Pamela Paul | Multicultural Meanderings

Paul: PEN America Has Stood By Authors. They Should Stand By PEN.

2024/04/30 Leave a comment

Agreed. Money quote: “I prefer to stand by PEN America and by all its members, though perhaps quite now, who would wish to see PEN’s mission upheld and strengthened rather than dismantled. Who does it really serve to keep tearing things down?”

All strong institutions stand to benefit from internal dissent and external pressures. But too often, recent efforts to reform institutions have meant reconstituting them in ways that distort or fundamentally undermine their core mission.

Nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies, university departments and cultural institutions have ousted leaders and sent their staffs into turmoil in pursuit of progressive political goals. In the wake of the 2016 election and the 2020 murder of George Floyd and in a rush to apply sweeping “In this house we believe” standards unilaterally, organizations have risked overt politicization, mission drift, irrelevance and even dissolution. And now the war in Gaza is ripping its way across American universities.

The latest target is PEN America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to free expression by journalists and authors. Last week, after an increasingly aggressive boycott campaign by some of its members, PEN canceled its annual World Voices Festival, which was conceived by Salman Rushdie and was to mark its 20th anniversary in May. This followed a refusal by several writers to have their work considered for PEN’s annual literary awards. The ceremony awarding those prizes was also canceled.

An open letter sent to PEN America’s board and trustees and republished on Literary Hub, now the de facto clearinghouse for pro-Palestinian literary-world sentiment, accused the organization of “implicit support of the Israeli occupation” and of “aiding and abetting genocide.” It demanded the resignation of PEN’s longtime C.E.O., Suzanne Nossel, and current president, Jennifer Finney Boylan. According to its 21 signatories, mostly up-and-coming authors, “among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”

In response and in keeping with its mission of independence and free expression, PEN America accepted the writers’ willingness to voice their conscience. It has also made clear that there is room for more than one point of view on what constitutes genocide and on the current conflict in Gaza.

“As an organization open to all writers, we see no alternative but to remain home to this diversity of opinions and perspectives, even if, for some, that very openness becomes reason to exit,” PEN America stated in an open letter to its community.

That doesn’t mean PEN’s critics are without a point. I have also heard dissent from inside PEN that the organization has not been as strong in its advocacy for Palestinian writers since Oct. 7 as it has been for Ukrainian writers since the Russian invasion. I have seen internal letters describing this disparity in detail. Those grievances may well be legitimate, and PEN should respond appropriately, advocating on behalf of all writers caught up in conflict, repression and censorship, regardless of geopolitical circumstance.

But for those advocating that PEN America reform itself in the service of a single political agenda, the organization’s efforts to accommodate a range of views count against the organization. “Neutrality,” the authors of the most recent letter contend, “is a betrayal of justice.” Nothing short of total capitulation will serve their purpose. And they are conducting an intimidation campaign among other members and authors to join their ranks or shut up about it. According to PEN leaders, writers have expressed fear in openly supporting the organization in the onslaught of this latest campaign.

Since 2006, I’ve been one of PEN America’s 4,500-plus members, which includes writers, journalists, activists and professionals involved in the world of letters. I joined well before I joined The Times, after the publication of my second book, a liberal critique of the effects of online pornography, which met with a certain amount of pushback. As a freelance journalist and author who covered politically sensitive topics, I appreciated the protection PEN America offered. PEN takes a firm stand, for example, against online abuse, something every working journalist today experiences to one extent or another. PEN is also firmly committed to fighting book bans in schools, libraries and prisons, something that grew increasingly relevant to me when I became the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

Of course, these conflicts are minor compared with a war in which lives are at stake. But whatever my personal views on the Middle East, I don’t expect or even want all its members to conform to my brand of politics.

PEN brooked dissent before. In 2015 it honored the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after its members were brutally attacked and in spite of opposition from some of its members. I appreciate that the organization has named a prominent transgender writer and activist as its president even if I do not share all her views when it comes to gender politics. I don’t have to agree with everything PEN does; in fact, I prefer that I don’t agree, because that opens me up to protection in kind from members who may not agree with me on all issues.

Even if we’ve grown inured to organizations losing their way under political pressure, we shouldn’t be indifferent to the potential consequences. Especially now that there are so few truly independent organizations left.

According to its charter, PEN “stands for the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations, and members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible.” I prefer to stand by PEN America and by all its members, though perhaps quiet now, who would wish to see PEN’s mission upheld and strengthened rather than dismantled. Who does it really serve to keep tearing things down?

Source: PEN America Has Stood By Authors. They Should Stand By PEN.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Pamela Paul, PEN

Paul: You’ve Been Wronged. That Doesn’t Make You Right.

2024/04/26 Leave a comment

Increasing common thread in commentary these days on the “Oppression Olympics:”

We are living in a golden age of aggrievement. No matter who you are or what your politics, whatever your ethnic origin, economic circumstance, family history or mental health status, chances are you have ample reason to be ticked off.

If you’re on the left, you have been oppressed, denied, marginalized, silenced, erased, pained, underrepresented, underresourced, traumatized, harmed and hurt. If you’re on the right, you’ve been ignored, overlooked, demeaned, underestimated, shouted down, maligned, caricatured and despised; in Trumpspeak: wronged and betrayed.

Plenty of the dissatisfaction is justified. But not all. What was Jan. 6 at heart but a gigantic tantrum by those who felt they’d been cheated and would take back their due, by whatever means necessary?

People have always fought over unequal access to scarce resources. Yet never has our culture made the claiming of complaint such an animating force, a near compulsory zero-sum game in which every party feels as if it’s been uniquely abused. Nor has the urge to leverage powerlessness as a form of power felt quite so universal — more pervasive on the left, if considerably more threatening on the right.

Against this backdrop, reading Frank Bruni’s new book, “The Age of Grievance,” is one sad nod and head shake after another. Building on the concept of the oppression Olympics, “the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder,” which he first described in a 2017 column, Bruni, now a contributing writer for Times Opinion, shows how that mind-set has been baked into everything from elementary school to government institutions. Tending to our respective fiefs, Bruni writes, is “to privilege the private over the public, to gaze inward rather than outward, and that’s not a great facilitator of common cause, common ground, compromise.”

Consider its reflection in just one phenomenon: “progressive stacking,” a method by which an assumed hierarchy of privilege is inverted so that the most marginalized voices are given precedence. Perhaps worthy in theory. But who is making these determinations and according to which set of assumptions? Think of the sticky moral quandaries: Who is more oppressed, an older, disabled white veteran or a young, gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl? What does it mean that vying for the top position involves proving how hard off and vulnerable you are?

Individuals as well as tribes, ethnic groups and nations are divvied up into simplistic binaries: colonizer vs. colonized, oppressor vs. oppressed, privileged and not. On college campuses and in nonprofit organizations, in workplaces and in public institutions, people can determine, perform and weaponize their grievance, knowing they can appeal to the administration, to human resources or to online court where they will be rewarded with attention, if not substantive improvement in actual circumstance.

The aggrieved take to social media where those looking to be offended are fed at the trough. Bruni refers to those who let you know that some representative of a wronged party is under threat the “indignity sentries of Twitter.” Ready to stir the pot, let the indignation begin and may the loudest complainer win!

But goading people into a constant sense of alarmism distracts from actual wrongdoing in the world. Turning complex tragedies into simple contests between who ticks more boxes rarely clarifies the situation. In San Francisco, when a Black Hispanic female district attorney chose not to file charges against the Black Walgreens security guard who shot Banko Brown, a Black, homeless transgender man who was accused of shoplifting, the entire episode was read not only as a crime and a referendum on arming security guards but also as a human rights crisis, simultaneously anti-trans, anti-homeless and racist.

In Brooklyn, when a man presumed to be homeless and mentally ill reportedly killed a golden retriever and the police did not immediately arrest him, the dog owner’s fears and efforts by some in the community to get the police to respond were read as racist vigilantism. The ensuing finger-pointing, name-calling and outrage did nothing to address the problems of homelessness, public safety or mental health.

The compulsion to find offense everywhere leaves us endlessly stewing. Whatever your politics, it assumes and feeds a narrative that stretches expansively from the acutely personal to the grandly political — from me and mine to you and the other, from us vs. them to good vs. evil. And as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff warned in their book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the calculus is that if you’re hurt or upset, your feelings must be validated. You can see this reductive mind-set in action in protest after protest across America as a contest plays out between Jews and Palestinians over who has been historically more oppressed and should therefore have the upper hand now.

But as Ricky Gervais says, “Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right.” Being oppressed doesn’t necessarily make you good, any more than “might is right.” Having been victimized doesn’t give you a pass.

If it felt like any of the persecution grandstanding led to progress, we might wanly allow grievance culture to march on. Instead, as one undergraduate noted in the Harvard Political Review, “In pitting subjugated groups against one another, the Oppression Olympics not only reduce the store of resources to which groups and movements have access, but also breed intersectional bitterness that facilitates further injustice.” Rewarding a victim-centric worldview, which we do from the classroom to the workplace to our political institutions, only sows more divisiveness and fatalism. It seems to satisfy no one, and people are more outraged than ever. Even those who hate Tucker Carlson become Tucker Carlson.

The acrimony has only intensified in the past few years. The battlefield keeps widening. What begins as a threat often descends into protests, riots and physical violence. It’s difficult for anyone to wade through all of this without feeling wronged in one way or another. But it wrongs us all. And if we continue to mistake grievance for righteousness, we only set ourselves up for more of the same.

Source: You’ve Been Wronged. That Doesn’t Make You Right.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Frank Bruni, Jonathan Haidt, Oppression Olympics, Pamela Paul, progressive stacking, The Coddling of the American Mind

Paul: Civil Discourse on Campus Is Put to the Test

2024/03/08 Leave a comment

More such dialogues needed:

The same week that a U.C. Berkeley protest ended in violence, with doors broken, people allegedly injured, a guest lecture organized by Jewish students canceled and attendees evacuated by the police through an underground passageway, a group of academics gathered across the bay at Stanford to discuss restoring inclusive civil discourse on campus. The underlying question: In today’s heated political environment, is that even possible?

Over the course of two packed days of moderated and free discussion, we would try to test it out.

Paul Brest, a professor emeritus and former dean at Stanford Law School and one of the conference’s organizers, arrived at Stanford in 1969 in the throes of Vietnam War protests. The windows of the conservative Hoover Institution on campus had to be boarded up. In later years, violence broke out in protests over South Africa.

“Back then, it was students against the institution,” he told me. “Now it’s very different because it’s student against student.”

Because I’d written about the difficulties students have had engaging in civil discourse, including a couple of columns on incidents at Stanford, I was one of two journalists invited to take part. Hosted by Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the conference brought together professors, deans and academic leaders who were largely liberal, with libertarians and a few conservatives and progressives in the mix. Unfortunately, one of the organizers told me, most of the invited progressives, which is to say the group that currently dominates campus debates, refused to come.

But those who did attend engaged in lively good-faith discussion about several hot-button topics ranging from free expression on campus to institutional neutrality. I’ll write about several of these in the future, but will begin with one of the most divisive: diversity hiring statements, the requirement that all job applicants demonstrate their commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion goals.

Brian Soucek, a professor at the U.C. Davis School of Law and an advocate of D.E.I. statements, started the panel off by making his case. Mere statements of belief in D.E.I. are not enough, he said. In an effort to reach consensus on what a D.E.I. hiring statement should look like, in lieu of U.C. Davis’s current required statement, he proposed an abbreviated version that asked candidates specifically about D.E.I. shortcomings and gaps in their fields of discipline and concrete steps they’ve taken or plan to take to address them.

The rest of the panel wasn’t having it.

Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College, endorsed the goal of diversifying staffs. The problem isn’t principle or legality, she said, it’s practice. Diversity according to whom? And in what context?

“It’s always ‘historically excluded and underrepresented,’” she said. “But historically when? Conservatives could argue they have been historically excluded. What’s underrepresented at Hillsdale College will be different from what’s underrepresented in the U.C. system.”

“We all know that there’s a strong political orientation bias being perpetuated,” she continued. “‘Not a good fit,’ they’ll say. It’s fundamentally dishonest and it creates more problems than it addresses.”

“People in the most elite systems know how to game the system,” Jeff Snyder, a professor of educational studies at Carleton, added. “It’s a privileged box-ticking exercise that ultimately degrades the purpose.” Together, he and Khalid filed an amicus brief for the plaintiffs against Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.

Imagine flipping the litmus test on its head, Snyder said. Suppose the requirement was a statement of patriotism at the University of Florida. Suppose they say, just as D.E.I. advocates will say, that the definition of patriotism is expansive. And suppose he writes that his vision of patriotism is political protest in the model of Colin Kaepernick. He wouldn’t get the job. Nor would he get a job if he wrote a D.E.I. statement for Carleton saying he mentored members of the campus N.R.A. group or the Young Republicans Club, both of which are underrepresented minorities on campus. D.E.I. statements are inherently ideological. A chilling effect is inevitable.

“What they want are non-straights, nonwhites and non-men,” said Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University. “But they don’t say it that way. There’s a lack of forthrightness that breaks people in these situations.” In his field, men are underrepresented, and queer scholarship is overrepresented. “But it strains credulity to say that anyone would read a D.E.I. statement about someone’s queer work and say that’s an overrepresented group.”

Soucek gamely continued his defense against what he called “anecdata.” He described an approach Berkeley tried out in 2018, in which it considered candidates’ D.E.I. statements first, before looking at the rest of their applications. Anyone whose D.E.I. statement didn’t pass the first round was eliminated from the next pool.

“People criticized Berkeley afterward that Berkeley didn’t even consider the applicants’ credentials,” Soucek said. “But I would say that D.E.I. statements are credentials.” And let’s be honest, he said. If you look at the cover letter first, you’re privileging another set of credentials first: people’s names — which can tell you a lot — their institutions, their mentors and connections. This was just another and no less valid approach to narrowing the pool.

Why not anonymize all applications? Khalid responded. In fields like history, political science and computer science, 11 universities dominate 50 percent of all tenure positions. Whatever they’re doing now, diversity efforts clearly aren’t working. She compared D.E.I. statements to D.E.I. diversity training. “The whole ‘Look into your hearts and say how racist you are — that does nothing,” Khalid said. “Painful, excruciating and pathetic is the only way to describe them.”

Simply requiring D.E.I. statements gives a pass to universities for not fixing existing problems, added Carol Sumner, the chief diversity officer of Northern Illinois University. She then raised another question: “Is the statement the problem or is it the subjectivity of the person reading the statement you don’t trust?”

Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, expressed concern that poorly designed D.E.I. encourages essentialist thinking — the idea that all women or members of the group have similar views or experiences. In his view, D.E.I. programs can be “a way to offload responsibility from the rest of the university and take pressure off them for what actually could be substantive policies that are harder and more expensive.”

One thing on which everyone agreed: Schools are failing at real diversity. D.E.I. statements aren’t necessarily helping. Instead of potentially creating new problems, academia needs to fix existing ones.

“We all had the shared view that diversity and inclusion are good, but that there are legitimate concerns about how we promote these things,” Brian Soucek told me when I spoke to him afterward. Addressing those knotty issues in open dialogue is a good place to start.

Source: Civil Discourse on Campus Is Put to the Test

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with campus, civil discourse, Pamela Paul

Paul: What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?

2023/12/09 Leave a comment

Wokeness run amok….:

During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social workers, students are given a glossary with “100+ common terms you may see or hear used in class, during discussions and at your field placements.”

Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).

The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

These aren’t the definitions you’d find in Webster’s dictionary, and until recently they would not have been much help in getting a master’s in social work at an Ivy League university. They reflect a shift not just at Columbia but in the field of social work, in which the social justice framework that has pervaded much of academia has affected the approach of top schools and the practice of social work itself.

Will radicalized social workers be providing service not just based on the needs of their clients but also to advance their political beliefs and assess clients based on their race or ethnicity?

When a student group, Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine, announced a teach-in about “the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on Oct. 7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism,” Mijal Bitton, a Jewish spiritual leader, asked on X, “Imagine receiving services from a Columbia-educated social worker who believes burning families, killing babies, and gang-raping women is a ‘counteroffensive’ and ‘revolutionary violence [central] to anti-imperialism.’” Administrators barred the event from the school, but organizers held it in the lobby on Wednesday. Ariana Pinsker-Lehrer, a first-year student, set the protesters straight. “You’re studying to be social workers,” she told the group, “do better.”

Since the time of the pioneering activist and reformer Jane Addams, social work has been guided by a sense of mission. Social workers, who are the most common providers of mental health care, as well as the people who carry out social service programs, help the country’s neediest people. Whether social workers are caseworkers in government agencies or — as is the case with most Columbia graduates, I was told — therapists or counselors in private practice, their clients are often the elderly, the poor, veterans, homeless people, people with substance abuse issues and domestic violence survivors.

According to the National Association of Social Workers, “The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet basic and complex needs of all people, with a particular focus on those who are vulnerable, oppressed and living in poverty.”

Other leading schools, like the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago and the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan, have embraced social justice goals but without as sharp an ideological expression as Columbia.

The Columbia School of Social Work updated its mission statementin 2022 to say that its purpose is “to interrogate racism and other systems of oppression standing in the way of social equity and justice and to foster social work education, practice and research that strengthen and expand the opportunities, resources and capabilities of all persons to achieve their full potential and well-being.” What was once its central mission — to enhance the world of social work — now follows an emphatic political statement.

Melissa Begg, the dean of the Columbia School of Social Work, said that while the school’s mission has always been about social justice and “equitable access,” its mission has evolved because “racism is part of the country.” The school, she explained, is trying to build an awareness of and give students the tools they need to address a diverse range of needs. As she put it, “If you think of slavery as the original sin of the United States, it makes sense to center that reality as part of the school’s mission.”

In 2017 the Columbia social work school introduced a framework around power, race, oppression and privilege, which the school called PROP. This began as a formal course for all first-year students to create what Begg referred to as “self-awareness.” In subsequent years, the PROP framework was applied to the entire curriculum of the school, and the PROP class became a required course called Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work.

According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous people/First Nations people and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia) and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of anti-Black racism on all previously mentioned systems.”

As part of their coursework, students are required to give a presentation in which they share part of their “personal process of understanding anti-Black racism, intersectionality and uprooting systems of oppression.” They are asked to explain their presentation “as it relates to decolonizing social work, healing, critical self-awareness and self-reflection.” Teachings include “The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness,” “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People” and “What It Means to Be a Revolutionary,” a 1972 speech by Angela Davis.

This decolonization framework, in which people are either oppressor or oppressed, often viewed through the prism of American ideas around race, is by no means exclusive to the Columbia School of Social Work. But its application in the program illustrates the effects of the current radicalism on campus and the ways in which those ideals can shift an entire field of practice.

Addressing race should be an important part of a social worker’s education, as it is in many social sciences. The history and practice of psychotherapy, related to social work, was long infected with insidious and harmful ideas around race, which were often tightly bound to the eugenics movement and characterized African Americans and other minorities as mentally deficient and childlike; current practitioners are by no means immune to racism themselves.

Caregivers need to be sensitive to the effects of racism and other biases on their clients’ health and well-being. But professional organizations have become much more dogmatic about those concerns in ways that endanger the effectiveness of social work.

The National Association of Social Workers now stipulates that “antiracism and other facets of diversity, equity and inclusion must be a focal point for everyone within social work.” In October, Thema S. Bryant, the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association, published a column titled “Psychologists Must Embrace Decolonial Psychology.” In it she wrote, “Decolonial psychology asks us to consider not just the life history of the individual we are working with but also the history of the various collective groups they are a part of, whether that is their nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability.” The profession, she explained, needed to include a range of goals, from appreciating “Indigenous science” to shaping “systems and institutions” in addition to individuals and families.

Psychotherapy already carries a certain amount of political or ideological bias. A number of recent surveys have shown that mental health practitioners, including social workers, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal, progressive or socialist, according to a new book, “Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology,” edited by Craig L. Frisby, Richard E. Redding, William T. O’Donohue and Scott O. Lilienfeld.

“Until roughly five years ago, people seeking mental health care could expect their therapists to keep politics out of the office,” Sally Satel, a practicing psychotherapist and the author of “PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine,” wrote in 2021. “Mental health professionals — mainly counselors and therapists — are increasingly replacing evidence-driven therapeutics with ideologically motivated practice and activism.”

“White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others,” Satel wrote, “while Black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.”

Take counseling, which is similar to social work in its focus on mental health but ostensibly focuses more on individual therapy and less on navigating support systems, for example, obtaining assistance from public agencies. The code of ethics adopted by the American Counseling Association in 2014 states that “counselors are aware of — and avoid imposing — their own values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.” But the next year, the association’s governing council endorsed guidelines on “multicultural and social justice counseling” that stipulate “social justice advocacy” and divide clients and providers into “privileged” and “marginalized” categories meant to guide professional engagement.

Therapists are supposed to be able to listen and not be judgmental about feelings and ideas that are taboo, Andrew Hartz, a New York-based psychologist, told me. It’s not helpful for patients to feel judged by their practitioner: “Even if the goal is to make the patient less racist, it’s not effective.”

This past summer, Hartz founded the Open Therapy Institute to provide training without ideology so neither clients nor therapists would feel judged for their beliefs. “I was trained in the city and in city hospitals, so I saw mostly nonwhite patients,” he said. If he had used the current decolonization framework or categorized his patients by ethnicity and race, he explained, it would have distracted him from being an effective resource. “I’m trying to think about ‘What are they feeling and how can I help them?’ Not ‘I’m an oppressor, and they’re a victim,’ and so I’m walking on eggshells. That’s not going to be good therapy.”

Social workers help a broad range of populations, one in which race and systems of oppression often play less of a central role than individual counseling and support in navigating complicated social service systems — Syrian refugees in need of resettlement and Appalachian residents navigating health care insurance, foster children, survivors of domestic violence, teenagers grappling with substance abuse and poverty. They work with military veterans, victims of natural disasters, police officers suffering from workplace stress and the elderly. The job requires long hours dealing with populations that others have largely written off — the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, the infirm.

Like many helping professions — nursing, elder care, teaching — social work is not only one of the noblest vocations; it’s also one of the least remunerative. While the two-year residential program at the Columbia School of Social Work costs an estimated total of $91,748 a year with room and board, the median annual salary for its 2021 graduates, per a 2022 survey, was $62,000. (The school does not provide full information on how many students receive financial aid.)

Many students go to social work school because it’s often a less expensive route to becoming a psychotherapist in private practice, which many do as a licensed clinical social worker. It’s less expensive and faster than getting a doctorate in psychology or psychiatry. It’s also hard to pay off those student loans working in a governmental agency. More students are entering private practice, Begg acknowledged, as did everyone else associated with the school; several characterized it as an overwhelming majority.

The intention of the current curriculum at the Columbia School of Social Work, Begg emphasized to me, is to prepare social workers for hard work, not to shut out prospective students with any kind of ideological litmus test. The glossary of terms handed out at orientation, she said, was created by students for students and was not a “public-facing document.” She wanted to “make a clear bright line between our curriculum and our glossary.”

It’s supposed to be used “internally by our community within the context of a conversation” and as a “jumping-off point for conversation” for students to “expand their horizons.”

That noble intention may not be matched in practice.

Social work education has always been tied to social justice, said Amy Werman, who graduated from the Columbia School of Social Work in 1982 and has been teaching clinical and research courses there since 2009, full time since 2015.

But in the past few years, she said, the student body has become more radical. “Many students see themselves as social justice warriors, and protesting is the litmus test of being a real social worker,” she told me. She said she couldn’t remember a single protest at the school when she was a student. “Now,” she said, “I feel it’s a rite of passage.”

On Nov. 8, about a month after Hamas slaughtered about 1,200people in Israel, dozens of students occupied the school’s lobby, banging on drums and yelling “Intifada! Intifada!” from 10:30 a.m. until early evening. Several Jewish students told Werman they didn’t feel safe. Students I spoke with said they thought that the blatantly political slant of the PROP curriculum encouraged the radical tenor of recent student activism.

“I lead with my Jewish identity and my identity as a woman, my subjugated identities,” said Werman, who discusses in orientation and in class her experience in Israel providing social services to Bedouins, Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, even after students have complained about her discussion of Israel in their evaluations of her.

“When Jews speak up in our school,” she said, “they are met with, ‘You have white privilege, so shut up. You are a colonizer. You are an oppressor. You are responsible for the deaths of innocent Palestinians.’”

When Asaf Eyal, a 2017 graduate of the school and now the director of a major New York City human services organization, arrived on campus, he said, he was bombarded immediately with messages from both the curriculum and from fellow students about his privilege as a white colonizer.

During the school’s required class in power, race, oppression and privilege (an earlier rendition of the course on decolonizing social work), Eyal, a former combat soldier from Israel, was shown videos of Israeli soldiers in which they were labeled the oppressor. In classroom lessons, the oppressed, he said, were always Black people. “Do you know there are Black Israelis, Black Jews?” Eyal, who had worked with Ethiopian Jews, asked his classmates.

“The school is infected with a political agenda that should not be in place, especially on Day 1,” Eyal told me.

Now, he said, he questions the education he got there. “I don’t come into my shelter every day and think about who is the oppressed,” he told me. “I think about helping people.” In October, after four years volunteering on behalf of the school, Eyal resigned from his role overseeing fieldwork assignments.

“Is this a school of social work or an indoctrination agency for extreme ideology?” Eyal said. “We’re missing the purpose. It’s not our purpose.”

Source: What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Columbia School of Social Work, Pamela Paul, woke

Paul: A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World

2023/10/19 Leave a comment

Agree, dangers of cancel culture with respect to literature and the arts in general:

Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebrationfor the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.

In a statement defending the decision, Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, distanced the organization from the award, saying the prize came from another group, which was now looking for “a suitable format and setting” to honor Shibli elsewhere. He also said that “we strongly condemn Hamas’s barbaric terror war against Israel” and that the fair “has always been about humanity; its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” Furthermore, Boos said, the Frankfurt Book Fair “stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”

Some readers, like the festival organizers, may also side entirely with Israel, which was brutally attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Others may side with Hamas or with the Palestinian people, now under fire by Israeli forces. Still others may have more complicated positions, condemning the actions of Hamas while supporting the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state or supporting Israel while disapproving of the tactics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or its military.

But taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction — no matter the subject matter or the author’s nationality — and that is the effect of the fair organizers’ decision. Canceling a celebration of an author may not be the same thing as banning a book, but the organizers’ decision amounts to demonizing a fiction writer and stifling her viewpoint.

The move sends an unfortunate message to both authors and readers, advancing the false notion that there is a wrong time for certain authors or novels and that now is not the time for Palestinian literature. As if novelists were somehow responsible to or for global conflicts and must be judged in accordance with whatever political events take place at the time of publication.

Even if one chooses a side in this war, literature and the views of fiction writers shouldn’t become collateral damage. It is no more wrong to read the latest novel by the Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad at this moment than it is to read the comic short stories of the Israeli author Etgar Keret. Now may, indeed, be the very moment when it makes sense to consider a creative work that comes from the other side.

Shibli told me she doesn’t fear the effects of Litprom’s and the book fair’s actions so much as she fears what they reflect in terms of political shifts. “It’s alarming to witness this populism attempting to take its hold on literature,” she wrote me in an email. “But literature cannot be in the grip of one group, not when it forges an intimate link with every reader.”

Shibli has not been canceled. Her works are still available in translation from the Arabic. But a chill has been cast. The idea has been thrust out there by the organizers of one of the world’s most prominent annual literary events that her fiction and, by extension, the work of other Palestinian writers are somehow not OK for our moment. And that the work of literary institutions is to reinforce borders rather than enable literature to transcend them.

“Minor Detail” undoubtedly offers sympathies to the Palestinian cause — a perspective that surely won’t be embraced by all readers. It includes the story of a Bedouin girl who was gang raped and murdered by an Israeli Army unit in 1949, an atrocity that has been well documented. One German judge of the prize, Ulrich Noller, resigned from the jury that determined the award last summer, saying the novel serves “anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives” and claiming it not only allowed such readings but also opened up space for them.

This is 2023’s second controversy in which political passions over a war prevailed over the fate of an author’s work. A month after a dispute between Ukrainian and Russian writers over a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival this year, the novelist Elizabeth Gilbert delayed her historical novel set in Siberia in response to online outcry from readers she said were Ukrainian. Gilbert said she made this decision on her own — we don’t know for sure — but in the end, this is another example of a work of fiction’s subject matter being deemed inappropriate for political reasons.

“It is not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert said in a video she posted online at the time. “And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Let’s be clear: Wars cause harm. Novels do not. Literature may raise uncomfortable questions or explore unpopular viewpoints or establish reasons to empathize with a character a reader might otherwise find repugnant. A novel’s story, characters, politics and theme may not appeal to a particular reader. That reader does not have to like those books or read them to begin with. One need not like or agree with the author, either, to appreciate the person’s work.

But novels need not appeal to or appease a political constituency. Those works of fiction written purely as political dogma in disguise tend to suffer the consequences with critics and readers. That said, even overtly political fiction and the novelists who write them should not subjected to the passions incited by global conflicts.

These are just two examples, but the effects ripple out, generating tension and fear in the wider literary world. Already, there is fallout from the decision in Frankfurt. The Indonesian Publishers Association, the Arab Publishers’ Association, the Emirates Publishers Association and the United Arab Emirates Sharjah Book Authority have pulled out of the festival, which opened on Wednesday.

As the Sharjah Book Authority put it, “We champion the role of culture and books to encourage dialogue and understanding between people. We believe that this role is more important now than ever.” In withdrawing on Tuesday, the Malaysian Education Ministry noted its decision is “in line with the government’s stand to be in solidarity and offer full support for Palestine.”

More than 600 publishers, editors, translators, writers and others in the industry, including Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and the Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, have signed an open letter on the ArabLit website.

“The Frankfurt Book Fair has a responsibility,” the letter explains, “to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down.”

In the statement Boos emphasized “peaceful and democratic discourse.” He and the fair’s organizers should then reflect on this: When you shut people out (be it through censorship, bans, social media campaigns, a canceled book celebration or the machinations of an autocratic regime), when people feel judged by or deprived of a voice that expresses their — and our common — humanity, we wall off our minds.

The moment people line up on opposing sides, when their eyes and hearts shut tight accordingly, is precisely when we need literature that challenges our presumed allegiances most.

“‘Adab’ in Arabic means ‘literature’ but also ‘ethics,’” Shibli told me. “Literature as ethics would perhaps open up more possibilities in our imagination on how we could live our lives together, in relation to each other.”

Source: A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Adania Shibli, cancel culture, Frankfurt Book Fair, Minor Detail, Pamela Paul

McWhorter: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter and Paul: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

2023/10/06 Leave a comment

Starting with the more charitable take by McWhorter:

The headlines lately have been full of the news that Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University has dismissed about half of the staff of the Center for Antiracist Research, which he has headed since 2020. Meanwhile, the university has initiated an investigation into the operations of the organization, which has taken in tens of millions of dollars in funding with almost no research to show for it.

Kendi, after three years of megacelebrity as America’s antiracist guru of choice, is being widely described as having imploded or fallen. Many are evincing a painfully obvious joy in this, out of a conviction that he has finally been revealed as the grifter or hustlerhe supposedly is. But this analysis is a strained and even recreational reading of a story that’s much more mundane.

I am unaware of a charge that Kendi has been lining his pockets with money directed toward the center. Rather, the grift is supposed to be that he has profited handsomely from the dissemination of his ideas, including best-selling books, especially “How to Be an Antiracist” and its young reader versions; high speaking fees (reportedly over $30,000 for a lecture at this point); and various other media projects.

But Kendi’s proposals seek to face, trace and erase racist injustice in society to an unprecedented degree. What makes it sleazy that he be well paid for the effort? How many of us, if engaged in similar activity and offered fat speaking fees and generous book royalties, would refuse them? (As someone in the ideas business, too, I certainly wouldn’t.)

The idea that Kendi is wrong to make money from what he is doing implies that his concepts are a kind of flimflam. In this scenario, he is a version of Harold Hill out of “The Music Man,” using star power to foist shoddy product on innocent people to make a buck. The River City residents now are educated white people petrified of being called racists and susceptible to the power of books and speeches that encourage them to acknowledge and work on their racism in order to become better people.

Surely, one might think, Kendi doesn’t actually believe that one is either racist or antiracist with nothing in between or that, as he wrote, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” or that all discrepancies between white and Black people are due to racism or that the United States should establish a Department of Antiracism with “disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

There is no mutual admiration society between Ibram Kendi and me. He has criticized my writings in his book “Stamped From the Beginning” and in several harsh social media posts. To say that I find his ideas less than compelling would be an understatement, and I’ve publicly expressed as much.

The thing is that, whatever one makes of his beliefs, there is all evidence that Kendi is quite sincere in them. If some of us perceive duality and circularity in his thinking, that’s fine. A public intellectual is entitled to his views, and if an interested public wants to pay, in some form, to consider those views, then that should be fine, too.

He became a celebrity by chance. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, America developed a sudden and passionate interest in racial justice, sustained by the lockdown’s affording Americans so much downtime to reflect on the issue, as well as conditioning a yearning for connection in a common purpose.

Kendi happened to write “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, and it stood out as a useful guide to the new imperative. It became a runaway best seller, assisted by his star power, and he became one of the most in-demand public speakers in the country, soon founding the new Center for Antiracist Research. He simply ran with what he was given, as any of us would have.

Deliberate immorality is exceptional. It should be a last resort analysis, not the first one. Accusing Kendi of being a bad man is symptomatic of how eager we tend to be to see bad faith in people who simply think differently from us. To delight in Kendi’s failure as the head of the Center for Antiracist Research is small.

Source: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter

And the harsher take by Paul, both with respect to Kendi and his enablers:

The recent turmoil at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, with more than half its staff laid off and half its budget cut amid questions of what it did with the nearly $55 million it raised, led to whoops of schadenfreude from Kendi’s critics and hand wringing from his loyal fans.

Kendi had become a symbol of what was right or wrong with America’s racial reckoning since the police murder of George Floyd. To some, he was a race-baiting grifter; to others, he was a social justice hero speaking harsh truths.

With little administrative experience, Kendi may simply have been ill equipped to deal with a program of that magnitude. He may have been distracted by a nonstop book tour and speaking engagements. Or maybe he just screwed up.

More interesting is that many major universities, corporations, nonprofit groups and influential donors thought buying into Kendi’s strident, simplistic formula — that racism is the cause of all racial disparities and that anyone who disagrees is a racist — could eradicate racial strife and absolve them of any role they may have played in it.

After all, this reductionist line of thinking runs squarely against the enlightened principles on which many of those institutions were founded — free inquiry, freedom of speech, a diversity of perspectives. As one Boston University professor wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, that academia backs Kendi’s mission amounts to a “violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles,” ones that betray “the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing.”

Yet Kendi’s ideas gained prominence, often to the exclusion of all other perspectives. Kendi was a relatively unknown academic when his second book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” was a surprise winner of a National Book Award in 2016. It helped catapult him from assistant professorships at State University of New York campuses, and the University of Florida, to a full professorship at American University, where he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.

In 2017, The New York Times Book Review, which I was then editing, asked Kendi to create a reading list, “A History of Race and Racism, in 24 Chapters,” for our pages. I interviewed Kendi, who is a very charismatic speaker, about the essay on the Book Review’s podcast and again, about his reading life, on a panel, in 2019.

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi asserted that racist ideas are used to obscure the fact that racist policies create racial disparities, and that to find fault with Black people in any way for those disparities is racist. People who “subscribed to assimilationist thinking that has also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority,” no matter how well-meaning and progressive, were themselves racist. In Kendi’s revisionist history, figures who had been previously hailed for their contribution to civil rights were repainted as racist if they did not attribute Black inequality solely to racism. Kendi accused W.E.B. Du Bois and Barack Obama of racism for entertaining the idea that Black behavior and attitudes could sometimes cause or exacerbate certain disparities, although he notes that Du Bois went on to take a what he considered a more antiracist position.

In 2019, Kendi took the ideas further, pivoting to contemporary policy with “How to Be an Antiracist.” In this book, Kendi made clear that to explore reasons other than racism for racial inequities, whether economic, social or cultural, is to promote anti-black policies.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right. As practiced, that meant curriculums that favor works by Black people over white people is one way to achieve that goal; hiring quotas are another.

Among the book’s central tenets is that everyone must choose between his approach, which he calls “antiracism,” and racism itself. It would no longer be enough for an individual or organization to simply be “not racist,” which Kendi calls a “mask for racism” — they must instead be actively “antiracist,” applying a strict lens of racism to their every thought and action, and in fields wholly unrelated to race, in order to escape deliberate or inadvertent racist thinking and behavior. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” Kendi writes.

Kendi’s antiracism prescription meant that universities, corporations and nonprofits would need to remove all policies that weren’t overtly antiracist. In the Boston University English department’s playwriting M.F.A. program, for example, reading assignments had to come from “50 percent diverse-identifying and marginalized writers” and writers of “white or Eurocentric lineage” be taught through “an actively antiracist lens.” Antiracism also requires a commitment to other positions, including active opposition to sexism, homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice and any class biases that supposedly harm Black lives. To deviate from any of this is to be racist. You’re either with us or you’re against us.

Yet, as the psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt points out, Kendi’s dichotomy is “incorrect from a social-science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies,” including ones that address social, economic and cultural disparities through a more fair distribution of resources.

When a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in May 2020, Kendi’s book, with its propitious, here-is-what-you-must-do-now title, became the bible for anyone newly committed to the cause of racial justice. Schools and companies made it required reading. So many campuses made it their “class read” “all-school read” or “community read” that the publisher created a full set of reading and teaching guides to help foster them. (Employees at the publishing house, Penguin Random House, were told to read it as the first “true companywide read” to begin “antiracism training mandatory for all employees.”) Universities used Kendi’s antiracist framework as the basis by which applicants’ required “diversity statements” would be judged.

Kendi’s vision of antiracism had considerable influence in shaping the national conversation around race. As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Washington Post last week, “No longer a mere ambassador for academic antiracism, Kendi became a brand.”

Yet the same year “How to Be an Antiracist” was published, Henry Louis Gates’s “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” presented a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between past and present. With its vivid examples of crude prejudice (the photos are not for the fainthearted), Gates’s historical excavation allows the reader to see a clear line between the pervasive bigotry of the past and the kind of ugly but marginal brand of white supremacy on display in 2017 Charlottesville. In contrast to Kendi’s contention that racial progress is consistently accompanied by racist progress, numerous memoirs, firsthand accounts, biographies and histories of the civil rights movement also document clear progress on race.

Contra Kendi, there are conscientious people who advocate racial neutrality over racial discrimination. It isn’t necessarily naïve or wrong to believe that most Americans aren’t racist. To believe that white supremacists exist in this country but that white supremacy is not the dominant characteristic of America in 2023 is also an acceptable position.

And while a cartoon version of colorblindness isn’t desirable or even possible, it is possible to recognize skin color but not form judgments on that basis. A person can worry that an emphasis on racial group identity can misleadingly homogenize diverse groups of people, at once underestimating intra-racial differences and overemphasizing interracial ones. The Black left-wing scholar Adolph Reed, for example, decries the emphasis on race-based policies. “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed said in an interview with The New York Times. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”

In short, a person can oppose racism on firm ethical or philosophical or pragmatic grounds without embracing Kendi’s conception of “antiracism.” No organization can expect all employees or students to adhere to a single view on how to combat racism.

Kendi asserts that whether a policy is racist or antiracist is determined not by intent, but by outcome. But the fruits of any efforts toward addressing racial inequality may take years to materialize and assess.

In the meantime, the best that could come out of this particular reckoning would be a more nuanced and open-minded conversation around racism and a commitment to more diverse visions of how to address it.

Source: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with Ibram X. Kendi, John McWhorter, Pamela Paul

Paul: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Good column:

Elitism is a frequent target of criticism, especially in politics. Historically, Americans haven’t liked elitists. They don’t appreciate the hoity-toity who look down on everyone else.

These days that disdain emanates most vocally from the populist right. To these self-described down-to-earth folk without airs or fancy talk, “the elite” is shorthand for those who are more educated and have more power, especially cultural power, code for people they don’t agree with and resent.

But the left also has a beef with elitism. To those concerned with social inequity, “the elite” symbolize a flawed meritocracy. In their view, certain demographic groups get elevated over others and bar access to those historically deprived of power, especially political and economic power.

Whatever their respective merits, both critiques are hard not to read as variations on “I want what you have.” The word “elite,” after all, signifies something people aspire to. We admire elite athletes. We rely on elite research institutions to make medical advances. Most people wish they too could sit in first class. Until then, they hotly resent whoever does.

A more sophisticated and productive critique of elites comes from Fredrik deBoer, known to those who read his popular newsletter as Freddie. DeBoer, a Marxist, activist and the author of the book “The Cult of Smart,” is one of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s always thoughtful and he pushes me to think. I hope his new book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” will be read especially by those on the left, because the left is where his heart lies and the failings of the left seem to break his heart most. In this, he and I are fully aligned.

“It’s OK to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your own side,” he writes. “You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.” As deBoer points out, it’s far better for those of us on the left to clean up our own mess than to hand it over to conservatives as easy fodder for mockery. To that end, he scrutinizes the self-interests of the nonprofit industry, the “elite capture” of the Black Lives Matter movement, the neglect of class as a primary category of political thought and other failures and shortcomings among progressive movers.

What drives deBoer’s argument here is the idea that on the left, elites are undermining progress for the average Joe. Worse, they’re doing it in the name of progress. It’s time, he says, to forcefully question exactly what elites on the left claim is best for everyone else, especially when evidence suggests otherwise.

One of the bravest chapters in his new book examines the elitism of the defund the police movement, which, deBoer argues, hurts the cause of racial justice. Research shows more policing has reduced homicides, which disproportionately affect Black Americans. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the population but make up more than half of homicide victims. As deBoer explains, “police abolition and incremental efforts to reduce policing could easily result in more hardship for the very community that we’re ostensibly fighting for.”

In deBoer’s view, this misplaced enthusiasm for police abolition is largely a result of the economic and cultural gulf between elite activists of all races and the vast majority of Black Americans. What’s easy for radical activists and academics to write on a placard turns out to be hard for many Black Americans to actually live with. Taking police off the streets may minimize the possibility of police violence against Black people, but it will do little to mitigate the far greater problem of all other violence against Black people.

Many Black people, particularly outside of elite circles, are all too aware of this. As deBoer notes, “significant majorities of Black Americans want not less policing but better policing.” In 2022, Black Democrats were twice as likely as white Democrats to say reducing crime should be a top priority. A 2021 survey found that white liberals were more inclined than Black Americans to support defunding the police: “71 percent of white liberals say they would support reducing police budgets and shifting funding to social services,” compared with 53 percent of Black Americans; a significant 44 percent of Black people oppose it altogether.

Yet for many on the left, to point out these facts is considered sacrilege, somehow racist and essentially tantamount to serving the enemy. Many white progressives are so terrified of being labeled “racist” themselves that they prioritize self-protection and fear of their critics over helping out the very people they profess to want to help — people they may not understand well at all.

For deBoer, police violence and other problems of social justice require action from people of all races and ethnicities, rather than heeding the empty diktats of elite discourse. “I feel strongly that there must be a way — there must be a way — to take police violence against Black people immensely seriously and to fight for major police reform,” he writes, “while acknowledging that crimes and violence committed against Black people by those other than police are far more common.”

Last month I met deBoer for lunch near where he lives in Connecticut. He talked a lot about the class disparities of the state, which contains many of the wealthiest pockets in the nation alongside extreme poverty. He sees himself writing in the tradition of leftist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty and Adolph Reed. It seems to pain him that the left so often shoots itself in the foot.

When I asked why he wrote this book, he said, “I really do believe that we live in a country and a culture with deeply entrenched racial inequality, and all decent people have a duty to try to confront that inequality.” However, he emphasized, it’s not only something we have a moral duty to do — we also have a moral duty to do it well. The number of people who genuinely thought there was a chance of police abolition was very small, he told me. “But by making that a centerpiece of their demands, it allowed them to say afterward, ‘Look at how awful things are now, we didn’t go far enough.’”

It’s a way for the left, deBoer explained, to look like “a beautiful failure.”

DeBoer doesn’t consider himself an optimist, but he nonetheless doesn’t want to concede that kind of defeat. The left, he told me, needs to return to the “up from below” approach of the socialist politician Eugene Debs: It needs to invest in real change for those in need rather than heed elite rhetoric. To my ears, all this does sound quite optimistic, considering the polarized discourse and politics of 2023, where shouty or performative extremism often gets in the way of duller and more difficult action. But as deBoer says, a bottom-up approach may be the best, or only, option for meaningful social progress.

Source: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with elites, Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, left, Pamela Paul, The Cult of Smart

Paul: What It Means to Call Prostitution ‘Sex Work’

2023/08/18 Leave a comment

Of note, like many terminology changes that blur meanings. Reminds me of the 1986 movie Working Girls:

Last week at the National Organization for Women’s New York office, women’s rights advocates, anti-trafficking groups and former prostitutes convened to galvanize New Yorkers to take action against the city’s booming sex trade. In addition to arguing for enforcement of existing laws — and for the penalization of buyers and pimps as opposed to the women and children who are their victims — they wanted to send an important message about the language used around the problem.

“The media uses terms like ‘sex work’ and ‘sex worker’ in their reporting, treating prostitution as a job like any other,” said Melanie Thompson, a 27-year-old woman from New York City who introduced herself as a “Black sex-trafficking and prostitution survivor.” The language of “sex work,” Thompson argued, implies falsely that engaging in the sex trade is a choice most often made willingly; it also absolves sex buyers of responsibility. (My colleague Nicholas Kristof recently profiled Thompson, who now works for the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.)

“I urge the media to remove the terms ‘sex work’ and ‘sex worker’ from your style handbooks,” she said.

In reporting the event afterward, The New York Post used the term“sex workers.”

The Post is hardly alone. In what at first glance might seem like a positive (and possibly “sex positive”) move, the term “sex work” suddenly appears to be everywhere. Even outside academic, activist and progressive strongholds, “sex work” is becoming a widespread euphemism for “prostitution.” It can also refer to stripping, erotic massage and other means of engaging in the sex trade. It’s now commonly used by politicians, the media, Hollywoodand government agencies. But make no mistake: “Sex work” is hardly a sign of liberation.

Why, you might wonder, does exchanging money for sex need a rebrand? Derogatory terms like “hooker” and “whore” were long ago replaced by the more neutral “prostitute.” But “sex worker” goes one step further, couching it as a conventional job title, like something plucked out of “What Color Is Your Parachute?” Its most grotesque variant is the phrase “child sex worker,” which has appeared in a wide range of publications, including BuzzFeed, The Decider and The Independent. (Sometimes the phrase has been edited out after publication.)

The term “sex work” emerged several decades ago among radical advocates of prostitution. People like Carol Leigh and Margo St. James, who helped convene the first World Whores’ Congress in 1985, used “sex work” in an effort to destigmatize, legitimize and decriminalize their trade. Not surprisingly, this shift toward acceptability has been welcomed by many men, who make up a vast majority of customers. The term subsequently gained traction in academic circles and among other progressive advocacy groups, such as some focused on labor or abortion rights.

I first heard the term in the early ’90s while living in Thailand, where I offered to volunteer for an organization aimed at helping local women caught up in prostitution. I’d been in enough bars with friends where underage girls flung themselves onto my companions’ laps, showering them with compliments, encouraging them to drink. Just being present seemed like complicity in what felt like a mutually degrading ecosystem. We all knew many of these girls had been sold into sex slavery by their own desperately poor parents.

But rather than focus on challenging systems of exploitation, the organization I was planning to help, led largely by Western women, aimed to better equip “sex workers” to ply their trade, such as negotiating for more money. I changed my mind about volunteering. I certainly didn’t want to make life more difficult for girls and women caught up in prostitution rings, but I couldn’t in good conscience help perpetuate the system.

No advocacy worker wants to stigmatize the women or children who are trafficked or who resort to prostitution. Survivors of the sex trade should never be blamed or criminalized. Nor should the humanity of individuals working in the sex trade be reduced to what they do for money. Both opponents and advocates of the term “sex worker” share these goals. Many of those urging legitimacy for the sex trade also take a stand vehemently — and presumably without seeing any contradiction — against child labor, indentured servitude and slavery.

But as with those close competitors for the title of “oldest profession,” the reality of prostitution isn’t worth fighting for. Though data is often incomplete, given the difficulties of tracking a black market, research from those who work with survivors indicates that only a tiny minority of people actively want to remain in prostitution. Those who enter the sex trade often do so because their choices are sorely circumscribed. Most prostitutes are poor and are overwhelmingly women; many of them are members of racial minorities and immigrants; many are gay, lesbian or transgender. Many, if not most, enter the trade unwillingly or underage (one oft-cited statistic shows the most common age of entry is between 12 and 16; some have also disputed this). They are frequently survivors of abuse and often develop substance abuse problems. Many suffer afterward from post-traumatic stress disorder. To say that they deserve attention and compassion is to acknowledge the breadth of their experience, not to deny them respect nor cast them solely as victims.

That some prostitutes eventually come to terms with their situation does not mean that they would have chosen it if they had better options. Melanie Thompson, who was kidnapped and sold as a prostitute at age 13, said at the meeting last week that by age 16, she told herself prostitution was her own choice. “We had to believe that in order to continue to endure,” she explained.

The urge to maintain that illusion is understandable. The term “sex work” whitewashes the economic constraints, family ruptures and often sordid circumstances that drive many women to sell themselves. It flips the nature of the transaction in question: It enables sex buyers to justify their own role, allowing the purchase of women’s bodies for their own sexual pleasure and violent urges to feel as lightly transactional as the purchase of packaged meat from the supermarket. Instead of women being bought and sold by men, it creates the impression that women are the ones in power. It is understandable that some women prefer to think of themselves that way, and certainly a vocal portion of them do.

But we owe it to listen to the other side as well. “We are not here out of a sense of morality about sex,” said Alexander Delgado, the director of public policy at PACT, an organization working to end child trafficking and exploitation and which co-sponsored last week’s event (along with Mujeres en Resistencia NY/NJ, Voces Latinas, World Without Exploitation and several other organizations). “The sex trade is a place where violence occurs and not a place where work happens.”

At a time when labor rights have gained traction and the Me Too movement has raised awareness around sexual harassment and abuse, it’s important that activists choose their targets wisely. The momentum of their hard-won victories should not be misplaced. A small, often elite, minority of people who work happily in the sex trade shouldn’t dictate the terms for everyone else.

“Prostitution is neither ‘sex’ nor ‘work,’ but a system based on gender-based violence and socio-economic inequalities related to sex, gender, race and poverty that preys on the most marginalized among us for the profitable commercial sex industry,” Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, told me.

In recent years, language has undergone drastic shifts in an effort to reduce harm. Sometimes these shifts result in contorted language that obscures meaning. Sometimes these shifts make people feel better without changing anything of substance. And sometimes they do move the needle toward positive change, which is always welcome. But the use of “sex work,” however lofty the intention, effectively increases the likelihood of harm for a population that has already suffered so much. To help people hurt by the sex trade, we need to call it like it is.

Source: What It Means to Call Prostitution ‘Sex Work’

Filed under Other Tagged with Pamela Paul, prostitution, Working Girls

Paul: A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.

2023/05/05 Leave a comment

Agree with the concerns regarding the risks to scientific research:

Is a gay Republican Latino more capable of conducting a physics experiment than a white progressive heterosexual woman? Would they come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds?

For most people, the suggestion isn’t just ludicrous, it’s offensive.

Yet this belief — that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly — has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings. A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge.

This sounds entirely reasonable.

Yet the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another publication that passed on the paper, the authors report, described some of its conclusions as “downright hurtful.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issuewith the word “merit” in the title, writing that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.”

Instead, the paper has been published in a new journal called — you can’t make this up — The Journal of Controversial Ideas. The journal, which welcomes papers that “discuss well-known controversial topics from diverse cultural, philosophical, moral, political and religious perspectives,” was co-founded in 2021 by the philosopher Peter Singer and is entirely serious. This particular paper was rewritten multiple times and peer-reviewed before publication. However controversial one judges the paper’s claims, they deserve consideration.

According to its 29 authors, who are primarily scientists (including two Nobel laureates) in fields as varied as theoretical physics, psychology and pharmacokinetics, ideological concerns are threatening independence and rigor in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, the authors write, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.

Consider the increasingly widespread practice of appending a “positionality statement” to one’s research. This is an explicit acknowledgment by the author of an academic paper of his or her identity (e.g., “nondisabled,” “continuing generation”). Positionality statements were first popular in the social sciences and are now spreading to the hard sciences and medicine. The idea is that one’s race, sex, relative privilege and “experiences of oppression” inherently inform one’s research, especially in ways that perpetuate or alleviate bias.

But whatever validity “alternative ways of knowing,” “multiple narratives” and “lived experience” may have in the humanities, they are of questionable utility when it comes to the sciences. Some defenders of positionality statements maintain that these acknowledgments promote objectivity by drawing attention to a researcher’s potential blind spots, but in practice they can have the opposite effect, implying that scientific research isn’t universally valid or applicable — that there are different kinds of knowledge for different groups of people.

Another concern is the rise of “citation justice” — the attempt to achieve racial or gender balance in scholarly references. The purpose of a citation in an academic publication is to substantiate claims and offer the most relevant supporting research. Advocates of citation justice say these citations too often prioritize the work of white men. But in a field like chemistry, in which fewer than 30 percent of papers are written by women, according to data from the American Chemical Society, and where the foundational texts are almost entirely written by men, “justice” means disproportionately favoring studies by women, regardless of relevance. Many prominent science journals now recommend that before submission, authors run their papers through software programs that detect any citation bias.

A third worrisome development is the statements that researchers are often required to write in order to apply for faculty jobs (and to advance in those positions) describing their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, something my colleague John McWhorter, one of the paper’s authors, has written about in The Times. These are noble goals that in practice, however, can amount to discrimination, and such statements strike many as a kind of political litmus test. At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, in the hiring cycle from 2018 to 2019, three-quarters of applicants for faculty positions in the life sciences were eliminated on the basis of these statements alone. (Grant programs also often require applications for funding in the sciences to include D.E.I. goals.)

Of course, nobody wants to hire a racist. But that’s not what we’re talking about. For a prospective faculty member to say he is determined to treat all students equally rather than to advance diversity initiatives can be enough to count someone out of a job.

Marisol Quintanilla, an assistant professor of nematology at Michigan State University, was required to take a multiple choice D.E.I. test for continued employment, along with all faculty members; she was also asked to write a D.E.I. statement as part of her annual performance evaluations, which weigh heavily in the tenure process. Several designated answers in the test didn’t align with her religious or scientific beliefs, she said. The statement requirement was abandoned in March, but not without a protracted battle. “I’ve heard colleagues of mine saying they need to get rid of white men in academia,” Quintanilla, a Chilean immigrant of mixed ethnicity, told me. “It amounted to clear discrimination. I feel very uncomfortable with this because I think hiring the best qualified candidates would be best for the advancement of science.”

Those are just three troubling practices detailed in the new paper. Sadly, they are part of a much larger set of developments.

“What’s being advocated are philosophies that are explicitly anti-scientific,” Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “They deny that objective truth exists.” Having grown up in the Soviet Union, where science was infused with Marxist-Leninist ideology, Krylov is particularly attuned to such threats. And while she has advocated on behalf of equal treatment for women in science, she prefers to be judged on the basis of her achievements, not on her sex. “The merit of scientific theories and findings do not depend on the identity of the scientist,” she said in a phone interview.

It should go without saying — but in today’s polarized world, unfortunately, it doesn’t — that the authors of this paper do not deny the existence of historical racism or sexism or dispute that inequalities of opportunity persist. Nor do they deny that scientists have personal views, which are in turn informed by culture and society. They acknowledge biases and blind spots.

Where they depart from the prevailing ideological winds is in arguing that however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity. (A major study published last week shows that despite decades of sexism, claims of gender bias in academic science are now grossly overstated.) The focus, the authors write, should be on improving meritocratic systems rather than dismantling them.

At a time when faith in institutions is plummeting and scientific challenges such as climate change remain enduringly large, the last thing we want is to give the public reason to lose faith in science. A study published last month, “Even When Ideologies Align, People Distrust Politicized Institutions,” shows that what we need is more impartiality, not less.

If you believe bias is crucial to evaluating scientific work, you may object to the fact that several of the authors of the study are politically conservative, as are some of the researchers they cite. One author, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago and a critic of some affirmative action and diversity programs, inspired outcry in 2021 when he was invited to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But to deny the validity of this paper on that basis would mean succumbing to the very fallacies the authors so persuasively dismantle.

One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.

Source: A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with DEI, Journal of Controversial Ideas, Pamela Paul, Peter Singer, science

Paul: In Defense of J.K. Rowling

2023/02/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

“Trans people need and deserve protection.”

“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others but are vulnerable.”

“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.”

“I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.”

These statements were written by J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, a human-rights activist and — according to a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups — a transphobe.

Even many of Rowling’s devoted fans have made this accusation. In 2020, The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest “Harry Potter” fan sites, claimed that Rowling had endorsed “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” letting members know it would avoid featuring quotes from and photos of the author.

Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats.

Now, in rare and wide-ranging interviews for the podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” which begins next week, Rowling is sharing her experiences. “I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house where my kids live, and I’ve had my address posted online,” she says in one of the interviews. “I’ve had what the police, anyway, would regard as credible threats.”

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.

Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”

For the record, I, too, read all of Rowling’s books, including the crime novels written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and came up empty-handed. Those who have parsed her work for transgressions have objected to the fact that in one of her Galbraith novels, she included a transgender character and that in another of these novels, a killer occasionally disguises himself by dressing as a woman. Needless to say, it takes a certain kind of person to see this as evidence of bigotry.

This isn’t the first time Rowling and her work have been condemned by ideologues. For years, books in the “Harry Potter” series were among the most banned in America. Many Christians denounced the books’ positive depiction of witchcraft and magic; some called Rowling a heretic. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism,” says that she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.

Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases. She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling — the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy — explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.

The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology — such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context. Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?

“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.

“And I say that because I have seen it used that way,” Rowling continues. She says other women have told her they’ve been warned: “Look at what happened to J.K. Rowling. Watch yourself.”

Recently, for example, Joanna Cherry, a Scottish National Party lawmaker who is a lesbian and a feminist, publicly questioned Scotland’s passage of a “self-ID” law that would allow people to legally establish by mere declaration that they are women after living for only three months as a transgender woman — and without any need for a gender dysphoria diagnosis. She reported that she faced workplace bullying and death threats; she was also removed from her frontbench position in Parliament as spokeswoman for justice and home affairs. “I think some people are scared to speak out in this debate because when you do speak out, you’re often wrongly branded as a transphobe or a bigot,” she said.

Phelps-Roper told me that Rowling’s outspokenness is precisely in the service of this kind of cause. “A lot of people think that Rowling is using her privilege to attack a vulnerable group,” she said. “But she sees herself as standing up for the rights of a vulnerable group.”

Rowling, Phelps-Roper added, views speaking out as a responsibility and an obligation: “She’s looking around and realizing that other people are self-censoring because they cannot afford to speak up. But she felt she had to be honest and stand up against a movement that she saw as using authoritarian tactics.”

As Rowling herself notes on the podcast, she’s written books where “from the very first page, bullying and authoritarian behavior is held to be one of the worst of human ills.” Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she is sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered.

Social media is then leveraged to amplify those attacks. It’s a strategy Phelps-Roper recognizes from her days at Westboro. “We leaned into whatever would get us the most attention, and that was often the most outrageous and aggressive versions of what we believed,” she recalled.

It may be a sign of the tide turning that along with Phelps-Roper, several like-minded creative people — though generally those with the protection of wealth or strong backing from their employers — are finally braving the heat. In recent months and after silence or worse from some of the young actors whose careers Rowling’s work helped advance, several actors from the “Harry Potter” films, such as Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, have publicly defended the author.

In the words of Fiennes: “J.K. Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centered human being,” he said. “The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting. It’s appalling.”

Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulouswhen it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.”

In Britain the liberal columnist Hadley Freeman left The Guardian after, she said, the publication refused to allow her to interview Rowling. She has since joined The Sunday Times, where her first column commended Rowling for her feminist positions. Another liberal columnist for The Guardian left for similar reasons; after decamping to The Telegraph, she defended Rowling, despite earlier threats of rape against her and her children for her work.

Millions of Rowling’s readers no doubt remain unaware of her demonization. But that doesn’t mean that — as with other outlandish claims, whether it’s the Big Lie or QAnon — the accusations aren’t insidious and tenacious. The seed has been planted in the culture that young people should feel that there’s something wrong with liking Rowling’s books, that her books are “problematic” and that appreciating her work is “complicated.” In recent weeks, an uproar ensued over a new “Harry Potter” video game. That is a terrible shame. Children would do well to read “Harry Potter” unreservedly and absorb its lessons.

Because what Rowling actually says matters. In 2016, when accepting the PEN/Allen Foundation award for literary service, Rowling referred to her support for feminism — and for the rights of transgender people. As she put it, “My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to satanism, and I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.”

Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.

Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.

Source: Paul: In Defense of J.K. Rowling

Filed under gender Tagged with J.K. Rowling, Pamela Paul, transgender

← Older posts

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McWhorter: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter and Paul: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

Paul: What It Means to Call Prostitution ‘Sex Work’

Paul: A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.

Paul: In Defense of J.K. Rowling

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