Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Post

This is part 2 of 2 concerning the histories and current manifestations of bullying, "wokeness," and "canceling" those with whom we disagree in the U.S. Thumbnail: those who criticize "wokeness" and characterize it as a form of socialism and communism (as the Civil Rights Movement was characterized) rarely if ever indicate any familiarity with what it means to be "woke" in the original and best sense of the word. They claim they are the true Americans and they work to limit the rights of some U.S. citizens (CPAC does this regularly). Those who claim to be woke, and who choose to wield their alleged wokeness as a weapon, usually claim that their view is right and any other view is wrong, and attempt to silence or cancel opinions they don't like. They do this in the name of equality for all. That's a contradiction. Unlike group one, they don't claim that they are the only true Americans, they don't try to prevent others from voting, and they don't meet in annual conferences. All of this is based on the book, "Healing America's Narratives; The Feminine, the Masculine, and Our Collective National Shadow" (2022).

I'm always more inspired whenever there's more to be inspired by. And lately there's a lot. If we think about simple facts that are hard to refute however, I think there's a lot that must be said about where exactly we've all been. As someone who was educated to very high standards in the Western education system, I'd ask the West some very basic questions. Qs When 'race' is debated in the WEST, what does 'race' mean? When CIVIL RIGHTS are discussed in the WEST, what are CIVIL RIGHTS? If, as a pentuple-or-so raced individual, if I think that a blond blue eyed billionaire is a CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER, am I allowed to say so? If the WEST was so inspiring why would birth rates be so low? If the Freedoms of Speech of some nations were so valuable why would those same nations seem to be the very least capable to fix very fundamental societal issues? Education, law enforcement, medical systems, civility, living costs, patriotism across all states/territories. If the average citizen can't describe WHAT rights they MIGHT have - let alone HOW to ENFORCE A SINGLE RIGHT - why would citizens in that country take to the streets screaming about their RIGHTS at all? Why isn't it common knowledge that you must know WHAT your rights are AND how to enforce them in order to truly have a single right? Why do our comedians continue to be more prominent truth tellers than our politicians, reporters, and political commentators? Is that our of necessity? Or a gap in the market? Or a fetish or a vendetta? Or an oversight or a wilful ignorance? Or a cowardice or systematic and industry-wide denials of responsibility? If you are a bit eccentric in your spirituality, beliefs, cadence of speech, dress sense, vocabulary and ways of speaking - can you be arrested? Institutionalised? Has this happened to artists all through history? Goths? Punks? If so, why? Why would fashion or vocabulary affect your human rights? Are there 'fashion crimes'? WHAT is being pretended AND BY WHO? Who would BEGIN to talk about CIVIL RIGHTS without discussing CIVIL SOCIETY or CIVIC DUTIES? What is a 'PRESS OP CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST' IN 2024? What do 'influencers' achieve if their net influence on society is PROVABLY very negative? Is it permissible to question topics of discussion when those who don't or can't read may WILFULLY MISCONSTRUE WHAT YOU WRITE to mean that you're DENYING THEIR FREEDOM OF SPEECH? That is, if INTELLIGENT DISCUSSION is itself stigmatised as being THE DEATH OF ONE PERSON'S 'FREEDOM OF........SPEECH'. In my day - I.e. for thousands of years - the freedom of speech involved interconnected rights and responsibilities across society. At all levels. Citizens in government, board rooms, think tanks, classrooms, in the streets, restaurants and wherever citizens are. Anywhere they care. There seems to be very pernicious myths around which SELECT FEW citizens have which SELECT FEW rights and when, no? Who will share this? Don't worry! Your name's not on it.

Confession: I am currently overwhelmed (on a few fronts) and specifically by how phenomenally this Women’s Herstory Month has started for me. It is only March 2, and WOW! Today, though, I want to lift the work of two women who ask us to take a deeper look at the life and legacy of another woman. Thanks to Leslie Podell and Professor Nell Irvin Painter, we can re-examine the impact and accuracy of Sojourner Truth's life and extraordinary speech, which many of us have been taught is a delivered one-time speech entitled "Ain't I A Woman". But look again, or rather, listen again. From The Sojourner Truth Project's website (which is linked in the first comment below): "... while based off of Sojourner’s original 1851 speech, is not Sojourner's speech and is vastly different from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech. ... The popular but inaccurate version was written and published in 1863, (12 years after Sojourner gave the "Ain't I a woman" speech), by a white abolitionist named Frances Dana Barker Gage. Curiously, Gage not only changed all of Sojourner’s words but chose to represent Sojourner speaking in a stereotypical 'southern black slave accent', rather than in Sojourner’s distinct upper New York State low-Dutch accent. Frances Gage’s actions were well intended and served the suffrage and women's rights movement at the time; however, by today’s standards of ethical journalism, her actions were a gross misrepresentation of Sojourner Truth’s words and identity."

One to read - and the writer an individual to watch! - from my friend and trusted advisor Chris Min. Fascinating, powerful take on white blindness, one aspect of the invisible backpack that is white privilege, and certainly one that I hope - like lots of Chris's other supporters - makes for the grist of not just more editorials but also an equally important and necessary book, before not too long, please! #whiteblindness #whiteprivilege #invisiblebackpack

A Tale Of Two Veeps by Matt Bai You can see why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate, and why Democrats have fallen in love with him. The guy delivers a stemwinder in the tradition of the great plains populists. Nobody delivers a speech that good unless he’s got a clear intellectual argument behind it and a burning conviction that he’s right. And that’s why the contrast between Walz and JD Vance might be the most interesting of the campaign. We’ve seen Donald Trump meander and contradict his way through endless stretches at a lectern. You’ll soon see Harris capably work her way through an amalgamation of platitudes and applause lines. The most important passage in Vance’s convention speech last month was the one where he described the country as something physical, rather than an abstraction. “America is not just an idea,” Vance said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.” But Vance isn’t being literal. He is articulating the central idea that animates all forms of nationalism (including the white variety), as well as the Trump movement. He is arguing that there is such thing as a common American culture, with its own language (English), its own religious ethos (Judeo-Christian) and its own concept of family (heterosexual, with naturally conceived children). Of course there’s room for immigration and racial diversity in Vance’s worldview; his own wife is of Indian descent. But in his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity. What Walz articulates is a competing view that says, no, actually America is very much an idea. Alone among nations, we have from the very start been a collection of immigrants and outsiders, bound together not by any common origin or culture, but rather by a common set of laws and values and institutions — what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion.” (This is the liberal version of “American Exceptionalism” — the thing that makes us different from everyplace else.) In the America Walz described in his convention speech, it doesn’t matter what language you speak at home or what god (if any) you worship, or whether you have kids (naturally or otherwise). Because as long as you believe in the American promise of liberty and adhere to its laws, you’re just as American as anyone else, and anybody who doesn’t like it should “mind their own damn business.” Community, in Walz’s telling, isn’t defined by somebody’s idea of cultural norms, but rather by your connection to your neighbors. If you’re willing to help out with a stranded car or a bake sale, then he doesn’t care if you’re an atheist or a cat-owner (or, God forbid, both). ©️Washington Post 2024

My latest article on how we took away the wrong lessons from the unprecedented successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties and Seventies. And how this has contributed to the weakening of minority rights and Western democracies. https://lnkd.in/e6Ymjy-J

DEFLECTIVE WHITENESS : CO-OPTING BLACK AND LATINX IDENTITY POLITICS - PDF: https://lnkd.in/gvnuG3Kt In Deflective Whiteness, Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to current discussions around racialized animus and White victimhood, demonstrating how White supremacy adapts its discursive strategies by cannibalizing the language and rhetoric of Black and Latinx social justice movements. Analyzing a wide-ranging collection of cultural objects—memes, oration, music, advertisements, and news coverage—Noel shows how White deflection sustains and reproduces structures of inequality and injustice. White deflection offers a script for how social justice rhetoric and the emotions of victimization are appropriated to conjure a hegemonic White identity. Using derivative language, deflection claims Whiteness as the aggrieved social status. Through case studies of cultural moments and archives including Twitter, country music, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more, Deflective Whiteness exposes the various forms of tacit White supremacy that operate under the alibi of injury and that ultimately serve to deepen racial inequities. By understanding how, where, and why White deflection is used, Noel argues, scholars and social justice advocates can trace, tag, and deconstruct covert White supremacy at its rhetorical foundations. #whitestudies #whitenessstudies #victimhood #BLM #whitedeflection #cooption

Dr. Claudine Gay's treatment, as many have noticed, is a certainly an example of systemic racism. But it's not just because of the mistreatment, abuse, and distortion of intent of a competent woman of color. This is systemic racism in that it is a systemic, systematic, and strategic roll-back on the gains achieved since George-Floyd's murder: one institution at a time. This Guardian article highlights this in clear intent of the activists who planned the attack. It's a clear pitting of one historically oppressed group against the other. As for progressive leadership, yelling foul-play is not going to stop the backlash. We need clear strategy, clear collective movement and action, and a clear culture of solidarity that makes what we stand for so crystal-clear, confusion becomes impossible.

Excerpt: "Domestically, Mr. Biden counterposed equality to his predecessor’s ethnonationalistic tendencies. Mr. Trump has repeatedly implied that Americans who aren’t white and Christian are not truly American. In 2016, he said that Gonzalo Curiel, a judge born in Indiana, could not rule fairly on civil lawsuits against Trump University because of his Mexican heritage, given Mr. Trump’s promises to build a wall between this country and Mexico. In 2019, Mr. Trump demanded that the four congresswomen of color who constitute the so-called Squad — three of whom were born in the United States — “go back” to the countries they were from. Mr. Biden, by contrast, declared in a May 2023 speech to Howard University’s graduating class that America was based on an idea — equal rights — “not religion, not ethnicity.” Throughout his presidency, Mr. Biden has depicted himself as defending that principle from authoritarian impulses both at home and abroad. But Israel’s political system is explicitly based on religion and ethnicity. Its controversial 2018 nation-state bill declares that Jews alone can “exercise national self-determination.” Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control — those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — can’t become citizens of the state that dominates their lives. A minority of Palestinians who live within Israel’s 1967 borders do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote. But when Arab Israeli politicians advanced a bill that would have made legal equality between Arab and Jewish citizens a foundation of Israeli law in 2018, the speaker of Israel’s parliament refused to allow a vote on it because it would “gnaw at the foundations of the state.” As I have previously argued, there was a Zionist tradition that envisioned Jews living equally alongside Palestinians in a binational state — although many Americans now take for granted that Israel gives Jews legal supremacy. But when it comes to Israel, Mr. Biden hasn’t supported equality under the law. The war in Gaza has made that contradiction impossible to ignore. It is most glaring when Biden expresses deep empathy for Israeli suffering but relative indifference to the far larger number of dead Palestinians, or when his administration seems to distinguish even between American citizens, showing more concern for those murdered by Hamas than for those killed by Israel’s military." (Subscription may be required) #usisrael #biden #gaza Biden’s Moral Failure in Israel https://lnkd.in/eTEHVdD7

New Article - Whiteness is a Spirit, Not a Race: What My Wealthy, Yale-Educated Caucasian Friend Taught Me - and the Story of Sarah Rector “I’m not white! I’m Caucasian! And I would appreciate if you never used that label to describe me again.” He said it to me so forcefully, I took a step back. Beyond the fact that I had no clue why he was angry, I was even more perplexed by the fact that until then I had never heard anyone make such a distinction—definitely not by someone who I thought was…well…white. That was nearly a decade ago. That one statement from a third generation Yale-educated friend, from an extremely wealthy well-connected family, completely shifted my understanding of identity. And laid the seeds for something much deeper in my soul. Seeing my puzzled look, he offered a bit more: "There’s only one race—the human race. White is a term people use to make themselves seem better than others." It was, for me at the time, a revolutionary concept. He was clear in his distinction: while he was Caucasian by ethnicity, he didn’t associate himself with whiteness. At all. This conversation planted a seed of curiosity in me, pushing me to question not only the term “whiteness” but also its historical and social significance. Historically, whiteness was less about ethnicity and more about social standing. In early America, the term "white" didn’t automatically apply to all Caucasians. It was a status—a reflection of land ownership, wealth, and power. Black’s Law Dictionary, in its earlier editions, classified "white" as access to rights and privileges that others were denied. “White” was about power and money and where one was in the pecking order of the day. Hence the concept, WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Were “white” and “Anglo-Saxon” synonymous then the concept by definition would have been a redundancy. But everybody knew what that meant—Anglo-Saxon blood and European ethnicity did not in itself “white” make (not then anyway). An interesting example of this is the story of Sarah Rector, a young African American girl in early 20th century Oklahoma, who came into immense wealth after oil was discovered on her family's land. Rector became the richest African American girl in the country at the time. The Oklahoma state legislature, recognizing her extraordinary wealth, sought to classify her as white, showing how fluid these labels could be when they intersected with power and privilege. #WhitenessIsASpirit #IdentityAndRace #CaucasianNotWhite #SarahRectorStory #RethinkingWhiteness #WealthAndIdentity #CulturalAwareness #RaceAndClass #YaleEducation #SpiritualIdentity #HistoryAndPerspective #ChallengingLabels #RaceConversations #IdentityShift #PowerOfWords Full article attached: https://lnkd.in/ei87nBVN