discusses Hum 110.” But it seemed like people didn’t want to engage publicly:
  • Another student wrote to Laura in a private message, “I'm coming into this as a ‘POC’ but I disagree with everything [RAR has been] saying for a long time [and] it feels as if it isn't safe for anyone to express anything that goes against what they're saying.”
  • Laura could relate—her father “immigrated from Syria and was brown”—so she stood in front of Hum 110 just before class to distribute an anonymous survey to gauge opinions about the protests, an implicit rebuke to RAR. Laura, who lives in the neighboring city of Beaverton, said she saw this move as risky. “I would’ve rethought what I did had I lived on campus,” she said.
  • If Facebook is no place to debate Hum 110, what about the printed page? Not so much: During the entire 2016–17 school year, not a single op-ed or even a quote critical of RAR’s methods—let alone goals—was published in the student newspaper, according to a review of archived issues. The only thing that comes close?
  • The student magazine, The Grail, did publish a fair amount of dissent over RAR—but almost all anonymously
  • This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color
  • The pushback from freshmen first came over Facebook. “To interrupt a lecture in a classroom setting is in serious violation of academic freedom and is just unthoughtful and wrong,” wrote a student from China named Sicheng, who distributed a letter of dissent against RAR. Another student, Isabel, ridiculed the group for its “unsolicited emotional theater.
  • I met the student who shot the video. A sophomore from India, he serves as a mentor for international students. (He asked not to be identified by name.) “A lot of them told me how disappointed they were—that they traveled such a long distance to come to this school, and worked so hard to get to this school, and their first lecture was canceled,” he said. He also recalled the mood last year for many students of color like himself: “There was very much a standard opinion you had to have [about RAR], otherwise people would look at you funny, and some people would say stuff to you—a lot of people were called ‘race traitors.
  • Another student from India, Jagannath, responded to the canceled lecture by organizing a freshmen-only meeting on the quad. “For us to rise out of this culture of private concerns, hatred, and fear, we need to find a way to think, speak, and act together,” he wrote in a mass email. Jagannath told me that upperclassmen warned him he was “very crazy” to hold a public meeting, but it was a huge success; about 150 freshmen showed up, and by all accounts, their debate over Hum 110 was civil and constructive. In the absence of Facebook and protest signs, the freshmen were taking back their class.
  • In the intervening year, the Reed administration had met many of RAR’s demands, including new hires in the Office of Inclusive Community, fast-tracking the reevaluation of the Hum 110 syllabus that traditionally happens every 10 years, and arranging a long series of “6 by 6 meetings”—six RAR students and six Hum professors—to solicit ideas for that syllabus. (Those meetings ended when RAR members stopped coming; they complained of being “forced to sit in hours of fruitless meetings listening to full-grown adults cry about Aristotle.”)
  • the more accommodation that’s been made, the more disruptive the protests have become—and the more heightened the rhetoric. “Black lives matter” was the common chant at last year’s boycott. This year’s? “No cops, no KKK, no racist U.S.A.” RAR increasingly claims those cops will be unleashed on them—or, in their words, Hum professors are “entertaining threatening violence on our bodies.”
  • Rollo later told me that RAR “had a beautiful opportunity to address police violence” but squandered it with extreme rhetoric. “Identity politics is divisive,” he insisted. As far as Hum 110, “I like to do my own interpreting,” and he resents RAR “playing the race card on ancient Egyptian culture.
  • Reed is just one college—and a small one at that. But the freshman revolt against RAR could be a blueprint for other campuses. If the “most liberal student body” in the country can reject divisive racial rhetoric and come together to debate a diversity of views, others could follow.
Javier E

Calling the Trump Era by Its Proper Name - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...552251

trump fascism culture politics democracy demagogue

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • what is normal for other presidents was out of character for Trump. In the rest of his spoken or tweeted expressions, there’s been practically no evidence of what has preoccupied most other leaders: the centrality, and fragility, of the institutional underpinnings of American life.
  • Except for that odd passage in his inaugural address, there’s no evidence I can think of that he recognizes the claims, validity, or importance of a set of rules beyond his personal interests or aggrandizement.
  • I wonder increasingly about the proper name to give it
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Trumpocracy? This is the name of an excellent new book by The Atlantic’s David Frum
  • A “dying” of democracy? That is the implication of the new book How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
  • Perhaps this is “tribalism,”
  • Or it is time to call this era flat-out a return to fascism?
  • I thought frequently of two works by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates that appear in his new book We Were Eight Years in Power. One was “Case for Reparations”; the other, his article about Trump as “The First White President.” Each of them powerfully argued that calling things by their explicit, deliberately undiplomatic names was a crucial intellectual and political step.
  • He was not writing about America’s “racial problems.” He was forcing attention on state-sponsored white racial supremacy.
  • Riemen’s mission seems similar. He argues that we are again confronting fascism, and says that the bluntness of the term (as with “white racial supremacy”) focuses attention on the unpleasant realities and what can be done about them.
  • “We Europeans have a sense about fascism. We know the signs.”
  • I am on Riemen’s side of that argument, and I find that his case for considering today’s developments “fascist” is, in fact, useful in thinking about responses.
  • whether you prefer “Trumpocracy,” “dying democracy,” “tribalism,” or “fascism” to describe the disease, these books leave no doubt that treatment is needed, now
Javier E

The Right's Continuing Glorification of Violence - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/uing-glorification-of-violence

violence glorification right alt-right

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Less than a week before the 2016 election, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic published a chilling prediction. The Trump campaign, they wrote “has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate.” If their analysis of the process of violent radicalization was correct, they said, “the result will be blood.” 
  • in March, Christian Vanderbrouk wrote an extraordinary piece about a darker but related strain of rhetoric on the right. It is time, he wrote then, for conservatives to stop trafficking in violent fantasies about racial civil wars that pit red and blue states against one another. 
  • “Schlichter’s books and The Turner Diaries share the same paranoia that progressive governments, aided by white collaborators, are empowering blacks to enable them to rape white women and ultimately exterminate the white race.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • at the core of Schlichter’s books is the catharsis of violence, and the racial elements are often explicit.
  • The racialized themes of Schlichter’s books are not subtle. Nor are the refrains of “replacement,” or “invasion,” — themes that have become popular – and deadly – on the fringes of the white nationalist movement.
  • Schlichter is not alone in his fascination with the pornification of political violence. Vanderbrouk also highlighted the Federalist’s Jesse Kelly, who warned that Trump supporters face genocide or ruin.  In his essay. “America Is Over, But I Won’t See It Go Without An Epic Fight,” Kelly asks readers to “imagine themselves as native Lakota tribesmen who must choose between life on a reservation—‘in the liberal utopian nightmare of 57 genders and government control over everything’—or glorious, doomed resistance: as the Lakota who fights back and holds his enemy’s scalp in his hands.”
  • Vanderbrouk’s piece was published in March, Hugh Hewitt doubled down on his defense of Schlichter. The Federalist continues to be sunk in terminal whataboutism. Trump continues to ratchet up his rhetoric, even in the face of national tragedy. Tucker Carlson denies that there is a problem of white supremacy at all.  And there has been blood
Javier E

Opinion | Seeing Black History in Context - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ack-history-month-america.html

politics culture crisis context American idea white supremacy black history

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • It’s time to acknowledge what black history really reveals — not individual heroism or the endurance of democratic ideals, but their opposites. Time to examine what black history has always shown us: how hundreds of years of codified oppression, groupthink, hypocrisy, lies and political cowardice have made possible, and palatable, the political oppression and moral corruption of the current moment that threatens to wipe out democracy for everybody.
  • Black history rooted in slavery means that the country was always going to have to make ugly compromises with its own ideals, a process that became normalized. The longevity of slavery meant that business and the pursuit of profit, not justice, would be the dominant force in American life and the real energy driving even the most optimistic notions of American exceptionalism.
  • in this context, the cult of Trump is not new, just another compromise with our ideals, albeit a far-reaching one that looks particularly bad in the supposedly enlightened post-civil rights era of the 21st century.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Embarrassment — forget moral outrage — is totally lacking now among Republicans, who willingly take their cues from a man incapable of feeling remorse or regret for any reason. Far from being embarrassed, the cult now seems to be saying that racism and corporate supremacy are, if not actually good for business, conditions we all can and perhaps should live with. Again, not new — we all lived with the economics of Jim Crow for a hundred years
  • What we must come to grips with is that the arrogance and myopia that made our race-based social caste system possible, that allowed us to dishonor our Constitution and delude ourselves on a regular basis, are the same arrogance and myopia that are now threatening the well-being of the entire planet.
  • Denying climate change is part and parcel of denying the corrosive effects of segregation. The point is that America is very good at making its own reality, which is another way of saying it has always tolerated — even welcomed — fake news and alternative facts for the sake of power and political convenience.
  • I doubt any black freedom fighter expected a country so wedded to inequality to significantly change in his or her lifetime or ours. Yet if we as a country don’t significantly change our view of our own history, which is framed in black history, there will be precious little in the future to celebrate.
Javier E

What White Nationalism Gets Right About American History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-american-history-statues.html

white nationalism history trump white supremacy Jefferson

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • The most effective tactics for white nationalists are to associate American history with themselves and to suggest that the collective efforts to turn away from our white supremacist past are the same as abandoning American culture.
  • It’s a message that erases people of color and their essential role in American life, but one that also appeals to large numbers of white people who would agree with the statement, “I’m not racist, but I don’t want American history dishonored, and this statue of Robert E. Lee shouldn’t be removed.”
  • On Tuesday afternoon the president defended the actions of those at the rally, stating, “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” His words marked possibly the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement. These statements described the marchers as they see themselves — nobly driven by a good cause, even if they are plagued by a few bad apples
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • But this protest, contrary to his defense, was advertised unambiguously as a white nationalist rally.
  • We have all observed the administration’s decisions over the past several months that aligned with the white nationalist agenda,
  • Until Trump’s comments, few critics seemed to identify the larger relationship the alt-right sees between its beliefs and the ideals of the American founders.
  • Yet President Trump stepped in to salvage the message that the rally organizers had originally hoped to project:
  • But I had never believed Trump’s administration would have trouble distancing itself from the actual white nationalist movement.
  • The most fundamental legislative goal of the white nationalist movement is to limit nonwhite immigration. It is important to remember that such limits were in place during the lifetimes of many current white nationalists; it was the default status until the 1960s.
  • I do, however, think it is essential that we recognize that the white nationalist history embedded in American culture lends itself to white nationalist rallies like the one in Charlottesville. If you want to preserve Confederate memorials, but you don’t work to build monuments to historical black leaders, you share the same cause as the marchers.
  • His comments supporting the rally gave new purpose to the white nationalist movement, unlike any endorsement it has ever received. Among its followers, being at that rally will become something to brag about, and some people who didn’t want to be associated with extremism will now see the cause as more mainstream. When the president doesn’t provide condemnation that he has been pressed to give, what message does that send but encouragement?
  • The United States was founded as a white nationalist country, and that legacy remains today. Things have improved from the radical promotion of white people at the expense of all others, which has persisted for most of our history, yet most of us have not accepted the extent to which white identity guides so much of what we still do. Sometimes it seems that the white nationalists are most honest about the very real foundation of white supremacy upon which our nation was built.
  • The president’s words legitimized the worst of our country, and now the white nationalist movement could be poised to grow. To challenge these messages, we need to acknowledge the continuity of white nationalist thought in American history, and the appeal it still holds.
  • It is a fringe movement not because its ideas are completely alien to our culture, but because we work constantly to argue against it, expose its inconsistencies and persuade our citizens to counter it. We can no longer count on the country’s leader to do this, so it’s now incumbent upon all of us.
Javier E

Liberal Democracy Is Suffering From a Concussion - 1 views

nymag.com/...ffering-from-a-concussion.html

liberal democracy trump intersectionality

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • “Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power
  • it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered.
  • Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it
  • The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante.
  • It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral.
  • If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished.
  • Then this: “Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.’
  • in a strange echo of the Trumpian right, they are insisting on the superiority of their orthodoxy to “facts.” They are hostile, like all fundamentalists, to science, because it might counter doctrine.
  • they shut down the event because intersectionality rejects the entire idea of free debate, science, or truth independent of white male power. At the end of this part of the ceremony, an individual therefore shouts: “Who is the enemy?” And the congregation responds: “White supremacy!”
  • We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.
  • Meanwhile, of course, President Trump continues his assault on the very same independent truth — in this case, significantly more frightening given his position as the most powerful individual on the planet. He too has a contempt for any facts that do not fit his own ideology or self-image.
  • That’s why the lies he repeats are not just moments of self-interested dishonesty. They are designed to erode the very notion of an empirical reality, independent of his own ideology and power. They are an attack on reason itself. A fact-driven media has to be discredited
  • Equally, a bureaucracy designed impartially to implement legislation has to be delegitimized, if its fact-based neutrality challenges Trump’s worldview. And so the “administrative state,” in Steve Bannon’s words, has to be “deconstructed.”
  • This is the vortex we are being led into by the most reckless, feckless, and malevolent president in this country’s history. It is a vortex where reality itself must subordinate itself to one political side; where facts are always instruments of power and nothing else; where our entire Constitution, designed to balance power against power to give truth and reason a chance, is being deliberately corroded from within.
  • It’s been seven weeks. And the damage done to our way of life is already deep, and deepening.
Javier E

Making Sense of the Violence in Charlottesville - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...538659

racism white supremacy history culture politics violence lynching usa memory racial

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • many Americans of good will honestly, if erroneously, believe that what happened in Charlottesville is “not us.” How can this be?
  • Answering this question demands a look back at some of the most significant patterns of white-on-black violence in American history to identify the precise ways in which that violence was justified, forgotten, or defined as something other than the racist terror that it was.
  • American chattel slavery—in which blacks were bought, sold, worked, and bred for profit—was created and maintained through violence that was at once brutal and routine
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • In justifying this violence, supporters of slavery recast it as a kind of self-defense, and violence committed in self-defense—unlike violence committed out of anger or hatred—says nothing about the character of the perpetrators.
  • The demise of slavery did not lead to a decline in white-on-black violence—it merely changed forms.
  • Most notoriously, whites lynched blacks; looking just at white-on-black lynchings for the purpose of racial control, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877, when Reconstruction ended, and 1950
  • Lynchings were even more savage and sadistic than most people imagine.
  • Patrick Phillips recounts one such expulsion in his 2016 book Blood at the Root. In 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, drove out all black residents of the county, who abandoned their land and their belongings as they fled bands of “night riders”
  • again, because defenders of lynching portrayed their violence as justified, even as we recognize today that lynching is a thing white people did, we can believe that it implies nothing about what it meant to be white.
  • The motifs of black men’s savage, uncontrollable lust and of white women’s chastity and virtue combined in a perfect storm of white fear to justify the practice of lynching generally, even when a particular lynching was not alleged to be in response to rape.
  • Even opponents of lynching seemed to agree that the supposed epidemic of black-on-white rape demanded a violent solution.
  • Attempts to justify racial terror have  been accompanied by a national commitment to erasing it from our memory.
  • Consider the little-known history of racial cleansing in America. Across the South and Midwest, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has identified hundreds of counties that experienced sharp and abrupt drop-offs of their black populations. Though the historical record, as with lynching, is intentionally spotty, in many cases there is clear evidence that whites systematically and violently drove out entire black populations, dispossessing black families of their property and rendering them refugees.
  • Such depravity required justification. This time, accusations of black criminality would do the trick. In most lynchings, the victim was accused of rape, murder, or both.
  • This state of affairs is not inevitable; America’s relationship with its history is a collective choice. Other countries have made other choices in the wake of systematic racist violence.
  • since black refugees could not safely return to retrieve their personal property or to sell their land, the new white “owners” could assert adverse possession after the statutory period of seven years, registering deeds at the county courthouse even though the Georgia statute technically required adverse possession to be “peaceable.”
  • This literal erasure enabled the ensuing rhetorical erasure of Forsyth’s history. In 1987, civil rights activists staged a protest in Forsyth County, which remained all-white 75 years after its racial cleansing. The white residents of the county seemed genuinely puzzled as to why activists were harassing them.
  • White terrorists cleansed their communities of blacks in Forsyth County in 1912, and in Marshall County, Kentucky in 1908, and in Vermillion County, Indiana in 1923, and in Sharp County, Arkansas on Christmas Eve, 1906, to name just a few. If we recognized these crimes for what they were, it would be difficult to ignore that a pattern of racial terrorism had occurred across decades, and that later incidents of racial violence were part of that pattern.
  • But a crime no one remembers cannot lead us to associate its perpetrators with criminality, so our concept of whiteness remains untouched by any association with violence.   
  • We have erased the history of lynching in much the same way. The overwhelming majority of lynching sites remain unmarked and un-memorialized. The failure to mark these sites allows Americans (especially whites) to forget the atrocities.
  • This erasure of history from public spaces contributes to a kind of gaslighting dynamic in discussions of race in America: whites are able to minimize blacks’ claims of historical and ongoing oppression because they have successfully forgotten much of the history that blacks still remember.  
  • Justifying and erasing hundreds of years of white-on-black violence has left many Americans ill-equipped to make sense of the racist violence that we live with today. As a result, whites often lack the vocabulary to contextualize even the most obviously racist events.
  • media outlets tended to use vague language like “evil” or “monster” to describe Roof. That kind of equivocal terminology implied that Roof had an inherent, inevitable propensity for violence, a propensity that sprang up organically rather than being nurtured by extremist influences
  • But Roof’s motive could not have been clearer. He wrote a manifesto about the threat black criminality poses to Western civilization. He confessed to police that he planned and carried out the shooting with the intention of starting a “race war.” Roof was desperate to make sure everyone understood that he had acted to promote white supremacy, but many Americans stubbornly refused to take him at his own word, insisting that it would be premature to interpret the shooting as racial terrorism.
  • By failing to connect Roof’s racism with his obvious criminality, many allowed themselves to think of the Charleston tragedy as an isolated and senseless act, instead of seeing it as a seamless continuation of the racial terrorism that is America’s heritage.
  • In every generation, Americans have consistently spoken about racist violence committed by white people as justified, erased it from memory, or simply called it something else
  • So when self-identified white nationalists seeking to turn America into a whites-only homeland held a torchlight protest, many observers failed to make the clear connection to bands of night riders, armed and carrying torches, driving blacks out of their homes to cleanse the region of anyone not white.
  • less than a decade later, Phillips writes, the white leaders of Forsyth County were boasting—with a straight face—that “while other north Georgia communities [with mixed populations] continued to suffer episodes of ‘race trouble,’ there were no such embarrassments in Forsyth.” This was possible in part because they had erased evidence of just how Forsyth came to be an all-white county
  • the effort is underway to face up to the full horror of racist terror, not justify it; to name racially motivated violence as such, not hide it; to mark down in disgrace the names of the perpetrators, not celebrate them; and to memorialize the victims, not erase their suffering.
  • America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning.
  • America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning. The horrific events of August provide an opportunity to get started.
Javier E

'Trump, Trump, Trump!' How a President's Name Became a Racial Jeer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-racial-jeers.html

white supremacy trump politics culture nativism icon

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • “The message here,” Mr. Beschloss said, “is ‘Trump is going to come and get you — and we support that.’”
  • When asked how a president’s very name could become so coded, Mr. Beschloss cited Mr. Trump’s speeches and tweets, including two in particular: the announcement of his candidacy in 2015, during which he referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists; and his equivocating comments after a white supremacist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Va., in June ended with one person killed and 19 wounded. (“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” the president had said. “On many sides.”)“This broadened into a feeling by some people — right or wrong — that Trump is going to be a weapon to reduce the opportunities of those who are different,” Mr. Beschloss said. “This is a signal moment.”
  • “When Trump says, ‘I hear you, I will represent you,’ he is speaking to a particular cross-section of the nation that does not include Muslims, that does not include people of color,”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump had created his own breakaway brand, making him the personification of specific ideals.
  • “To use the name as a rallying cry for a kind of embodied white supremacy, white nationalism or sense of triumphalism, for taking back the country, as best as I can tell has never been crystallized in the name of a U.S. president,” Mr. Muhammad said.“It’s authoritarian, the cult of personality,” Mr. Meacham said. “It’s saying that we’re American — and you’re not.”
cartergramiak

Opinion | Voter Suppression Is Grand Larceny - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...voter-suppression-us.html

politics policy gop US

shared by cartergramiak on 01 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In 1890, Mississippi became one of the first states in the country to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of writing white supremacy into the DNA of the state.
  • “As a further precaution to secure unquestioned white supremacy the committee have fixed an arbitrary appointment of the state, which fixes the legislative branch of the government at 130 members and the senatorial branch at 45 members.” The majority of the seats in both branches were “from white constituencies.”
  • On Feb. 24, the center updated its account to reveal that “as of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Senator Rick Scott and other Republicans on Feb. 25 introduced the Save Democracy Act in what they said was an effort to “restore confidence in our elections.”Jessica Anderson of the conservative lobbying organization Heritage Action for America said of the legislation: “I applaud Senator Scott for putting forward common-sense, targeted reforms to help protect the integrity of our federal elections and the sanctity of the vote. The Save Democracy Act will protect against fraud and restore American’s confidence in our election systems while respecting the state’s sovereignty.”
  • They can use all manner of euphemism to make it sound honorable, but it is not. This is an electoral fleecing in plain sight, one targeting people of color. We are watching another of history’s racist robberies. It’s grand larceny and, as usual, what is being stolen is power.
lmunch

Former White supremacist: This is how to tackle hate and bigotry (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

extremism culture US crisis Policy

shared by lmunch on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • According to the US Department of Homeland Security, White supremacy is the biggest security threat facing the United States today based on the number of violent crimes committed. It eclipses all other types of extremism.
  • I would know -- because that was me. After serving in Afghanistan, I officially joined the White Knights of the KKK in 2014. The skills that I learned in the military, like a heightened level of mental and tactical awareness, are exactly what groups like this valued for the purpose of training new members. I was a prime target to be groomed and recruited.
  • During my service in Afghanistan, my best friend was killed in an unexpected attack on a routine drill. He died in my arms, and I blamed Muslims for his death. We were trained to see them as the enemy. I came home with a hatred for Islam as well as an addiction to the painkillers I was prescribed after a back injury. I had been trained in the military to serve with duty and loyalty. I would have done anything to show my loyalty to the White Knights of the KKK. It gave me a sense of purpose that I was missing after I came home.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Because of the love and compassion they showed me, I was able to move forward in my life and give back. Now I help people disengage from hate groups, return to their families, and live healthy and happy lives.
  • As a former White supremacist and drug addict, I started to wonder if it was possible to be addicted to hate the way I was addicted to drugs as a coping tool. Based on this, I have spent the last two years developing two programs aimed at addressing the root causes of hate with Parents For Peace, which takes a public health approach to preventing radicalization, extremism, and violence.
  • Additionally, the government often cannot act if a crime hasn't been committed. That is why Parents For Peace's work is so important. The organization focuses on prevention and intervention to keep people from becoming extremists or committing extremist acts. Our work is challenging, and the outcomes are positive but silent.
  • If we think of hate as a public health crisis and a disease, we should treat it as such. It is the only way to effectively combat the rise of extremism.
Javier E

Free Black Thought: A Manifesto - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...free-black-thought-a-manifesto

persuasion racism Critical Theory race Culture Politics epistemology perspective bias

shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.
  • second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • Both of these observations are true at least some of the time
  • The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.
  • In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.
  • it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.
  • First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking
  • Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.
  • Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • Third, marginalized communities are diverse.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • “The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.
  • Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.
  • Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.
  • If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
Javier E

Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...who-decides-whats-racist

Culture Politics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.
  • CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.
  • second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • Both of these observations are true at least some of the time
  • The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.
  • In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”
  • Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.
  • Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.
  • it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.
  • First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking
  • There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.
  • We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.
  • Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.
  • Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight
  • Third, marginalized communities are diverse.
  • “The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”
  • Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.
  • Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.
  • Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.
  • If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.
  • Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend
  • But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
Javier E

Historians Clash With the 1619 Project - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...604093

slavery project 1619 history controversy US

shared by Javier E on 02 May 21 - No Cached
  • “They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of The New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic presidency edition,” Hannah-Jones told me. “I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”
  • For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project, the response has been deeply gratifying.
  • When The New York Times Magazine published its 1619 Project in August, people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies. Since then, the project—a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions—has spawned a podcast, a high-school curriculum, and an upcoming book
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom.
  • The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.
  • given the stature of the historians involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the 1619 Project
  • he letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.
  • Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere.
  • while some of the critiques can be answered with historical fact, others are questions of interpretation grounded in perspective and experience.
  • Both sides agree, as many of the project’s right-wing critics do not, that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life—an argument that is less radical than it may appear at first glance. If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project, though not necessarily with all of its individual arguments.
  • Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles?
  • The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society
  • The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize.
  • The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union.
  • Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism.
  • “The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all,”
  • The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”
  • The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.
  • “To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.”
  • Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.
  • On this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground. Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal, the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel abolitionism in the North.
  • it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.
  • The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union.
  • In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, Oakes said, “The function of those tropes is to deny change over time … The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?”
  • The project’s pessimism has drawn criticism from the left as well as the right.
  • A major theme of the 1619 Project is that the progress that has been made has been fragile and reversible—and has been achieved in spite of the nation’s true founding principles, which are not the lofty ideals few Americans genuinely believe in.
  • “The fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it's a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women's rights—everything. That's the glory of it,” Wilentz told me. “To minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical tradition in America.”
  • the question of whether black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “largely alone,” as Hannah-Jones put it in her essay, is subject to vigorous debate.
  • “I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.”
  • “The tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project. And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes American history,”
  • To Wilentz, the failures of earlier scholarship don’t illustrate the danger of a monochromatic group of historians writing about the American past, but rather the risk that ideologues can hijack the narrative. “[It was] when the southern racists took over the historical profession that things changed, and W. E. B. Du Bois fought a very, very courageous fight against all of that,” Wilentz told me. The Dunning School, he said, was “not a white point of view; it’s a southern, racist point of view.”
  • In the letter, Wilentz portrays the authors of the 1619 Project as ideologues as well. He implies—apparently based on a combative but ambiguous exchange between Hannah-Jones and the writer Wesley Yang on Twitter—that she had discounted objections raised by “white historians” since publication.
  • Hannah-Jones told me she was misinterpreted. “I rely heavily on the scholarship of historians no matter what race, and I would never discount the work of any historian because that person is white or any other race,” she told me. “I did respond to someone who was saying white scholars were afraid, and I think my point was that history is not objective. And that people who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as well.”
  • When I asked Wilentz about Hannah-Jones’s clarification, he was dismissive. “Fact and objectivity are the foundation of both honest journalism and honest history. And so to dismiss it, to say, ‘No, I'm not really talking about whites’—well, she did, and then she takes it back in those tweets and then says it's about the inability of anybody to write objective history. That's objectionable too,”
  • The problem, as Du Bois argued, is that much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.
  • Newt Gingrich called the 1619 Project a “lie,” arguing that “there were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves." In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo dismissed the Times Magazine project as a “conspiracy theory” developed from the “chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.
katherineharron

Opinion: The fight over Marjorie Taylor Greene poses a threat to the entire country - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

gop

shared by katherineharron on 05 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • he civil war raging inside the GOP may look like a problem for the Republican Party, but it is much more. It is a flashing red light for the entire country, warning America that if it continues on this path, it will become a country without guardrails against extremist ideologies.
  • The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and there's no prohibition against believing crazy ideas.
  • It's no wonder the venerable former Republican Sen. John Danforth said the GOP has become a "grotesque caricature" of what it used to be.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • that was before House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to punish the execrable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, other than a statement condemning her views. The QAnon follower's embrace of baseless conspiracy theories, along with violent, racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic statements are repulsive not just to many Americans, but to decent people around the world.
  • McCarthy presided over a meeting weighing the fate of Greene and of Rep. Liz Cheney, who committed the grave sin of condemning former President Donald Trump for inciting a mob to attack the Capitol in an assault on American democracy so stunning that even McCarthy briefly found his spine and criticized Trump.
  • Cheney survived a vote to remove her from leadership by a vote of 145- 61. And Greene, after apologizing to her colleagues in the closed-door party meeting Wednesday night, was not penalized, but met with a standing ovation.
  • Greene offered what largely amounted to a non-apology, expressing regret for some of her past comments. Hours later, in a dramatic Congressional session, 219 House Democrats, along with 11 Republicans, did what McCarthy should have and stripped Greene of her committee assignments.
  • It's the party of the twice impeached Trump, a man who Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham described in 2015 as "a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot," who "doesn't represent my party."
  • After the closed-door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy justified his inaction on Greene by saying, "This Republican Party's a very big tent, everyone's invited in."
  • But the tent is becoming increasingly comfortable for racists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and reality deniers.
  • By embracing Greene, Republicans are moving the Overton window, the range of views that are considered politically acceptable. Unfortunately, that has an impact on the entire country, however much the Democrats try to correct for the moral failings of Republicans.
  • Graham, as we know, did a 180 on Trump. He, too, found integrity too politically risky, and debased himself by embracing Trump.
  • On Wednesday, McCarthy defended Greene and said, "I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us -- denouncing Q-on, I don't know if I say it right," McCarthy disingenuously claimed, "I don't even know what it is.
  • Just two years ago, Republicans stripped Rep. Steve King from all committee assignments. King, who had made countless racist statements, had asked in an interview with the New York Times, "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization -- how did that language become offensive."
  • "That is not the party of Lincoln," he declared, "and it's definitely not American."
  • The party has changed.
  • Like many elected Republicans, Greene rejected the incontrovertible fact that President Joe Biden won the election. But she goes much further. She repeatedly showed support on social media for assassinating prominent Democrats, shared an image of herself holding a gun alongside other congresswomen with a caption that mentioned going "on the offense against these socialists" and claimed the 2018 California wildfires were deliberately set by a Jewish financier using a space laser.
  • When Greene was still a candidate running for Congress, the Republican Party initially distanced itself from her.
  • Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republicans' number two, went even further, calling her statements "disgusting," and added they "don't reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great."
  • But then Trump threw his arms around his fervent admirer, calling her "a real WINNER," and a "future Republican star."
  • It was the tolerance of Trump's rhetoric -- which was previously considered beyond the pale -- that paved the road to Greene's election and the attack on the Capitol last month.
  • Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, seems to be an outlier among Republican leadership in condemning Greene. "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are a cancer for the Republican Party and our country. Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality."
  • The GOP welcomed into the fold an extremist, during a time when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered an urgent examination of extremism in US military ranks; during a time when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the threat of domestic terrorism is "persistent."
  • The new domestic terrorist threat comes from the extremist fringes that espouse the same ideas that McCarthy seemed to welcome into the GOP's "very big tent."
  • Extremists and their supporters are winning battles in the Republican civil war, and the entire country is paying a price.
Javier E

Race war murder: James Harris Jackson killed Timothy Caughman to spark white v. black c... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...race-war-murder-hate-crime

race war racism assassination homicide nyc murder nazi

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • There were few signs at Friends that Jackson harbored any hatred, according to interviews with a dozen classmates, teachers and administrators. Most agreed to talk about Jackson only if they would not be identified because they did not want to be connected with his crime.
  • One classmate of color said she, too, had no inkling that Jackson was racist. Instead, they bonded over their love of history. “I felt like he was the only one in the class who got me,” she said.
  • Jackson belonged to a small group of more conservative students who stood out on campus, she said. “It was a really liberal school, so people shared a lot of assumptions,” she said. “He liked to challenge those.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “I think he came to Seder or Passover with me one year at my family’s house,” he said, adding that Jackson had black and Hispanic friends at the school and dated an Asian girl.
  • His senior year, he was one of about 30 Latin students to travel to Italy during spring break. As the group toured ancient Roman ruins, Jackson turned to a student he barely knew and said that his grandfather had admitted on his deathbed to being in the SS.
  • After flunking out of Ohio Wesleyan University his first semester, he did the first of two things that would shock his former Quaker school classmates. In 2009, he enlisted. “Kids from Friends don’t do that,” recalled his history classmate. “Going to West Point is one thing. But to go and just sign up?”
  • “The planet is going down fast. And the best have to be saved. The weak have to die. It’s just that simple,” he continued, turning his face to the ceiling and exhaling loudly with his eyes closed. “This has to be God’s will. What other explanation could there be?”
  • Jackson’s arrest made front-page news across the country. But prosecutors were surprised at how quickly the story faded.
  • “The coverage of the case was not as extensive or as deep as I thought it would be, given all that was going on in America at time, and its outrageousness,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who charged Jackson with murder as a hate crime and murder as terrorism. “Had he come from ISIS and hunted Jews and then killed a Jewish man, I think there would have been much more attention.”
  • It would be another five months before hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville for the “Unite the Right” rally — a gathering that would end in violence and expose the alt-right for what it really was.
  • Detective Schick considered the crime a window into the growing problem of white supremacy in America. “We need to know where this train of thought is coming from, how it’s being perpetuated in these hate groups,” he said. “It’s the same thought pattern used back by the Ku Klux Klan.”
  • At their 10-year reunion, Jackson’s classmates decided to hold a Quaker meeting for worship.There, in the meeting house Harris used to attend with them, the young professionals wondered if there were warning signs they didn’t see, or if the school’s progressivism had somehow helped push Jackson toward violence.
  • “There is clearly something that was missing from our high school or our experience that didn’t allow him to speak about these feelings sooner,” one Friends graduate said.
  • Raines, Jackson’s former history teacher who now works at another private school, said he brought up the case this fall during an assembly. The virulence of white supremacy should not be ignored.
  • “You see these trends, these forces, resurging,” he said. “You need to take action if you can.”
saberal

NBC's Savannah Guthrie Grills Trump Opposite ABC's Sober Biden Talk - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...annah-guthrie-trump-biden.html

us politics trump

shared by saberal on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • George Stephanopoulos of ABC had it easy, steering an old-school Washington veteran through policy plans against a patriotic backdrop, while Savannah Guthrie of NBC had to navigate the stormy waters of QAnon, white supremacy and whether the virus-stricken president had pneumonia. (Despite repeated inquiries, he would not say.)
  • Mr. Biden’s ABC town hall had all the fireworks of a vintage episode of “This Week With David Brinkley.” Mr. Trump’s NBC forum had all the subtlety of a professional wrestling match.
  • In an out-of-the-gate barrage, Ms. Guthrie pressed Mr. Trump repeatedly on his medical condition, if he had taken a coronavirus test before the first presidential debate, if he would denounce white supremacy and if he opposed QAnon — questions that Mr. Trump, who typically sits down with friendly interviewers, had avoided facing.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • On ABC, the mood was different. Mr. Biden and Mr. Stephanopoulos engaged in a sober policy conversation more suited to a Sunday morning public-affairs broadcast.
  • The tone tensed up when Mr. Biden declined, as he has several times, to fully explain his view on expanding the Supreme Court. “Don’t voters have a right to know where you stand?” Mr. Stephanopoulos asked.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 254 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page