ICYMI: Why we shouldn’t boycott Michael Jackson’s music

2019/03/09 Leave a comment

Agree (even if not a great fan):

The vivid revelations of sexual abuse by pop star Michael Jackson – unproven in court, but hauntingly recounted by survivors in a recent documentary and an Oprah Winfrey special – have raised once again that thorny question: Can you still enjoy the art or wisdom of someone who is alleged to have done evil?

Mr. Jackson’s family vehemently denies any wrongdoing at his objectively creepy Neverland estate, complete with its youth-chasing Peter Pan themes. The estate is vilifying the young men who have come forward with their stories of seduction, grooming and worse, which go back to 1993. We may never know exactly what happened on those 2,800 acres near Los Olivos, Calif., and Dan Reed’s documentary Leaving Neverland reprises old rumours, but cannot definitively prove them beyond the first-person accounts.

Three major Quebec radio stations, the BBC, Norwegian radio and at least one Dutch outlet have now boycotted MJ’s music in the wake of this recent publicity. Others are sure to follow. Many former fans are likewise sickened and censorious, and indisputably, the King of Pop has had his crown knocked down. It wasn’t so long ago, of course, that Mr. Jackson held his infant son over a balcony in Berlin, apparently one step away from dropping Prince Michael II onto the pavement below. But the pressing question now is whether Mr. Jackson’s work is irredeemably tainted – and whether we can ever listen to his music innocently again.

Everyone must make their own calls on this. Personally, I find it easy to separate the man from his music. I will go to my grave loving the Motown-era Jackson Five versions of I Want You Back and ABC, with Little Michael in angel-voiced glory. And the 1983 Motown Special performance riveted my world with a new Michael, complete with the game-changing moonwalk.

Still, that doesn’t settle the basic question. For many decades, we have been confronted by artists whose views and actions seem to undermine their best achievements, and there are even websites devoted to rating their misdeeds, because of course there are. There is a rogues’ gallery of racists and anti-Semites in the Western arts and culture canon: Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Patricia Highsmith, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, H.P. Lovecraft, Dr. Seuss (!). There are misogynists and alleged wife-murderers: William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Louis Althusser. There are actual charged murderers: Caravaggio and Phil Spector, for example. And there are, of course, many very bad husbands and wives: Charles Dickens, Pablo Picasso, Woolf again, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald (a drunk as well) and so on. And there is the going concern of Woody Allen, who continues to work despite the allegations of sexual abuse against him.

As critic Charles McGrath said, “Genet was a thief, Rimbaud was a smuggler, Byron committed incest, Flaubert paid for sex with boys.” So are you going to give up reading them all because of moral censure? That would, at the very least, limit your literary range. Explaining away racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny as a “feature of the time” is little better, a mealy-mouthed apology.

So the best way forward is just to bite the bullet on bad behaviour. In philosophy, the special case is Martin Heidegger, the phenomenologist who revolutionized German philosophy in the 1920s with his monumental bookBeing and Time, and continued to influence the discourse after the Second World War with dense essays on art, poetry and technology. The problem is that, from the 1930s on, Heidegger aligned himself solidly and publicly with the Nazi Party. His 1933 Rector’s Speech at the University of Freiburg is an uncommonly clear defence of the authoritarian status of Adolf Hitler, and of the subservient role universities must assume under a Nazi regime. It is an indefensible, shameful performance: craven, arrogant, pretentious, and slick all at once. Heidegger worked to destroy his Jewish former mentor, Edmund Husserl, and maltreated his secret Jewish lover, Hannah Arendt.

What a world-class creep! And still I recommend that my students read Heidegger. Why? Because the man is the instrument, not the hand. I assign his work in almost every class I teach, because his insight is indisputable. I never play down the Nazi proclivities, or how they are joined to deeper thoughts about Earth and world, beauty and truth. He was a terrible man, but a great philosopher.

That is how it rolls here on planet Earth. Human beings are flawed, sometimes terrible creatures. And yet they can, under the right circumstances, commune with the sublime. I don’t know how that is possible, but it is. Don’t turn off the music, friends: Just turn on the awareness.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

What is intersectionality? All of who I am

2019/03/09 Leave a comment

 

While I dislike the word as it is comes across as jargon rather than plain language (e.g., relationship between identities and circumstances) and find some of the language around oppression over the top, some useful context and history to the term.

While relatively easy to analyse some aspects of intersectionality (e.g., gender, race) with socio-economic data, this becomes harder with more aspects of identity to consider.

The recent article by Erin Tolley, Tolley: Racialized and women politicians still get different news treatment, provoked a twitter discussion (https://twitter.com/MalindaSmith/status/1103669339134160896) over the shorthand used to capture the concept of intersectionality::

Last year at the Golden Globes, many Hollywood actors got on stage in an act of unity for #TimesUp and #MeToo. Together they wore black and, in an attempt to bring together a diverse range of women, used the word “intersectionality.”

The Hollywood starlets were reflecting a current conversation within progressive and not-for-profit circles. Intersectionality has been recently used within academic fields such as psychology, human rights and political science.

My field — anti-racist, anti-oppression/colonial-centred health equity —relies heavily on the idea of intersectionality. As a concept, the term can help communicate complex realities.

What exactly is intersectionality?

Kimberle Crenshaw, legal scholar and critical race theorist, is generally credited with originating the term in the late 1980s.

Some activists and scholars, however, trace the earliest articulations of intersectionality back to the ’70s in the manifesto by the Combahee River Collective, a collective of Black (lesbian-identified) feminists who, in 1977, said:

“We … find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

To understand intersectionality and how to apply it, I believe it is essential to understand four concepts:

1. All of who I am: Factors of identity

Intersectionality embraces the idea of “all of who I am.”

One of the main critical concepts is “location:” To locate oneself politically and socially means to identify specific factors about your identity. These factors include: race, indigeneity, socioeconomic status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, (dis)ability, spirituality, immigration/refugee status, language, and education.

One of the ideas of intersectionality is for individuals, groups and communities to self-identify. This allows people to choose what they share about themselves.

For example, I locate myself within the African diaspora, as a woman who has survived African enslavement, a feminist from a working-class background, daughter of Caribbean immigrants, mother, living with a visual disability in Turtle Island (Canada). I also locate myself as a researcher, educator, therapist and community organizer.

Another factor of location is to identify power and unearned privilege. Dependent on one’s location(s), one may have power and privilege over others.

For instance, white men have more power and unearned privilege than white women based on systemic oppression supported by patriarchy, sexism and misogyny. Based on anti-Black racism, Black men have less power and unearned privilege than white men, but because of sexism, they have more unearned privilege than Black women.

Even though they experience sexism, white women have more power and unearned privilege than Black women due to anti-Black racism.

If you want to be an ally and support emancipatory changes, it is important to reflect on your location.

Allies are folks who actively support individuals and communities experiencing multiple forms of oppression; they share and give up their power to help make changes in the lives of the disempowered. However, it is important to note: an ally-centred person dependant on time, place and their location can also experience disempowerment.

2. Oppressions

What is oppression?

Oppression is ways of knowing and doing by those with power and authority as individuals, in governments and cultural institutions that create marginalization and subjugation of those who do not have institutional authority or power — often African/Black, Indigenous and racialized folks.

We need to understand systemic forms of disempowerment and brutality so we can actively create room for an intersectional analysis.

3. Violence

An intersectional analysis has to connect the human experiences of violence, historically and currently.

Violence includes the exercise of power to oppress and discriminate against communities individually and collectively. Violence is any abuse of power (public, private, and/or structural) that inflicts harm.

Violence includes physical, sexual, and psychological harm including: anti-Black racism, anti-indiegenity, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism.

Violence by police in Black communities is an example of public and private, race-gender-class based violence. The result is physical, psychological and financial violence against Black men, women, children and our families.

4. Resistance

Actualizing resistance is critical to intersectionality. Resistance is the struggle to survive, exist, persist and fight to eradicate ideologies and practices of colonialism, anti-Black racism, and all other forms of intersectional violence in the lives of Black, Indigenous and racialized folks and our communities.

A brief genealogy of intersectionality

In the ’80s, many scholars elaborated on the limitations of the isolation of categories such as race, class and gender as the primary category of identity, difference or oppression and their legal implications for Black communities.

Feminist scholar Moya Bailey at Northeastern University has coined the term “misogynoir” over the past decade on social media: it is used to describe the intersection of sexism and racism. But many before Bailey spoke of similar issues.

Many Black women in the 1800s and 1900s were discussing how racism and sexism intersect to create a racialized noir misogyny. In 1851, Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved Black woman, talked in her now famous speech “Ain’t I a woman” about the complexities and violence that Black, enslaved and poor women experienced living in America.

Other women who made these connections during that time period include: Mary Church Terrell, Nannie Burroughs, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells and Harriet Tubman.

More recently, Black women who have influenced our knowledge base on intersectionality include: Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Assata Shakur, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Patrica Hill-Collins, Viola Desmond, Carol Boyce-Davies, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, Amina Mama and Afua Cooper.

Transnationally, many nameless Black women in our communities and professional spaces spoke about the intersections of their lives as women, as Black, as poor. Their experiences stem directly from shared histories of colonialism, enslavement, industrialization and democratization on the backs of African and Indigenous peoples.

Different phrases were used to describe their conditions. But their words and actions mobilized Black, Indigenous and racialized women globally to examine how race, gender and class simultaneously impact our lives and how we resist.

Source: What is intersectionality? All of who I am

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with

Cashmere’s chief creative officer on what ‘multicultural’ means in 2019

2019/03/09 Leave a comment

More on multicultural marketing:

L.A.-based lifestyle marketing agency Cashmere has been on a roll lately: This week Jack in the Box selected the shop as its social media and public relations agency following a two-month review.

The announcement came on the heels of the Google and Pixel 3 commercial starring Childish Gambino that aired during the Grammys last month, a collaborative effort between Cashmere and production company Mamag Studios, along with actor-rapper Donald Glover.

But being on a roll is not exactly new for Cashmere. Co-founded in 2003 by longtime industry executive Ted Chung, the agency has evolved into a leading multicultural lifestyle company, thriving in the nexus of entertainment, advertising and digital media. The brand wizards behind Snoop Dogg’s enduring career, Cashmere has more recently done work on “Black Panther,” “Get Out,” “Grown-ish,” “Atlanta” and more.

The shop has mastered the art of making the niche appeal to the mainstream. And on the latest episode of the Ad Lib podcast, Cashmere Exec VP and Chief Creative Officer Ryan Ford discusses what it means to be a multicultural agency in 2019.

“‘Multicultural’ is the new general market. They’re one in the same these days,” he says. “Hip-hop was … this urban thing. Now hip-hop is just pop culture. Global pop culture. It’s the same when you talk about ‘multicultural marketing’ or ‘multicultural advertising agencies.’ That’s America. That’s the new general market.”

To illustrate his “specific is the new broad” mantra, Ford points to a show like “Atlanta,” which details the journey of young black men in that city. “Creatively, that show really speaks to that audience in such a nuanced way, it seems like you really understand this culture. They don’t make any attempts to try to make a broader audience understand that,” says Ford. “Just living in L.A., some of the stuff on that show is so Atlanta that I might not get it.”

And yet it works.

Beyond entertainment brands, Cashmere counts as clients BMW, Jack in the Box, Google, Adidas, GE, and Diageo, among others. “The connective tissue through all those brands,” says Ford, is that “they’re looking to connect, to build meaningful communication streams with an audience that’s increasingly diverse, which is increasingly young, which is increasingly online through social media.”

And with whom it’s increasingly risky to misstep. Get it wrong, and you’re raked over the coals.

“It can be so detrimental to a brand, and you wake up one day and everything you’ve worked to build advertising-wise or marketing-wise can be gone in a flash,” warns Ford.

Ford talks about the staffing at Cashmere, which is diverse from top to bottom by design, and the necessity of giving voice to everyone in the room. “There’s not a tremendous amount of people of color in positions of power in the advertising and marketing industry, both inside the brands and at agencies,” he says. “And oftentimes, if they are there, they don’t feel empowered to share their authentic voice.”

We also discuss Ford’s career, which began in journalism. Before changing lanes into marketing, he had worked his way up to executive editor at hip-hop media brand the Source. He sees parallels in the agency landscape today to what the music industry went through over a decade ago.

“There were a lot of record labels that didn’t want to understand what was really happening to the music industry, and the music industry was decimated. And now you have places like Apple and Google and Spotify which are the most powerful forces in the music industry,” he says.

Then he adds, chuckling just a little bit, “We want to be the next Apple or Google or Spotify.”

Source: Cashmere’s chief creative officer on what ‘multicultural’ means in 2019

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

An ‘Atlas of Inequality” Maps Micro-Level Segregation in Boston

2019/03/08 Leave a comment

This is really impressive micro-level analysis:
When I lived in my old D.C. neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, it was at that particular stage of gentrification where it seemed truly diverse. Taquerias and pupuserias stood right alongside indie theaters and grungy dive bars; the sidewalks were a multicultural mix of young, mostly white professionals and working-class people of color. But if you looked closer, you’d notice what some experts call “micro-level segregation.”
People from different economic and racial backgrounds didn’t frequent the same bars, restaurants, and stores. Latinx residents seemed to hang out at Marleny’s, whereas more affluent newcomers would be seen at Marx Café—right next door.In a new map, MIT Media Lab visualizes that kind of micro-level segregation in the Boston metro region to show that “economic inequality isn’t just limited to neighborhoods,” as the researchers write on the website. “It’s part of the places you visit every day.”
The map, which the MIT team hopes to expand to the 11 largest U.S. cities, is a part of ongoing research into how individual decisions and opportunities shape real-word urban issues so that “we can act and intervene in human behavior,” said Esteban Moro, the principal investigator at MIT Media Lab and an associate professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
To create the map, Moro and his colleagues compiled aggregate location data collected by Cuebiq’s Data for Good initiative, harvested from digital devices (like cell phones and tablets) of 150,000 anonymous sources between 2016 and 2017.
Based on the median income of the census block where each anonymous user spent the most time, the researchers assigned them to one of four income brackets. They also obtained a list of 30,000 places—including restaurants, bus stations, museums, offices, and coffee shops—that these users frequented most often. For each place (represented as one dot on the map), they were able to determine its share of visitors from each income category.

Based on that distribution, they placed each place on an inequality index (displayed on the top left corner): The most unequal places (in red) were those where only one type of income group visited in the time period; the most equal (in blue) were those where all four income groups had similar shares—meaning that people of diverse economic backgrounds spent time there at roughly at the same rate.

The resulting map looks a lot like a view of Boston from an airliner on final approach over the city. But the multicolored points of light are actually schools, businesses, and other meeting places.

(MIT Media Lab)
The resulting “Atlas of Inequality” reveals a taxonomy of places in the city that tend to be more diverse and those that tend to be more economically homogenous. Among the most equal places, Moro and his colleagues found, are museums and airports. Schools, on the other hand, are among the least.
What’s striking, although perhaps not entirely surprising, is that two places can be just meters apart and have a completely different economic profile of visitors. Where we get coffee, where we buy groceries, and where we grab take-out often reflect our choices, which determine the kinds of people we interact with every day. Or, these habits reflect our constraints—and show what places are accessible and welcoming to certain groups of people.“Right now the way we understand segregation is at the census tract level,” Moro said. “But our decisions that are impacting segregation happen actually at much smaller level—within 25 meters.”Here’s an example from Boston of two coffee shops (whose names have been anonymized by the researchers to protect the businesses) just across the street from each other, one of which is much more diverse than the other:

(MIT Media Lab)

The map and accompanying research, of course, have limitations. While Moro and his colleagues made sure that the sample of anonymous users they analyzed was as representative of the general population as it could be, it does nevertheless leave out people at the lower extreme of the income spectrum—people who are homeless, for example—who bear the brunt of segregation. The researchers also acknowledge that the list of places they feature is not comprehensive.

Source: An ‘Atlas of Inequality” Maps Micro-Level Segregation in Boston

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Tolley: Racialized and women politicians still get different news treatment

2019/03/08 Leave a comment

I am a great fan of Erin Tolley’s work. Some good words of advice to journalists covering politics and other spheres:

In the days after Jody Wilson-Raybould’s resignation from federal cabinet, reportssuggested she was difficult, not a team player, and even “mean.” Supportersdenounced this framing and pointed to its gendered and racialized undertones, a criticism with which the prime minister eventually agreed. Even so, media coverage came complete with editorial cartoons depicting Wilson-Raybould bound, gagged and beaten. Although the cartoons were largely condemned, some commentators derided the critics as overly sensitive, while of one of the cartoonists blamed faux-outrage and virtue-signalling.

As the days wore on, a caucus colleague suggested that Wilson-Raybould couldn’t handle the pressure of her cabinet position. Others argued that the evident cabinet discord is a predictable outcome of the government’s focus on “identity politics,” with one columnistsaying the prime minister had “been hoisted by his own petard.”

The media and political institutions have both edged toward more inclusivity, but women and racialized minorities remain, as former journalist Vivian Smith has put it, “outsiders still.” This outsider status partly reflects basic demographics: Parliament, newsroomsand the parliamentary press gallery are still mostly made up of white men. But it is also indicative of the ways that race and gender structure politics.

I have researched news coverage and found systemic differences in the ways white and racialized politicians are covered by journalists. Similar patterns exist in media coverage of women in politics. As I point out in my 2016 book, Framed: Media and the Coverage of Race in Canadian Politics, these patterns are longstanding, so as the 2019 federal election campaign kicks into high gear, we are likely to see more of the same.

Racialized candidates’ coverage is as plentiful but more negative than that of white candidates. Their coverage focuses less on politically salient issues and is more likely to mention aspects of the candidate’s background like their race, immigration status or religion than is the case for white candidates. Racialized candidates are less likely to be quoted and more likely to be featured in stories that are buried on the inside pages of print editions. These patterns give racialized candidates less visibility and credibility.

Race influences how journalists decide to frame and portray their subjects. This type of coverage cues voters to apply racial considerations to their evaluations of politicians. It is grounded in assumptions about the meaning, importance and consequences of race. One aspect of this process is to assume that race is only relevant to subjects with minority racial backgrounds. Because of this, stories will often advance racial explanations in the coverage of racialized subjects but not in those about white subjects.

So, for example, when the news media do shine a light on racialized politicians, that coverage often frames them as a product of their demography. After the US midterm elections in 2018, which saw a record number of women candidates and several “historic firsts,” much of the coverage focused on the candidates who “broke race and gender barriers” and would be heading to Congress. There’s nothing wrong with covering these trailblazers, but the focus on their socio-demographic backgrounds conceals the other qualifications that they bring with them, including their professional credentials, community organizing and political acumen. The focus on socio-demographics has the effect of suggesting electoral success was a function of these candidates’ race or gender and that the backgrounds of white or male politicians did not factor into their victories.

Racialized women break the political mould in two ways: once on account of their gender and again on account of their race. Their media coverage bears the marker of their intersecting identities.

In my work, I have documented the portrayal of racialized women serving as members of Parliament in Canadian print news coverage since 1993. In addition to highlighting the novelty of racialized women politicians, there is a tendency to exoticize them.

In a 2008 Toronto Star news story, then-Bloc Québécois MP Vivian Barbot was described as having a “captivating smoky voice.” In a 2009 column in the Globe and Mail, Ruby Dhalla was referred to as “a young drop-dead gorgeous, Indo-Canadian woman,” while a list of “10 things you should know about Ruby Dhalla” that appeared in the same paper said the Liberal MP is “like something out of a Bollywood movie.”

Some argue that media framing is simply a reflection of a candidate’s self-presentation. For example, in speeches and interviews, Olivia Chow, a longtime Toronto city councilor, MP and one-time mayoral candidate often referenced her background as an immigrant and woman of colour. Her background helps to explain her political activism, but Chow herself suggests it is also a response to the racism and sexism she endured on the campaign trail. Her treatment included an editorial cartoon that depicted her with exaggerated slanted eyes, dressed as a Maoist communist, and riding on her late husband’s coattails. The race and gender of white male politicians is rarely mentioned: they are portrayed as the neutral standard. Chow tried to counteract this tendency by framing her own narrative rather than leaving it up to the media.

The ways in which the media cover political candidates partly comes down to what news outlets think will interest their viewers and readers. Journalists consider timeliness, relevance and novelty when deciding what stories to cover, what angle to adopt and who to quote.

The Canadian Press Stylebook, a reference for print journalists, provides some guidelines. In its section on race and ethnicity, journalists are counseled to “identify a person by race, colour, national origin or immigration status only when it is truly pertinent.” However, it goes on to say that “race is pertinent in reporting an accomplishment unusual in a particular race: for example, if a Canadian of Chinese origin is named to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.”

The standard of a racially unusual accomplishment is not echoed in the section on sexism, which instead instructs journalists to “Treat the sexes equally and without stereotyping. . . . The test always is: Would this information be used if the subject were a man?” By contrast, there is no mention of this kind of reverse test in the section on race and ethnicity. There, journalists are not counseled to ask, “Would this information be used if the subject were white?” In other words, when determining what is relevant, the standard that journalists are advised to apply is different for race than it is for gender.

Although those in the media and those in politics might each be loath to admit it, these institutions share a common lineage, resting on foundations that are both racialized and gendered. In the political realm, for example, racist restrictions barred some Canadians from voting, sometimes until well into the 20th century. In other words, politicians and the news media are navigating institutions marked by racialized assumptions, not to mention prejudice, patriarchy and classism.

In this context, racialized women candidates stand out, and their atypicality provides journalists with what seems like a novel hook for a story.

The way for journalists to improve the fairness of their coverage is not to ignore race and gender altogether, but instead to use the same standard when deciding on the hook for stories, the way they will be framed, and which details they will focus on when they are covering white men and racialized women. Race and gender are as much factors in the political trajectories of successful white men as they are in the stories of racialized women who have triumphed. News coverage should reflect this.

Source: Racialized and women politicians still get different news treatment

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

White Supremacist Propaganda At ‘Record-Setting’ Levels, ADL Report Finds

2019/03/08 Leave a comment

Canada not immune. A more subtle approach. Not sure that this replaces more overt demonstrations and gatherings, or just complements it:

At first, you might not realize the flyer was put there by a white supremacy group.

The poster, in shades of black, white and teal, features Andrew Jackson on horseback. The accompanying text reads: “European roots, American greatness.”

Flyers like this, posted across the country by American neo-Nazi and white supremacist group Identity Evropa are popping up far more than they used to. Others feature George Washington. According to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacy propaganda increased by 182 percent in 2018 compared with the year before.

The increase in flyers and other propaganda reflects a relatively new strategy for hate groups, the ADL says. Under intense scrutiny, white supremacists are reluctant to show their face in public, so they’re relying more on leaflets and posters to spread hate without putting themselves at personal risk, it adds.

ADL counted 1,187 incidents of propaganda in 2018, up from 421 incidents in 2017. While college campuses remain a primary target, most of the increase occurred off of college campuses, with 868 incidents in 2018, up from 129 the year before. The alt-right also uses banners to promote its message, the ADL said, counting 32 instances of white supremacist banners hung in high-visibility locations such as highway overpasses.

Increased propaganda efforts “allow them to maximize media and online attention, while limiting the risk of individual exposure, negative media coverage, arrests and public backlash,” the ADL wrote.

The frequent subtlety of the flyers is intentional, and represents a shift in the way white supremacy groups are attempting to spread their ideology, the ADL reports.

“If you know what you’re looking at, the white supremacists’ banners, stickers and fliers clearly convey racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” ADL senior investigative researcher Carla Hill wrote in Politico. “But the messaging is not always overtly hateful.”

According to the ADL, the goal of these understated flyers is to appeal to mainstream conservatives, who might appreciate the seemingly innocuous message of American exceptionalism. But their underlying message, the ADL says, is one of hate.

Identity Evropa — designated as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — focuses on encouraging white people to embrace their shared racial identity. According to the ADL, Identity Evropa is the group that popularized the white supremacist slogan “You will not replace us,” which was chanted during the rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a white nationalist drove into a crowd of protesters, killing one woman.

Hill also cited another group, the Patriot Front, which posts red, white and blue flyers, espouses “mainstream conservative messaging” such as “America First,” and rallies against what it calls “fake news.” But “when they gather for events, Patriot Front members are far less circumspect about their racism, frequently shouting ‘Blood and Soil!,’ a callback to a Nazi slogan,” Hill wrote.

As they’re increasing their propaganda, hate groups are also rethinking how they hold public events. While the number of racist rallies and demonstrations rose last year, from 76 in 2017 to 91 in 2018, fewer of those events were announced beforehand, the ADL said. Instead, hate groups are using “flash mob” techniques, coming together to rally without giving opponents time to mobilize. Identity Evropa and the group Patriot Front held more than 30 “unannounced, quickly disbanded gatherings” last year, ADL said.

White supremacy groups are “trying to take advantage of a very polarized sociopolitical landscape,” Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told The Wall Street Journal.

And by posting photos of the propaganda on social media, these groups can make themselves seem to be more influential than they really are, Levin said.

Source: White Supremacist Propaganda At ‘Record-Setting’ Levels, ADL Report Finds

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Far right ‘infiltrating children’s charities with anti-Islam agenda’

2019/03/07 Leave a comment

As we have seen with the gilets jaunes, rightwing groups take advantage of opportunities to advance their messages and undermine some of the original motives of protesters or those concerned:

Rightwing groups including Ukip are attempting to “infiltrate” child protection charities to further an anti-Islam agenda, officials from the government’s counter-extremism programme believe.

Officers from Prevent said far-right figures were using voluntary groups to stir up tension in towns with historical problems of child sexual exploitation.

In Rochdale, a community group for child sexual abuse survivors, Shatter Boys, said it had been approached repeatedly by senior Ukip figures including Lord Pearson, who offered to introduce them to millionaire donors and fund an open-top bus to raise the alarm about grooming gangs.

Daniel Wolstencroft, the founder of Shatter Boys, said: “What they’re doing basically is grooming survivor groups and survivors of abuse. I think their fight is about Islam.”

Wolstencroft, who is an adviser to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, said Ukip in particular had attempted to “jump on the child abuse bandwagon” to further its own anti-Islam agenda.

Pearson’s offer of funding, made during a private lunch at the House of Lords, followed months of courting by the Ukip families spokesman, Alan Craig, who last year said Muslim grooming gangs had committed a “Holocaust of our children”.

Craig, who said paedophilia could be traced back “to Muhammad himself”, approached the Rochdale-based group on social media before attending one of its street patrols with a leading member of the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA).

The Ukip leader, Gerard Batten, spoke at a rally in Rochdale organised by the DFLA last April. The DFLA has described the Greater Manchester town as being on its “hit list” for anti-grooming demonstrations.

The issue of child sexual exploitation by men of Pakistani heritage has become a key focus of Ukip under the leadership of Batten, who triggered a wave of senior resignations when he appointed the anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson as an adviser on grooming gangs.

Play Video
8:51
How Ukip normalised far-right politics – video explainer

Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s former lead on child sexual abuse, said established charities were being “infiltrated by the far right who wish them to pursue a different agenda”.

Figures linked to the far right have also launched or promoted their own anti-grooming campaign groups in the past year, the Guardian has learned.

One of Robinson’s allies, Shazia Hobbs, launched an anti-grooming helpline at an event hosted by Pearson in parliament in December, which was attended by the For Britain leader, Anne Marie Waters.

Pearson was quoted after the event as saying: “If you touch this case, you immediately become an Islamophobe. Islam lies at the heart of this problem and most of this is a problem within Islam. We need to start talking about this openly.” Pearson and Ukip have not responded to requests for comment.

Another group, the National Anti Grooming Alliance & Helpline (NAGAH), was jointly set up by a member of the DFLA, John Clynch, last year after reports of a mass grooming gang in Telford, Shropshire.

Afzal, who prosecuted grooming gangs in Rochdale in 2012, described the NAGAH as “an alleged far-right front” that had been “created by the extreme right to further their own agenda”.

The NAGAH has attracted moral and financial support from Daniel Thomas, a close ally of Robinson, who is trying to raise £150,000 for the group with a charity boxing event.

The NAGAH’s co-founder Anthony Wood has described “Pakistani rape gangs” as “probably the biggest crime in this country’s history”.

Contacted by the Guardian, Wood said Clynch no longer worked for the NAGAH and that he had left the DFLA. Clynch has not returned a request for comment.

Wood said: “We are not far right at all, we are a community group … We have helped historic survivors, online cases, male survivors. It does not just focus on one area and we have stated this since day one.”

Thomas, who organises Robinson’s rallies, said there was “not a racist bone in the bodies” of those involved in the NAGAH and accused the media of “attempting to destroy a working class charity”.

Frontline Prevent workers said the issue of far-right groups infiltrating charities was “increasingly a concern” that had been raised with intervention providers across England.

Abdul Ahad, a Prevent officer in north-east England, said rightwing groups were using the grooming gangs issue to “appeal to people’s emotions”.

“It is a tactic they are trying to pursue. They can build up the relationship and trust and slowly but surely sink their claws in and then they’ve got them hook, line and sinker,” he said. “They then start spewing their [far-right] narrative before you know it. I know some charities have refused to have anything to do with the far right but it will be done very covertly and subtly.”

The number of people referred to Prevent over concerns about far-right activity rose by more than a third in the year to March 2018, accounting for nearly one in five of all cases.

Source: Far right ‘infiltrating children’s charities with anti-Islam agenda’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Beijing plans to continue tightening grip on Christianity and Islam

2019/03/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

Beijing has vowed to push ahead with its controversial campaign to “Sinicise religion”, defying growing international condemnation over its sweeping crackdown on Muslims and Christians.

Delivering his annual government work report on Tuesday, Premier Li Keqiang told the national legislature that “we must fully implement the [Communist] Party’s fundamental policy on religious affairs and uphold the Sinicisation of religion in China”.

The push to “Sinicise religion” – introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2015 – is an attempt by the officially atheist party to bring religions under its absolute control and into line with Chinese culture.

The campaign has coincided with an intensified clampdown on religious freedom across the country, especially on Protestants, Catholics and Muslims who the party fears could become tools of foreign influence or ethnic separatism.

In the far western region of Xinjiang, over 1 million Uygurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities have reportedly been held in internment camps and forced to denounce Islam and pledge loyalty to the party.

Expressions and observance of Islam, ethnic customs and culture have also been curbed or discouraged in what some critics called a “cultural cleansing” of the Uygur minority.

Meanwhile, in the neighbouring regions of Ningxia Hui and Gansu – home to many Hui Muslims – domes, Islamic decor and Arabic signs have been taken off the streets and some mosques. No new “Arab style” mosques can be built and some Arabic-language schools have been shut down.

Outside the western regions, a wave of underground congregations – including the Zion Church in Beijing and Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, both prominent “house churches” – have been forced to shut down, with their members and pastors interrogated and detained.
Early Rain pastor Wang Yi has remained in detention facing subversion charges since a raid on his church in December.

The crackdowns – especially the mass detentions and security lockdown in Xinjiang – have been met with a rising chorus of criticism not only from human rights groups, but also academics, foreign governments and the United Nations.

Vatican will improve bishop agreement with Beijing to help reunite mainland China’s underground Catholic churches, envoy of Pope Francis says

But according to the government’s work report, Beijing plans to continue tightening its grip on religion. The “Sinicisation of religion” was included in Xi’s report – laying out broad policy directions for the next five years – to the party congress in late 2017 that kicked off his second term in power.

It has been included in the two government work reports that followed, for 2018 and 2019.

Last year, the party-controlled governing bodies for Protestants, Catholics and Muslims in China all released detailed five-year plans on how to Sinicise their own religions.

For Christianity, the plan calls for “Sinicised theology”, including retranslating the Bible and rewriting annotations.

It also demands Chinese traditional culture be integrated into expressions of faith, with “Chinese elements” to be added to liturgies, sacred music, clerical clothing and church buildings. Examples given include using traditional Chinese tunes to compose hymns and encouraging Christians to practise calligraphy and Chinese painting.

Source: Beijing plans to continue tightening grip on Christianity and Islam

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Were the brides of Islamic State cloistered housewives or participants in atrocities?

2019/03/07 Leave a comment

More background on the women who joined or supported ISIS:

Thousands of foreign-born women left their homes and lives to join Islamic State and marry its fighters. But now that the militant group’s so-called caliphate is reduced to crumbled masonry and scorched rebar, many of them want to return home.

Shamima Begum was a teenage schoolgirl in east London when she left home to join Islamic State; Hoda Muthana, an Alabama-born college student; Kimberly Gwen Polman, a 46-year-old single mom in Canada studying to be a children’s advocate. Now they’re held in a Kurdish-controlled prison in the hinterlands of eastern Syria, asking to be let back into their home countries.

The women branded “ISIS brides,” using initials for the militant group, have become a focal point of fierce debate for governments worldwide: What are states’ responsibilities toward these women?

A central question in that debate is what exactly did the women do in the caliphate? Were they cloistered housewives largely ignorant of the group’s realities, or active participants in its genocidal acts?

Women initially did not join combat

When Islamic State declared the establishment of its caliphate in 2014, it called upon all able-bodied Muslims to emigrate and engage in jihad, or struggle, to further its cause.

Initially, for women, that didn’t include combat, said Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London.

“The role of the Muslim woman ideally was to be a wife and bear children,” he said in a phone interview, “and as a wife and a mother they were participating directly in jihad because they’re creating the next generation of fighters.”

While its militants were waging what Islamic State called “offensive jihad” — blitz campaigns that saw the group put a third of Iraq and Syria each under its dominion — women were to be “bases of support” for husbands, fathers and sons, one wife explained.

Hayat Boumeddiene, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly, the Paris gunman who killed five people in two January 2015 attacks, offered advice for fighters’ wives during a interview in an Islamic State magazine.

“Be advisors to them. They should find comfort and peace with you,” she said in an article in the February 2015 issue of Dabiq. “Do not make things difficult for them. Facilitate all matters for them.”

As a wife and a mother they were participating directly in jihad because they’re creating the next generation of fighters.

Boumeddiene, who like her husband was born in France, is still at large and being sought by French authorities.

Women did claim more operational roles in suicide attacks outside Islamic State territories, said Devorah Margolin, a senior research analyst at the War Studies Department of Kings College London.

But most women who traveled to the caliphate intent on reaching the battlefield were unable to do so.

That changed to a degree as the group began to lose territory and many of its fighters were killed. It began to wage “defensive jihad.”

“By 2017 and 2018 they were proactively calling for women to engage in combat as well,” said Winter.

But there is little evidence women did so in large numbers.

Winter said there had been rumors of women given explosives and weapons training, but Islamic State never confirmed these reports.

There had been predictions women would increasingly take part in suicide bombings, since they generally have an easier time passing through checkpoints and whose faces could remain hidden under their garments.

There was also precedence for their deployment: Abu Musab Zarqawi, the spiritual godfather of Islamic State, dispatched Sajida Rishawi with a suicide vest to the Hotel Radisson in the Jordanian capital of Amman in 2005. She failed to detonate her bomb but was caught by authorities after her husband’s device killed 38 people.

Some carried guns in the religious police force

Islamic State’s religious police, known as the Hisbah, roamed its territory to ensure residents were complying with the caliphate’s harsh edicts. People found in violation faced imprisonment, whipping and amputation. An all-female police force known as the Khansaa Brigade was an integral part of the Hisbah.

“We saw women in the Hisbah. They were all armed,” said Saad Ubaidi, who owns a beauty salon with his wife in Mosul, Iraq.

“Iraqi women had guns, but the foreigners carried ghadaraat,” said Ubaidi, using the slang term for Uzi machine guns.

Women played a vital part in the propaganda war

Women may not have fought on the battlefield, but they helped Islamic State spread its message.

“They were very much part of the propaganda machine of this state-building process,” said Margolin, who is writing a report on women’s role in violent Islamist groups for George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Women were some of Islamic State’s most active recruiters online, she said.

Blogs and social media accounts ostensibly held by foreign-born female adherents advertised their lives as if they were in an Islamist utopia. They encouraged others to do hijrah, emigrate to the caliphate.

Some would provide a guide on how to avoid being identified as someone traveling to Syria to join Islamic State. Others would suggest what to pack for life in the caliphate (makeup and Islamic clothing, according to one blogger), or offer quotidian details on how the group assigned housing to fighters and women.

Others would cheer for the group’s barbarism and gruesome tactics.

Muthana, the Alabama-born student and daughter of a Yemeni diplomat who joined Islamic State in 2014, exhorted Americans to follow her lead.

“Soooo many Aussies and Brits here,” she tweeted from her now-suspended account. “But where are the Americans, wake up u cowards.”

She encouraged those who couldn’t travel to Islamic State territory to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.

“Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades..go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them,” she tweeted.

Women took part in the enslavement of Yazidis

In August 2014, the extremists surrounded Mt. Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. They began to hunt the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority long persecuted for their beliefs, which include elements of Christianity and Judaism. Islamic State viewed them as devil-worshipers.

Thousands of Yazidi men were slaughtered; women and girls were kidnapped and driven away to be sold in markets or given as gifts. In their enslavement, the women and girls would be servants to the household’s wife and raped by the husband.

One wife of an Islamic State member with a Yazidi enslaved in her household defended the practice in an issue of Dabiq. Her article was entitled “Slave-girls or Prostitutes?”

The woman, who called herself Umm Sumayyah al Muhajirah, cited religious texts and the works of scholars to construct an argument for taking Yazidi women as concubines. And she dismissed reports of abuse, attributing them to “devious and wicked slave girls” who “made up lies and wrote false stories.”

And whereas sex with a Yazidi slave is permissible, she adds, prostitutes in the West “openly commit sin.”

“Leave us alone with your burping,” she wrote of people judging the slave practice.

Pinning down what each person did will be difficult

Investigators looking for clues to the individual actions of each woman, away from social media, will have a difficult time gathering evidence admissible in a court of law.

“In the U.S., we’ve had 16 people who returned that we know of, 13 have been prosecuted in federal courts, so there’s a system to do it,” said Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

But most of those were people who admitted their actions, he added. For those who don’t, investigators using Islamic State documents, for example, have to have a rock-solid chain of evidence, which is difficult to establish in the chaotic environment of a war zone.

Witnesses, often intelligence or security personnel, are often reluctant to testify in open court, and identifying women dressed in three-layer niqabs, the de rigueur face covering, will be unreliable.

Even the social media presence these women maintained is being lost. Blogging sites like Tumblr or WordPress, and messaging platforms such as Telegram, have aggressively shut down the accounts of Islamic State-affiliated users.

In any case, said Margolin, the women probably weren’t lying when they said they had been mostly concerned with family matters, but that didn’t absolve them of responsibility.

“Yes, they were wives and mothers, but what that means isn’t like what we mean when we think of a housewife,” said Margolin.

As the bearers of the group’s ideology for the next generation of fighters, she said, they were pursuing a higher objective.

“They represented,” said Margolin, “the future and permanence of Islamic State.”

Source: Were the brides of Islamic State cloistered housewives or participants in atrocities?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Spielberg’s spiel against Netflix’s eligibility for Oscars has minority filmmakers bristling

2019/03/06 Leave a comment

An angle I hadn’t thought of:

When Steven Spielberg speaks about the business of Hollywood, everyone generally listens and few dissent. But reports that he intends to support rule changes that could block Netflix from Oscars-eligibility have provoked a heated, and unwieldy, debate online this weekend. It has found the legendary filmmaker at odds with some industry heavyweights, who have pointed out that Netflix has been an important supporter of minority filmmakers and stories, especially in awards campaigns, while also reigniting the ongoing streaming versus theatrical debate.

Spielberg has weighed in before on whether streaming movies should compete for the film industry’s most prestigious award (TV movies, he said last year, should compete for Emmys), but that was before Netflix nearly succeeded in getting its first best picture Oscar for Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” at last week’s Academy Awards. Netflix, of course, did not win the top award — “Green Book,” which was produced partially by Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, did.

Still, Netflix was a legitimate contender and this year, the streaming service is likely to step up its awards game even more with Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” which The Hollywood Reporter said may also gunning for a wide-theatrical release. A teaser ad aired during the 91st Oscars for the gangster drama said “in theatres next fall,” instead of the “in select theatres” phrasing that was used for “Roma.”

But Netflix also isn’t playing by the same rules as other studios. The company doesn’t report theatrical grosses, for one, and it’s been vexing some more traditional Hollywood executives throughout this award season and there have been whispers in recent weeks that a reckoning is coming.

Now, Spielberg and others are planning to do something about it by supporting a revised film academy regulation at an upcoming meeting of the organization’s board of governors that would disqualify Netflix from the Oscars, or at least how the streaming giant currently operates during awards season.

This year “Roma” got a limited theatrical qualifying run and an expensive campaign with one of the industry’s most successful awards publicists, Lisa Taback, leading the charge. But Netflix, operates somewhat outside of the industry while also infiltrating its most important institutions, like the Oscars and the Motion Picture Association of America. Some like Spielberg, are worried about what that will mean for the future of movies.

“Steven feels strongly about the difference between the streaming and theatrical situation,” an Amblin spokesperson told IndieWire’s Anne Thompson late last week. “He’ll be happy if the others will join (his campaign) when that comes up. He will see what happens.”

An Amblin representative said Sunday there was nothing to add.

But some see Spielberg’s position as wrong-minded, especially when it comes to the Academy Awards, which requires a theatrical run to be eligible for an award. Many online have pointed out the hypocrisy that the organization allows members to watch films on DVD screeners before voting.

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay tweeted at the film academy’s handle in response to the news that the topic would be discussed at a board of governors meeting, which is comprised of only 54 people out of over 8,000 members.

“I hope if this is true, that you’ll have filmmakers in the room or read statements from directors like me who feel differently,” DuVernay wrote.

Some took a more direct approach, questioning whether Spielberg understands how important Netflix has been to minority filmmakers in recent years.

Franklin Leonard, who founded The BlackList, which surveys the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood, noted that Netflix’s first four major Oscar campaigns were all by and about people of colour: “Beasts of No Nation,” “The 13th,” “Mudbound” and “Roma.”

“It’s possible that Steven Spielberg doesn’t know how difficult it is to get movies made in the legacy system as a woman or a person of colour. In his extraordinary career, he hasn’t exactly produced or executive produced many films directed by them,” Leonard tweeted Saturday. “By my count, Spielberg does one roughly every two decades.”

It’s important to note that Netflix didn’t produce “Beasts of No Nation,” “Mudbound” or “Roma,” but rather acquired them for distribution. But if Oscar campaigns are no longer part of the equation in a Netflix-partnership, top-tier filmmakers are likely to take their talents and films elsewhere.

Others, like “First Reformed” filmmaker Paul Schrader, had a slightly different take.

“The notion of squeezing 200+ people into a dark unventilated space to see a flickering image was created by exhibition economics not any notion of the ‘theatrical experience,”‘ Schrader wrote in a Facebook post Saturday. “Netflix allows many financially marginal films to have a platform and that’s a good thing.”

But his Academy Award-nominated film, he thinks, would have gotten lost on Netflix and possibly, “Relegated to film esoterica.” Netflix had the option to purchase the film out of the Toronto International Film Festival and didn’t. A24 did and stuck with the provocative film through awards season.

“Distribution models are in flux,” Schrader concluded. “It’s not as simple as theatrical versus streaming.”

One thing is certain, however: Netflix is not going away any time soon and how it integrates with the traditional structures of Hollywood, like the Oscars, is a story that’s still being written.

Sean Baker, who directed “The Florida Project,” suggested a compromise: That Netflix offered a “theatrical tier” to pricing plans, which would allow members to see its films in theatres for free.

“I know I’d spend an extra 2 dollars a month to see films like ‘Roma’ or ‘Buster Scruggs’ on the big screen,” Baker tweeted. “Just an idea with no details ironed out. But we need to find solutions like this in which everybody bends a bit in order to keep the film community (which includes theatre owners, film festivals and competitive distributors) alive and kicking.”

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →