Category Archives: Government Oppression

The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol dramatized the threat from the far right in a way that the United States hasnt seen since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. January 6 sharpened battle lines and intensified far-right militancyyet it also highlighted a number of questions and uncertainties that far-rightists are facing as they enter a new period, now that Donald Trump is no longer in the White House.

Removing Trumps twisted charisma from the picture might inflame factional infighting, but it might also clear the way for newer leaders with stronger organizational skills.

As President, Trump echoed and validated far-rightists more than any of his predecessors, with his racism and misogyny, demonization of political opponents, celebration of violence, and blatant authoritarian tendencies. In the final months of his administration, Trump refused to accept his electoral defeat, a stance that fueled far-right politics in a way no other President has done.

Tens of millions of people have bought into Trumps fraudulent claim that the vote was rigged, thereby calling into question the legitimacy of the U.S. government itself. The great majority of those who stormed the Capitol, according to one detailed study, had no apparent affiliation with far-right organizations, but rather were normal Trump supporters suddenly ready to use force to overturn a presidential election.

The far right has grown dramatically in recent months, but its newer adherents are not yet well organized, and their long-term commitment to the movement is uncertain.

Insurgency reflects the far rights contradictory relationship with the established order. Far-rightists want to bolster systems of oppression and exclusion that have been integral to U.S. society since the beginning. Yet theyre deeply angry at the status quo and the people in power.

Part of this anger comes from a fear of losing the relative social privilege and power they traditionally held over oppressed groups; another part comes from a sense of being beaten down and disenfranchised by elites. This double-edged anger coalesces into the belief that economic and political elites are using people of color, feminists, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people to weaken and destroy white Christian America.

Far-right anti-elitism is real, but it doesnt challenge real social or economic hierarchies. Rather, it takes peoples sense of disempowerment and channels it in ways that bolster inequality and oppression all the more.

The U.S. far right encompasses several different ideologies. Most notorious is white nationalism, an openly racist doctrine that literally aims to establish an all-white nation through migration, mass expulsion, or genocide. White nationalism is promoted by such groups as Patriot Front, but its less common among far-rightists than other ideologies that bolster racial oppression in ways that are easier for proponents to deny.

The Proud Boys, for example, advocate Western chauvinism (i.e., European cultural dominance) but also include people of color as members; notably, the groups current leader, Enrique Tarrio, identifies as Afro-Cuban. The Oath Keepers, a leading Patriot movement group, routinely scapegoat and demonize Muslims and immigrants but uphold color-blind ideology, which reinforces racial oppression by denying that its there.

Other major far-right ideologies dont center on race at all. The theocratic wing of the Christian right wants to take dominion over society, meaning that it advocates a form of supremacism based on religion rather than race. One of the largest theocratic formations, the New Apostolic Reformation movement, has a multiracial membership and active branches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Christian right mobilization efforts have largely centered on issues of gender and sexuality through campaigns opposing abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

Another type of far-right ideology is conspiracism, which interprets political and social conflict primarily in terms of imagined plots by sinister cabals. The QAnon movement, which claims that a network of satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles secretly controls the Democratic Party and many key institutions, is only the most recent well-publicized incarnation.

Conspiracism can be found in most branches of the far right. Its roots trace back to the long history of antisemitism but also numerous anti-Catholic, homophobic, and anticommunist witch hunts that have occurred repeatedly in U.S. history.

The Patriot (or militia) movement, which fears a plot by globalist elites to impose tyranny on the United States, draws from all of these ideological currents and adds another: the glorification of individual property rights. This is the belief that freedom is fundamentally about owning and controlling property without government regulation or limits. Property rights ideology is an expression of class privilege because it bases peoples civic worth on whether or not they are owners.

How will these ideologies interact in the months and years ahead? Which themes and beliefs will gain ground within the far right, especially among newer members?

Ideological diversity sometimes fuels sectarian conflict. Yet several of the U.S. far rights biggest upsurges of the past forty years have been powered by different ideologies converging and interacting in dynamic ways. In the weeks following the November 2020 election, the pro-Trump Stop the Steal movement provided an umbrella for such convergence, as QAnon conspiracists, Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis not only marched together but began to borrow each others slogans and symbols.

Beyond ideology, the events of January 6 and Trumps departure from the White House two weeks later raise a number of questions about the mindset of far-rightists and how they view their current situation. These questions can help us understand some of the movements internal dynamics and possible courses of action.

One question is how far-rightists regard the January 6 Capitol takeover. Strictly speaking, if its aim was to overturn Bidens election and keep Trump in the White House, then the attack failed. This led to what observers called confusion, disillusionment, and infighting among hardcore Trump supporters, some of whom coped with their sense of defeat by claiming, absurdly, that the Capitol takeover had been orchestrated by antifa posing as Stop-the-Steal activists.

To other far-rightists, however, the Capitol attack was a heroic moment, a mass action that brought Congress to a standstill for hours and sent politicians a warning they could not ignore. One Patriot activist described January 6 as one of the most powerful things that I was ever a part of and will ever be a part of.

The event gave the movement a martyr in Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer when she tried to enter the building, bolstering calls for greater militancy and commitment. A post-Trump upsurge of far-right violence was already likely, and the polarizing effects of January 6 intensify this, whether through heightened enthusiasm or growing desperation.

Another question facing far-rightists is whether Donald Trump will continue to be a rallying figure going forward. During his presidency, far-right attitudes toward Trump diverged widely. At one extreme, most QAnon supporters viewed him in superhuman, messianic terms. Christian theocrats often compared Trump to Cyrus in the Biblean unbeliever who nonetheless served as an instrument of God.

Yet many members of the alt-right, whose skillful online activism in 2016 helped Trump win the nomination and the presidency, quickly came to believe that he failed to deliver most of his promises on immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

The attitude of some on the far right shifted after January 6. Many Proud Boys, previously staunch supporters, called Trump weak and a total failure for agreeing to leave office and for dissociating himself from the violence at the Capitol, while many QAnon followers felt betrayed by his failure to arrest Democrats and other opponents en masse, as they had predicted he would do. Yet some alt-rightists hope that Trump might now be more effective at combating the conservative establishment than he had been as President.

Donald Trump got eleven million more votes in 2020 than he did four years earlier, despite his disastrous handling of the pandemic and the recession, among other failings. He remains popular within the Republican Party and among forces further to the right.

Yet its unclear whether he will continue to play an active leading role, which has mixed implications for his movement. Removing Trumps twisted charisma from the picture might inflame factional infighting, but it might also clear the way for newer leaders with stronger organizational skills.

The Capitol takeover raised major questions concerning far-rightists attitudes towardand relations withthe police. The January 6 attackers physically assaulted more than a hundred Capitol Police officers, one of whom was attacked with a chemical spray and died from a stroke the next day. Yet they also carried thin blue line flags, and some off-duty cops are believed to have participated in the attack.

Those on the far right have long tended to support local cops but oppose federal law enforcement, yet deeper complexities are involved.

Solidarity with police became a far-right rallying point in the spring and summer of 2020, in the face of the Black-led mass protests against police violence after the murder of George Floyd. Yet members of the boogaloo movement rejected President Trumps law-and-order rhetoric and called instead for cops to be killed, to help further their movements goal of provoking a civil war. Boogaloo activists stepped up these calls after the Capitol takeover.

Other far-right groups have shifted in their attitudes toward law enforcement. The Proud Boys, founded in 2016, initially positioned themselves as a vigilante arm of the Republican Party and enjoyed friendly relations with police. But after the November 2020 election, they found themselves in physical confrontations with cops, notably at a New Years Day protest in Salem, Oregon, after which members of the group made a show of stomping on a thin blue line flag.

The Patriot movements relationship with police is more complex. Some leading groups within the movement (the Oath Keepers, and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association) specifically recruit members of law enforcement. But the movement also has a history of armed confrontations with cops, most dramatically the 2014 standoff at Cliven Bundys ranch. Clivens son Ammon Bundy leads the group Peoples Rights, which has promoted the belief that the county sheriff is the only legitimate law enforcement official.

Given this complicated background, its likely that many far-rightists, especially newly radicalized activists, are uncertain or conflicted in their attitudes toward police. This will likely continue to be a point of significant debate.

But the far right is certain to remain a serious force, because its supremacist and exclusionary politics speak to widely held fears and, in distorted ways, address real social tensions and problems.

It would be a serious mistake to rely on the state repressive apparatus to stop this threat. As Cloee Cooper noted in a February 22 article on Progressive.org, The mechanisms of repression and policing aimed at suppressing the far right inevitably get turned on communities of color and the left.

Instead, we need grassroots-based organizing and activism to confront organized far-right forces and defend communities that are under attack, with space for people to act in different ways and with different politicsmilitant and nonmilitant, leftist and nonleftist.

At the same time, we cant let the insurgent far right present itself as the only real oppositional force. We must offer liberatory visions and strategies that speak to the disempowerment and isolation that most people in this society experience to varying degrees, and that the far right feeds on.

Against the far rights twisted anti-elitism founded on bogus conspiracy theories, supremacism, and exclusion, we must offer radical critiques based on systemic analysis, egalitarianism, and solidarity.

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After the Storm - Progressive.org - Progressive.org

For the inaugural kickoff of THR Talks a new Hollywood Reporter series in which an of-the-moment artist is put together with a cultural or political figure for a dialogue that goes deeper than the usual conversation Andra Day and Roxane Gay plunged effortlessly into in-depth, far-ranging discussion, with THR editorial director Nekesa Mumbi Moody listening in. Oscar-nominated actress and social commentator Day did not hold back when it came to unpacking racial inequality in the opioid "epidemic" (and the Derek Chauvin trial), white supremacy in textbooks and in what American children are taught, and why Stacey Abrams and the iconic jazz singer of "Strange Fruit" share political DNA.

ROXANE GAY I was watching the movie and thinking about how oftentimes it seems like suffering brings a dimension to art that we don't seem to find in other ways. Do you think that Billie Holiday's suffering is what made her such an amazing artist?

ANDRA DAY I'd like to be like, "No, she could have done it without suffering," because I love her. But of course it's a part of art. It's reflective of the times and our experiences. It's healing, also. I think that music's design is healing at its core. I'll never forget about the scripture I read about waters [that] could only be healed with someone playing the lyre. So yeah, [suffering] was a part of her music, because it was a part of her story and what was challenging for her but also strengthened her. But I don't think it's a darkness. I think it's a healing from that pain that really makes art birthed from pain so potent and so powerful.

GAY That's an interesting way of thinking about it, because we tend to think of pain as dark and we don't necessarily know what's on the other side. One of the things that we saw throughout the movie was that Billie Holiday struggled, like many people, with addiction, and at the same time, that wasn't the whole of her story. What did you do as an actor to get to know her beyond what we knew about the worst of her life?

DAY I mean, I have to say that my research and my getting to know her really started before becoming an actor in this movie. I've been a fan since I was 11 years old. So I started with her music and then went into her relationship with her band members. Then the story about her life, from where she was born, her losing her father to Jim Crow because no hospitals would take him and her being raised in a brothel. So my study of her goes way back. And I think in that study of her, you find out about addiction, about mental illness from trauma, the underlying causes of addiction. Addiction is a way to remedy and to cope in a way, to stave off the pain.

And in the study of addiction and mental illness, you have to study the intersectionality of race, and how Black people have been portrayed in this realm, how we've been criminalized. When I look at drug addicts and their criminality, I often see Black and brown faces, right? And so then you [see the racial component in] the war on drugs. It's this evolving thing that you begin to see this huge fractal of oppression and intention to criminalize Black bodies, which dates all the way back to the Emancipation.

GAY When you look at the way in which the FBI had targeted her, and I think went about it in a really criminal way, it's interesting to see that it's been more than half a century and nothing really has changed, at least for Black and brown people. Did that impact your portrayal, thinking about how history is also part of our present day?

DAY Yes, absolutely. You mentioned that the FBI did it in a criminal way. The FBI does everything in a criminal way. That is the nature of the FBI. I think that that's something that really needs to be dealt with in the nation, too. J. Edgar Hoover being the source of that. This was a man who was incredibly racist and homophobic and sexist. So everything was flawed about the procuring of information, of intel.

We filmed the movie at the end of 2019, so this is pre-George Floyd, but this was not pre-Kalief Browder, pre-Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. This is not pre-Malcolm X. There is a relevance here today. We don't even have to go back to Holiday's time to see that. We're seeing a really crystalizing example of it right now. The opioid epidemic considered an epidemic because it is affecting white kids stopped being an epidemic and became criminalized yet again during the George Floyd case. It became used against George Floyd. We are here right now in 2021, and there are the two different portrayals of addiction to the same drug.

I think we need to change the way we look at addiction and it needs to be treated as a mental illness. And we need to speak very, very honestly about race and justice when it comes to addiction, and to acknowledge that, yes, this has been something that has been used against Black people to criminalize and monetize, ultimately, their bodies.

GAY Absolutely. The prison industrial complex is predicated on abusing Black bodies and profiting off of them. It seems like nobody in power is willing to have that conversation, even though that conversation desperately needs to be had. We can see some of that playing out right now with the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis. I'm all for due process, but it's truly outrageous that we have video [on Derek Chauvin]. We know what this man did. Why are we talking about it?

DAY I agree with you. We've actually got to change what due process is.

GAY Due process has never really served us at all.

DAY Never. So those things have to be gutted. Our nation's foundations have to be unthreaded so that we can sew a new, equal fabric that's really based on principles of justice and equality of the greater good. So it's a difficult reconciling, I guess, for a lot of people.

GAY Do you think it's possible for us to get to this place where we rethink justice and really unravel a lot of the foundations of this country?

DAY I have to believe it's possible. That comes from my faith perspective. We have to hold out hope for those triumphs and victories. I see a lot of hope in the younger generation. I think truth is going to be a huge, huge part of that. The reason this Billie Holiday story is resonating with people so much is that she represented truth. "Strange Fruit," the song, represented truth in a system that is built on deception and suppressing the narrative. If it's built on lies, truth [is] probably the only thing that can dismantle it.

GAY It was clear that truth is definitely dangerous because of the ways that the United States tried to suppress the song. She had this streak of social justice in her and was interested in using art for political ends. Why do you think it's taken so long for us to recognize that she used her music to fight for the greater good?

DAY It's taken so long because it was meant to never be known. This has everything to do with controlling narrative this is what Hoover did, what [FBI agent] Harry J. Anslinger did. Billie Holiday was globally famous. But she was using her platform to speak out about racial terror and lynching in America. And she was integrating audiences. She was using her voice to sort of push legislation, The Emmett Till Antilynching bill, which still hasn't been passed today. So the reality is we didn't know because we weren't supposed to know. We didn't know because textbooks are designed to continue white supremacy, right? In schools and colleges. I didn't know about [the women of] Hidden Figures because we weren't supposed to know. I didn't know for a long time that Black people were kept in zoos. I didn't know that a slave netted us our independence as a nation, his great act. Billie Holiday was a threat to a system of racial inequality. So we were only supposed to know her as a tragic addict who wasted her life on drugs, which could not be further from the truth.

The reality is, I don't think that Billie Holiday was stepping in to be like, "I'm going to be a hero of civil rights" and whatever. She was just a human. You hear her talk about it very matter-of-factly. She's like, "Well, it's not right, man." She's just like, "You shouldn't be lynching people. People should not be segregated. We should not be treated unfairly, and there should be racial equity." And so, she was a very empathetic person. I don't think she had a choice. If she wanted to think as a free Black queer woman, that alone was a huge challenge to the system.

GAY Absolutely. White supremacy does try to keep a lot of important historical knowledge from us. So where do you go to educate yourself beyond what we're taught in schools and the mainstream media?

DAY Fortunately, we have the internet, though you have to vet a lot of things that you read. Which is another tricky thing because I go test my information against this encyclopedia or whatever, and I'm like, "But you forget those things are dictated by white people." Even what we would test the accuracy of information and events [against] is all based off of the standards and narrative of the white male patriarchy. So I often see people talk about Black stories and say, "That's not true because I looked at the Library of Congress," and I'm like, "Well, that could be your first mistake."

For me, it comes from reading the books of my ancestors. Reading Angela Davis' work and her research. Reading Assata Shakur's work and her research and life experiences. Listening to our grandparents, and doing research on what they're telling us against things that we know have happened. People who were there, oftentimes, are the things that I find the most informative.

GAY It's funny. I have a podcast [Hear to Slay], and my co-host [Tressie McMillan Cottom] and I were talking today about how you can't get all of your information from a single book, because everything is incomplete, and it's up to us to flesh out the whole picture. So, yeah, you've been doing that through that work.

DAY And it's sort of like semantics as well, right? Just how things are portrayed. Like, when white men commit terrorism in America. It's just described as murder or it's not described as a hate crime.

GAY Right, or a lone wolf.

DAY Exactly. We recently just [saw] Soul of a Nation [ABC's six-part doc series on the Black experience in America]. It was such an amazing program, and I'm so glad they talked about Tulsa, Oklahoma Black Wall Street. It gets in me when I hear people refer to Tulsa as a race riot, because a riot implies two sides. That was not a riot. That was a massacre. That was genocide. That was a holocaust. We murdered an entire city of people. They were bombing and killing them. So it's also paying attention to those little details about how you describe things.

GAY It is, and unfortunately, we live in a culture that does not always appreciate nuance and/or take the time to think about language. I'm a writer, so of course I think this, but language really does matter. And the ways in which we talk about Black history, in particular, matter, because when it's framed from a position of white supremacy, it seems one way, and then when it's framed from a position of actual reality, it's a completely different way.

DAY Yeah, I always reference my young cousin. I was taking care of him when he was here, and his textbooks are framed around not just white culture, but white supremacy. That is where they come from. Often, the biggest manufacturer of textbooks is Texas, so think about that agenda there alone.

GAY Texas has a ridiculous stronghold on the textbook industry, and they actually dictate a lot of the curricula children across the country learn, including curricula that try to make slavery seem like, "Oh, it was just a bad day. It was like hard work."

DAY Do you believe what's said in my young cousin's textbook? It says, "Slavery, a difficult situation." And the book did everything it could to paint the slaves as lazy and complaining about having to work hard in the hot sun. When you see stuff like that, you go, "We have to pay attention to the details, because the details are what's going to dictate to future generations what actually happened." So, yes, I agree with you 100 percent there. I told him, "Uh-uh. I'm going to call your teacher. Put that book down. I'm going to teach you history about slavery."

GAY I think one of the best ways that we can continue to teach young people, people of all ages for that matter, is through stories. Why do you think it's important that the right people tell stories like this?

DAY First of all, if you don't tell stories like this, then you cannot actually move forward. You can't progress as a society, as a culture. You can't heal, you can't get better. Ultimately you destroy yourself. It is integral to survival, in my opinion. We can't grow to racial equality if we're not telling the truth.

If it was that important to them at the time to slaveholders on down to the Hoovers, the Anslingers of the world and the Reagans to control the narrative and to lie about our stories, it's got to be that important for us to tell the truth. The only thing that can dismantle a system of oppression is truth.

Because for future generations, it goes, "Well, how can I be mad at Black people if a Black person helped America become an independent nation with the sacrifice of [James Armistead] Lafayette, infiltrating the enemy camp and rerouting troops as a spy?" That is such a dangerous act. He was willing to give up his life for people that enslaved him. So when you know the truth about that, I think it's, "Well, I can't hate that guy." It is harder to hate someone when you have access to the depth of their struggle, their contribution, and their triumph.

GAY So the movie has done very well, and you won the Golden Globe. Congratulations. How do you process that kind of acclaim? Are you competitive? Do you want these kinds of recognitions?

DAY I'm probably the opposite of that a little bit. I am extremely appreciative. I always think about this scripture that discourages competition. And I love that. Because competition is very much a human nature thing. We believe that we have to do this in order to survive, that there's not space for everyone. But the reality is, if we're here, that there is space for everyone. There's this scripture that says, "Don't work as if working unto man," like to beat man, "but work as if working unto the Lord," which is a much higher standard in self-accountability.

To me, it just thrashes this idea that you and I are in competition, especially when it comes to Black women. So I'm going to work hard. To me, even when I look at my fellow nominees, I don't say, "They're competitors." We're sharing the space together, and we're representing different stories. As far as continuing in it, I'll probably do a little more acting, but I look forward to hitting the background and doing some writing and developing.

GAY What kind of writing do you do?

DAY Music and poetry. And right now it's screenwriting.

GAY Oh, fantastic.

DAY It's new, so I don't have any sort of misconceptions about like, "I am just going to dive in, get it right away." Really, I write everything the same way I write lyrics or poetry. I dump everything out, every single idea. Research, research, research, dump, dump, dump. Then I begin to form and craft it from there. So I'm in that phase of dumping everything right now, trying out ideas. It's actually a limited series that I'm working on. Ultimately, I want to get with a great experienced screenwriter. I don't need to be the one to tell it top to bottom. I want people who are experienced, who are Black and who are preferably female, but also allies as well.

GAY Who are some of the political or artistic or other voices that have stood out to you in this moment?

DAY I've started with the artists of my community. There are some rappers and some singers. Geminelle Rollins, from southeast San Diego, where I'm from. Ryan Anthony, Marty McFly. Just people that are from my neighborhood, Black people. There's also a girl I went to high school with, Joshlyn [Turner], who has a juice truck. She's trying to get healthy food and healthy juice into the community. It's called The Write Juice. So really first start supporting those businesses by making people aware of them. I have people from multiple ethnicities and backgrounds on my team, but really being targeted and focused on hiring and working with Black talent. I've done work actually with the amazing Michelle Obama. So I feel like I could just stop right there.

GAY I mean, I think that's a mic drop. That covers it.

DAY Yeah. To be available for her efforts in what she's doing as far as educating girls. Not just girls of color, but girls all over the world who have been denied education. That was the Let Girls Learn campaign. I mean, Stacey Abrams is another one as well.

GAY She's incredible. They literally are redoing the voter repression laws. And what they don't realize is she can outthink them every single day of the week. This kind of thing emboldens Black people.

DAY This is where I go back right to Billie Holiday. That is the same DNA. That is why they had to shut her up. You know what I mean? Because she is the DNA that is in Stacey Abrams; [the Republican-led revisions to voting rules] are a direct response to Stacey Abrams registering millions of voters. She just did the right thing. Someone said in an interview not too long ago: "You would think the government, the FBI, had more important things to do than go after Billie Holiday." I said, "Well, that depends on your goals. Their goals are to continue white supremacy, racial oppression, systemic inequality. So if those are your goals, then Stacey Abrams got to go. Right? Billie Holiday got to go." Absolutely dangerous. I'm so inspired by her and her efforts.

GAY So we're coming out of the pandemic, hopefully. What are you looking ahead to, as we all get vaccinated and life hopefully returns to a different kind of normal that maybe isn't as messed up as the previous normal?

DAY First thing I look forward to is vacation. I'm going to head somewhere and take a little bit of a break. Seeing family again, just connecting with people. A big thing. I'm looking forward to in-person, right? Showing up and saying yes, and being present for certain opportunities and things that come along, and just seeing what happens. I'm hoping, as far as socially, that we hit the ground running. And then just turn up. You know what I'm saying? Everybody just turn the fuck up, and have a good time.

GAY I mean, I have never been more ready. This year is going to be the Summer Freaknik. Let's go!

DAY It's on! It's on and popping! You let me know, are we in New York? Are we in L.A.?

GAY Oh, we're in L.A. We're going to enjoy the sun. We're going to have some friends. I just have some lighter questions. What was your favorite book as a child?

DAY You know what I liked when I was young? I liked a lot of those scary stories. It was R.L. Stine.

GAY I think R.L. Stine has written like 150 books.

DAY I don't know why, because I hate scary movies and scary stories. So I'm this dumb kid, right? Why would I torture myself? As a kid, it was terrifying. You were reading every single word, so it was happening in your head at the same time. I wish I could be sophisticated, like, "I only read Langston Hughes as a child."

GAY I wouldn't believe anyone who said that. What did you want to be at that age, when you grew up?

DAY Always a singer. Always an entertainer. There was never a plan B. Although I had random moments where I'm like, "Mom, dad, I think I'm going to be a paleontologist." They'd be like, "OK, girl."

GAY What's the best piece of advice you've been given?

DAY From my parents, and it is to not let fear dictate my decisions. Fear is a liar. To not let fear decide what I'm going to do for me.

GAY Lastly, what do you like most about your work and what you do?

DAY I like the people. Yeah, people do some crazy shit sometimes. But again, I don't want fear of somebody screwing me over to dictate how I interact with people. I think that has to do with my faith. It says, "Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself." I love loving my neighbor, and I love being loved by my neighbor. I like people, their experiences. It's enriching to me. Most of the time. Even when you meet somebody who you're like, "I'm not supposed to engage with them anymore," you're still enriched because now you know that.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in the April 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Originally posted here:

THR Talks: Andra Day and Roxane Gay in Conversation About Suffering in Art and Racism in Addiction - Hollywood Reporter

Struggle stalwart Charlotte Maxeke has this Freedom Month, been remembered as a strong and selfless woman.

On Wednesday, ahead of the annual Freedom Day commemoration, a virtual panel discussion was organised by the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) to mark the life and times of Maxeke as a freedom fighter.

The panellists described Maxeke as a woman who was always determined to work for others.

Dr Musawenkosi Donia Saurombe, from the Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke Institute (CMMI), said Maxeke had made an enormous contribution to the improvement of people's lives, particularly women.

Maxeke was selfless. "Charlotte continued to be a selfless character. She was a pioneer."

Saurombe said it was important for women to follow in Maxeke's footsteps and emulate her determination to challenge the status quo.

The Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke Institute (CMMI) is a family initiative born out of the desire to preserve, promote, elevate and leverage the legacy left behind by Mme Charlotte.

Maxeke was a South African religious leader, social and political activist; she was the first black woman to graduate with a university degree in South Africa with a BSc from Wilberforce University Ohio in 1903, as well as the first black African woman to graduate from an American university.

Born on 7 April 1871, she was the only woman who attended the launch of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in Bloemfontein in 1912.

She witnessed the 1878-1879 last Frontier war, the battle of Isandlwana in 1879, the battle of Adwa in Ethiopia, 1896, the Pan African Congress and the Bhambatha Rebellion of 1906.

She and other selfless women of her generation fought against oppression at a time when such defiance was met with unrelenting force.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the struggle icon and Freedom Month is being celebrated under the theme "The Year of Charlotte Maxeke: the Meaning of Freedom under COVID-19".

Government has called on everyone to use the Freedom Month and Freedom Day celebrations to pull together and continue to fight COVID-19 while striving for greater inclusion and social cohesion.

As the government has declared 2021 the year to remember Maxeke, Dr Saurombe said the CMMI had planned a number of programmes and activities to commemorate the life and times of the struggle icon.

Zubeida Jaffer, an award-winning South African journalist and activist, is the author of 'Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke'.

She wrote the book over a period of three years.

"I believe more could be written about Charlotte. There are many big moments that people can read about her," Jaffer said.

Jaffer told other panellists that Maxeke used to teach herd boys at night while continuing to do her other activities. "Often it is the small things that we make that impact on other people's lives," she said.

Reshoketswe Mosuwe, the President of the 19th Episcopal District Women's Missionary Society A.M.E Church, said she was humbled and proud to be following in Maxeke's footsteps.

"We believe that she still lives in us," Mosuwe said.

Mosuwe was invited to speak about the life and times of Maxeke as a church leader and as a spiritual woman in the A.M.E church.

Maxeke was greatly influenced by AMEC.

She became the organiser of the Women's Mite Missionary Society in Johannesburg and then moved to the Polokwane (then Pietersburg) area. There she joined her family in Dwaars River, under Chief Ramakgopa, who gave her money to start a school.

With regards to gender-based violence, Mosuwe called on everyone to fight the scourge. "She was a fighter and fighting gender-based violence is part of honouring her," she said.

(With Inputs from South African Government Press Release)

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Charlotte Maxeke remembered as strong woman this Freedom Month - Devdiscourse

Motivation for the assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Ankara, remains shrouded in mystery five years after off-duty Turkish police officer Mevlut Mert Altintas committed the crime during the opening of an art exhibition in Ankara on December 19, 2016. Chaos ensued when Altintas (circled in the photo below) calmly pulled out his duty gun and fired at least eight rounds, shouting in Arabic and Turkish, Allahu Akbar! Dont forget Aleppo. Dont forgetSyria. Unless our towns are secure, you wont enjoy security. Only death can take me from here. Everyone who is involved in this suffering will pay the price.

Speculation about why Altintas acted as he did have run the gamut, but three theories have come to the forefront. First, Turkish government officials blame the Gulen movement, which they designated as a terrorist organization right after the suspicious July 15, 2016, coup attempt. Second, Altintas, who was opposed to increasing economic ties between Turkey and Russia and opposed to Russias support for the Assad regime in Syria, operated as a lone actor. Third, suspicion has been cast on the Kurds who are fighting against ISIS. The leaders of both Turkey and Russia were prudent in their statements after the assassination. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said,I describe this attack on Russias embassy as an attack to Turkey, Turkeys state and nation, while President Vladimir Putin said that the crime was a provocation designed to spoil relations between Russia and Turkey and derail the peace process in Syria.

As might have been expected, the Second Heavy Penal Court of Ankara, which announced its verdict in the assassination case on March 9, 2021, said that the Gulen movement was complicit in Karlovs death. Russia and experts of the Western world, however, do not support the Turkish governments theory. This article attempts to shed light on the indictmentsTurkey issued in the Karlov case and delves into questions related to the Gulen theory and the lone-actor theory that need to be reinvestigated. The Kurdish theory is not addressed here because no evidence exists to even suggest that such a scenario is plausible.

Turkeys Accusations in the Indictment

Like it had done with other investigations of notable attacks in Turkey since the anti-corruption scandals came to light in late 2013, the court accused Fethullah Gulen and his movement of plotting the assassination of Karlov and persuading Altintas to commit the crime. Before examining the details of Karlovs indictment, however, it is necessary to explain how the Turkish justice system works and why the investigation and prosecution of notable attacks always have the same scapegoats: former police officers, former military personnel, and Gulenists. The December 2013 anti-corruption investigations, which used solid evidence to implicate Erdogan, his family members, and Erdogans cabinet, is a prime example. Erdogan accused allegedly Gulenist police officers to plot a scheme to overthrow the government and oust Erdogan from power. Furious about such an unconvincing plan, Erdogan responded by launching a retaliatory crackdown against the Gulenists and subjecting all members of the movement to relentless oppression.

Erdogans implacable grudge against Gulen has harmed the credibility of Turkeys justice system because, now, every investigation is directed to conclude that Gulenists were somehow the perpetrators. This hijacking of the Turkish justice system helps to explain why Turkey was ranked near the bottom of the constraints on government powers category in the 2020Rule of Law Index. The World Justice Project compiles the index each year and reflects how the influential nonprofit civil society organization perceives 128 countries adherence to the rule of law. Turkey ranked 124th on the list.

The governments disregard for the rule of law in Turkey has meant the demise of bottom-up investigations that aimed to collect evidence and then identify the suspect and the rise of top-down investigations that name the suspect first and then fabricate evidence against the predetermined suspect. Prosecutors now routinely use copy-and-paste indictments filled with fabricated evidence presented by intelligence officials. Prosecutors who were opposed to the directives promulgated by Erdogan and his government were accused of being members of a terrorist organization and then put in jail. The indictments prepared after the 2013anti-corruption scandals were no different and include many contradictions that Western countries consider to be suspicious.

Suspicious Investigations by Turkeys Judicial System

An examination of how the prosecution and conviction systems work in Turkey suggests a pattern of subterfuge that undermines the credibility of the governments indictment of Altintas for the assassination of Karlov. That pattern involves the use of fabricated and dubious evidence and the statements of secret so-called witnesses provided by intelligence officials and the police for the sole purpose of indicting a perceived enemy of the government. Prosecutors are complicit in the charade, signing the bogus indictments and referring them to the court without question.

The police investigation that targeted members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a case in point. During this investigation, the police collected solid evidence about the spying activities of IRGC members in Turkey and how they had targeted the U.S. Consulate in Turkey. The government, however, ignored the evidence and shut down the investigation. In another case, the government shutdown a police investigation that targeted the Tahsiye Group, an al Qaeda-affiliated organization led by Mehmet Dogan. Dogan had become a target of the law enforcement when, during a speech, he praised Osama Bin Laden and told his followers that they have a binding duty (fardh) to join Osama Bin Ladens army in Afghanistan. In a third case, the government relentlessly punished the police investigators who examined several trucks that belonged to Turkeys Intelligence Office. The investigators found that the trucks contained arms and explosives destined for jihadist groups in Syria. Despite solid evidence and video footage showing arms hidden inside the trucks, the government shut down the case. In yet another case, the government shut down the December 17 and 25, 2013 anti-corruption investigations that implicated Erdogan, his family, and members of his cabinet. Reza Zarrab, the money launderer for the corrupt government officials, transported$20 billion to Iran on a route through Turkey at a time when the European Union and the United States had imposed embargoes on Iran for its ambition to possess nuclear weapons. The police had proved that Zarrab was giving bribes worth millions of euros and dollars to Turkeys bureaucrats and ministers, but the government disregarded the evidence and released Zarrab and his accomplices. Zarrab, however, was arrested in the United States on March 19, 2016. At Zarrabs trial, the U.S. prosecutors were able to use all of the evidenceincluding wiretappingsthat the Turkish police had collected within the scope of their corruption investigations from three years ago and which the Turkish government alleged that they had been fabricated by the Turkish police investigators. A fifth case involves the conviction of police officers who allegedly had ignored the killing of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007. The court announced its verdict on March 2021; however, Dinks family and the familys lawyers believed that the investigation had overlooked critical elements and were not satisfied with the courts decision. The common thread that ties these five cases together is the governments adamant contentiondespite clear evidence to the contrarythat all the defendants were Gulenists who deserved lengthy, and even lifelong, prison sentences.

The outcome of the governments investigation of the July 15, 2016, coup attempt differed slightly from its usual strategy. This time, the government accused not only Gulenists but also Americans of plotting the failed coup. Evidence uncovered since then, however, indicates the July 15 coup attempt was one of the most suspicious events of Turkeys history. Some high level politicians in Turkey have said that Erdogan knew about the coup in advance and did not try to stop it because he believed the fallout from a coup would be to his benefit. The coup, therefore, was not a failed coup but rather a fake coup. The authors previous articles about the coup emphasizes the idea that a small group of military personnel who were provoked into staging a badly orchestrated coup and paid a colossal cost for doing so, as Erdogan used the event to undermine Turkeys democracy and turn a democracy into an authoritarian regime.

Details and Questions from the Altintas Indictment

The prosecutor accused 28 suspects in a 600-page indictment and concluded that Gulen was the number one suspect. According to the indictment, the prosecutor made the following accusations:

The following questions still need to be answered:

Now the Second Theory: Was Altintas a Lone Actor Inspired by al Qaeda Ideology?

The second theory contends that, in his effort to punish Russia for of its involvement in the Syrian conflict, Altintas acted on his own volition when he assassinated Karlov. Such lone-actor terrorism has been a threat to the world since the early 2010s. Individuals who engage in lone-actor terrorism operate according to their own timetable, are not directed by any terrorist leader or terrorist organization, and may be inspired by one or more radical ideologies. Most lone actors, however, have been inspired by ideologies of either al Qaeda or ISIS. Given that Altintas was a self-radicalized individual with close ties to SDV and given that the Syrian branch of al Qaeda, al Nusra Front,has claimed responsibility for Karlovs assassination, proponents of the second theory believe that their interpretation of assassins motivation has more credibility than any other proposed theory.

Altintas Radicalization

Details in the prosecutors indictment of Altintas provides clues about how Altintas was self-radicalized. Various models explain how individuals are radicalized, and, according to one of them, radicalization is a four-step process: (1) pre-radicalization, (2) conversion and identification, (3) conviction and indoctrination, and (4) action. At the pre-radicalization step, according to the details of the indictment, Altintas introvert personality made him susceptible to being affected by the teachings of the Turkish radical Islamist Nurettin Yildiz. The indictment also noted that Atintas had complained about his family, telling friends that his family was not practicing Islam. According to Altintas family, he drank alcohol and was not a religious person until he attended the Turkish National Police Academy in 2012. In his second year in the academy, family members said, Altintas began to sympathize with radical religious groups and joined the religious programs offered by Yildiz.

At the conversion and identification step, the indictment indicates that in 2013, Altintas began to question his job and Turkeys approach to Islam. For example, Altintas began to complain about his position as a police officer, telling his friends that it is not appropriate to work in a state until it is ruled by Islamic law, that he was planning to resign from his position as a police officer, and that he was against the democratic elections.

At the conviction and indoctrination step, Altintas seemed to have become an ardent believer in jihadist ideology. For example, Altintas shared extremist messages on a WhatsApp group about Syria and ISIS. He also used hate rhetoric against the United States and said that the United States was inflicting cruelty on the people in Islamic countries. Altintas also was followed the news in Syria and criticized Russian atrocities in Syria.

At the action step, Altintas sought to engage in deeds that would serve his ideology. For example, he wanted to travel to Syria, join a jihadist group, and become a martyr. He also became involved in donation programs that send money to Syria. When investigators examined Altitas computer, they discovered that he had downloaded a video in February 2016 titled Al Qaeda: You Only Are Responsible Yourself, which began with a speech by Osama bin Laden. Altintas computer also contained a draft email to mrtltns@gmail.com, dated July 27, 2015, that Altintas was preparing to be a martyr.

SDV and Salafism in Turkey

Turkey has been one of the top 10 countries with the most jihadists joining al Qaeda or ISIS groups in Syria. In 2015, more than 2,000 Turkish jihadists joined one of these terrorist organizations. Turkeys government has been criticized for ignoring the activities of jihadist groups in Syria and for allowing the militants to use its borders freely not only to transfer militants but also money and logistics. In 2015, Russian authorities published satellite images purportedly showing Turkish trucks transporting oil from ISIS-controlled areas in Syria.

Nurettin Yildiz, a retired imam and director of SDV, played an essential role in the radicalization of many individuals, including Altintas. Yildiz is known for his anti-Semitic and jihadist speeches. In one of those speeches, he said, Jews are the symbols of brutality and enjoy killing of women and children.Yildiz also is an advocate of Salafism in Turkey and regularly holds meetings and gives sermons on topics such as Salafi-interpreted jihadism and support for jihadists in Syria. He also is a fervent supporter of Erdogan and the AKP. As an example, a page on the SDV website and a google search on Yildiz bring photos of Yildiz with previously-investigated suspects for their roles in transferring arms and explosives to Syria.

After the assassination of Karlov, the al Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria known as Fatah al-Sham Front (formerly al-Nusra Front) claimed responsibility for the assassination of Karlov in a letter the group published online. The letter talks about the Revenge of Aleppo and claims that Altintas was not only a riot police officer but also a member of the al-Nusra Front. Erdogan, however, said in a 2016 speech that al-Nusra Front is not a terrorist organization, only to reverse his stance two years later and designated the group as a terrorist organization.

To conclude, Turkeys Second Heavy Penal Court of Ankara announced its verdict in the Karlov assassination casein March 2021, concluding that the Gulen movement was responsible for the crime. The court ignored an investigation report that said Altintas committed the crime as a radicalized lone actor with link to al Qaeda-affiliated individuals. The courts decision appears to have been based on a government-directed investigation that declared an alleged perpetrator and then tried to find or fabricate evidence to fit its contrived scenario. In Russia and the Western world, the verdict has been deemed unsatisfactory. It is not realistic, of course, to expect reliable investigations and prosecutions under the current authoritarian regime in Turkey. Further investigation of the Karlov assassination is needed to determine who directed Altintas to kill the Russian ambassador, who was behind the government-directed investigations, who ignored potential evidence that could have led to the identification of the real culprits, who chose not to provide adequate protection for Karlov inside the exhibition, and who directed officers to kill Altintas at the crime scene even though it would have been possible to capture him alive.

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Under False Pretenses: Who Directed the Assassin to Kill the Russian Ambassador in Turkey in 2016? - Modern Diplomacy

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Posted by Nupur Hukmani

Dalit political history is testimony to Namdeo Dhassals immense contribution. He was one of the founders of the Dalit Panther Movement (DPM). Born as a Mahar (whose designated caste occupation was remover of carcasses), he grew up in dire poverty on the streets of Mumbai. He never finished school and was self-taught. His activism, politics, and his art for the fight against the injustice of the caste system made him a beacon of hope for scores of oppressed Dalits.Dhassal is well-known for his audacious poetry for which he won a Padma Shri.

The DPM which eventually became a political party was full of hot-tempered young men that idolized Dhassal for his inflammatory words and actions. Dhassal wrote vivid poems, left nothing to the imagination, and captured the nature of the oppression that he as a Dalit had faced in a chaffed style. For the oppressors, Dhassal was the anti-thesis of the ramifications that upholding the caste system was meant to have- being confident, opinionated, acutely aware of the oppression, and revolutionalizing the masses against that oppression. His use of shock poetry describing the life, subjugation, and helplessness of being Dalit was what drew the masses toward him. Consider these lines from his poem, Equality for All or Death for India:

They are fired up with their own egotismThey are possessed by neurosesKilling, violence, bloodshedThey are polluted by this rotten stenchThey make everyone into an OedipusThey want partitionThey want riotsThey want to turn humans into demonsThey want to see humanity destroyed one more time

Here, Dhassal talks about caste violence and uses the term they for caste Hindus, and the we is used to denote Dalits. His poems have a historical quality and yet seem very relevant to this day. The imagery and choice of words are unconventional and courageous to say the least.

The DPMwas built on the lines of the Black Panthers Movement against racism in the USA of the late 60s. The evolution of the Dalit Panthers journeyed interesting paths. By the late 50s, Ambedkar had decided to renounce Hinduism, the religion which he believed had no conscience. He studied various religions and finally chose to convert to Buddhism as a means of emancipation. He led the mass conversion of millions of Dalits to Buddhism. Ambedkars political interpretation of Buddhas teachings came to be called Navayana or Neo-Buddhism and was the core ideology of the Dalit Panthers when they started.

The Panthers movement was initiated by a bunch of college-going Mahar youth whose own families had converted to Buddhism during Ambedkars time. The 60s also saw a wave of new writers on the literary block who were livid with the hegemony of Brahmin writers for not only occupying the literary space but for also appropriating Dalit experiences. The DPM was first born as a literary movement and then went on to become a political movement. Dhassal was a poet before he became an activist and his poetry reflected the raw and shuddering experiences of Dalit oppression in the vocabulary of Dalits.

Also read: Dalit Panthers: A Radical Resistance

The word Dalit means downtrodden. The Panthers decided to use the term because it is casteless and their ideological stand was to fight for all the oppressed be it members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the Neo Buddhists, the workers, the landless, poor farmers, women, or then those who were fraught in the name of religion. They called themselves the Panthers after the Black Panthers, which symbolized courage. They believed that violence in response to violence and other forms of oppression was justified. The Dalit Panthers Party was initially an interesting amalgamation of different ideologies which was no doubt refreshing but which was also the very reason for their split into different styles of leadership many years down the line.

To build this movement from its inception as a literary one to the point where it became a full-fledged social movement and eventually even a political party, the Panthers used a lot of symbolism such as protest marches, demonstrations, pamphleteering, and many times ingenious sloganeering. Public gestures like the burning of the Manusmriti and Gita were carried out to denounce the religious sanctity of the caste system. They commemorated the valorous act of Dalits at Bhima Koregaon War and also held a large rally on Ambedkars death anniversary at Chaitanya Bhoomi. All these symbolic acts stimulated the Dalit youth and helped snowball the movement to spread all over the country.

Dhassal was a natural leader full of charisma. People flocked around him, paid rapt attention to his words, were mesmerized by his blasphemous poetry, and saw in him a future of hope and change. Under his leadership, Dalit politics saw a new horizon and was instrumental in unifying the masses. That is why it is soul-crushing to read his wife, Mallika Amar Shaikhs memoir about her tumultuous relationship with him, and the subjugation he put her through.

Mallika recounts meeting Dhassal through her brother-in-law at 14 in her memoir I Want to Destroy Myself. The book is a painful description of her relationship not only with Dhassal, the person but also with Dhassal, the politician. She describes a different side to Dhassal: He was sometimes loveable, many times abusive, and on most occasions insensitive to her needs as a person, a partner, and a woman.

Also read: Book Review: I Want To Destroy Myself By Malika Amar Shaikh

He physically abuses her, passes on a venereal disease which he acquires in one of his visits to the sex worker in Kamathipura, rapes her before they get married, and eventually separates their son from her in a fit of anger for many months. She recalls Namdeo being a completely absent partner and eventually an absent father too. Both of them go through an endless, vicious cycle of drinking, fighting, abusing, and beating in front of the child.

She narrates their agonizing disagreements on parenting decisions which expose Namdeos ideological hypocrisy at home. Having grown up in a communist environment, she is certain on how she wants to raise her child- without religion, caste, and rejecting rituals like the naming ceremony. On the other hand, even though he claims to be Dhassal comes across as someone who is tokenistic in his parenting and is not sure of his philosophy. He wants to give the child a revolutionary name like George Jackson and refuses to celebrate his birthday. Ironically, he falls prey to his friends suggestion of idol worship of the Buddha statue that they decide to install on the eve of his childs birthday.

Mallika exposes Dhassals hypocrisy in his politics as well. As a politician, he was brash, thoughtless, and larger than life. She believes that the internal conflicts took place because the Panthers lacked discipline.

Mallika exposes Dhassals hypocrisy in his politics as well. As a politician, he was brash, thoughtless, and larger than life. She believes that the internal conflicts took place because the Panthers lacked discipline. Dhassal does not contribute to household expenses claiming rising party costs but continues to live a lavish lifestyle himself; spends obscene amounts of money on party workers including their trips to Kamathipura. He also forces her to sell her jewellery when he cant meet these expenses. There is a very poignant description of how she eventually sells theSoviet Landmagazines in their house just so that she can feed the family.

According to her, the Panthers were just a bunch of young, directionless men who were trying to be scooped up by all political parties from the left to the center to the extreme right because of their non-commitment towards a particular ideology. All this takes place against the background of the Emergency in Indiawhich Dhassal openly supportedwhich many believe was so that the government in power would drop the cases against him and his party for all the militancy and violence they allegedly indulged in. She is also vocal with him about his various political decisions. At one point, he decides to support the Shiv Sena which she opposes. What do you understand of it? he dismisses her.

Throughout the book, she talks of the irony of the way her husband was revered by countless people as the saviour of the oppressed while he continued to oppress the women in his life and outside.His hypocrisy is loud and brash like him in every incident that she recounts, except that he is deaf and blind to it. She feels trapped as most women in bad marriages feel. Eventually, she tries multiple attempts at dying by suicide.

Reading about Dhassals early life of abject poverty and social persecution was truly inspiring. Reading his poetry and about his politics makes one marvel at the mans expressiveness, courage, intellect, and elocution. However, reading his wifes memoir put me in an existential quagmire and made me confront many uncomfortable questions such as: Should Dhassal be kept on a pedestal as the ideal of hope and change for the oppressed when he was an oppressor in various aspects of his personal life? His benevolent narcissism makes it extremely difficult to objectively assess his oppression as opposed to his activism and social altruism.

Also read: The Contribution Of Dalit Women Shahir In Maharashtras Anti-Caste Movement

This cognitive dissonance that he and many powerful men like him exhibit between their public and personal lives also leads to another dilemma: What are the implications of the fracture between his public and private values on the issues of gender in the anti-caste movement?

We must keep in mind that Dhassals activism and politics did not exist in a social and political void but were part of a larger system of patriarchy. The most difficult question for me to answer was: Why am I critiquing Dhassal now? To give a voice to the voiceless- his wife, his mother, women around him at the receiving end of his oppression and the women who are part of this system where men like Dhassal are revered for their fight against injustice while inflicting another kind of oppression in their own homes. And finally, one is forced to confront the eternal question: Must one separate the art from the artist?

Like Chinua Achebe said, An artist is committed to art which is committed to people, Dhassal was no doubt committed to his art, politics, activism and to the masses; only that he did not extend that commitment to all people around him.

Nupur holds a Masters in Psychology and has been an educator for eight years. She is passionate about writing and lovesincorporating writing as a medium in teaching. She is currently pursuing a Masters in International Human Rights from the Indian Institute of Human Rights, Delhi.When she is not teaching or writing, she loves reading, cooking and long distance running. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.

Featured Image Source: Namdeo Dhasal | Facebook

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Namdeo Dhassal: The Poet, The Politician, And The Person - Feminism in India

LONDON Yemens teachers union denounced what it described as Tehrans use of education to pursue a policy of cultural colonialism,in statements published by theDaily Telegraph.

According to the teachers union, Yemeni children are being indoctrinated with violent and anti-Semitic propaganda in areas controlled bythe Iran-aligned Houthis.

Yahya Al-Yinai, a spokesman for the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate, told theDaily Telegraphthat the militias had overhauled the teaching curriculum and installed their supporters as principals in just about 90 percent of the schools under their control.

Yinai also accused Iran of orchestrating the changes in a policy of cultural colonialism by trying to introduce the ideology of the Khomeinist revolution in Yemen through public education.

With military and economic assistance from Iran, the Houthis currently control roughly two-thirds of the Yemeni population, including the capital Sanaa.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se) recently released a report which said the Houthis textbooks sought to indoctrinate children to sacrifice their lives.

Marcus Sheff, the chief executive of Impact-se, told theDaily Telegraphthat the Houthis appeared to have no red lines in their education drive.

The closest we have seen to being this extreme is the Islamic State (ISIS) materials, he said.

Houthi textbooks include graphic images of dead children and glorified violence as the only solution for resolving conflicts, the Impact-se report said.

The graphic nature of the material really took us aback, Sheff said.

The United States is described as the Greater Satan and as the enemy of all Arabs and Muslims, the Impact-se report revealed.

The American flag is used in images as a symbol of oppression, colonialism or simply the enemy, researchers found.

Children are being taught a Houthi slogan including the words Death to America, Death to Israel as part of an exercise on learning Arabic, the report also revealed.

Meanwhile, the 1979 Iranian revolution was awarded much praise.

Around three million young Yemenis currently receive their education in Houthi-controlled parts of the country.

Impact-se argues that the militias have made education a core pillar of their campaign to increase their influence and that their teachings illustrate why they are resistant to peaceful conflict resolution, theDaily Telegraphreported.

In the material reviewed, peace is explicitly dismissed as a form of capitulation, and people who advocate for it are framed as fools, cowards and even traitors, said Arik Agassi, the organisations chief operating officer.

This helps explain why the Iran-aligned militias continue to fight, despite the best efforts of a Saudi-led Arab coalition.

Yemen has been convulsed by civil war since 2014 when the Houthis took control of the capital of Sanaa and much of the northern part of the country, forcing the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi-led coalition, backed at the time by the US, entered the war months later to try to restore Hadi to power.

Despite a relentless air campaign and ground fighting, the war has deteriorated into a stalemate, killing about 130,000 people and spawning the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

The administration of US President Joe Biden last month officially withdrew its backing for the coalition but said the US would continue to offer support to Saudi Arabia as it defends itself against Houthi attacks.

The Saudis have recently offered a ceasefire deal, but Houthis turned them down.

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Yemen's teachers' union accuses Houthis of indoctrinating children || AW - The Arab Weekly

In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each items purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 others, including awareness (#18) and childrens games as adults (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasnt long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.

The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, whod been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet theres little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. As a white person, youre just desperate to find something else to grab on to, Lander said in 2009. Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished theyd grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.

Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the sites age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and black music that black people dont listen to any more (#116).

What has changed, however changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they werent exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.

In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Landers blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.

Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power. But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.

This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a major change in American attitudes about race another 45% said it was a minor change and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.

At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was too much discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didnt exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.

What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society white is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as were not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as were put to the test.

A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: The discovery of personal whiteness among the worlds peoples is a very modern thing a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.

Though radical in its time, Du Boiss characterisation of what he called the new religion of whiteness a religion founded on the dogma that of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.

That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attempted to delineate the real distinctions which nature has made between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnsteins Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that the most plausible explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was some form of mixed gene and environmental source in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.

By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Boiss assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.

If its easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon in some quarters, the idea that race is a social construct has become a cliche the same cannot be said for Du Boiss suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.

Of course, its important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, white identity didnt just spring to life full-blown and unchanging. It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.

Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in the discovery of personal whiteness took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. Whats more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Boiss suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.

If you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head. If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.

That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally the conditions on Barbados, Englands wealthiest colony, were notorious but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.

Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the perpetual enemies of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.

The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts or worse of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. They were particularly afraid of incidents such as Bacons Rebellion, in 1676, which saw indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginias colonial government.

To ward off such events, the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their Christian servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved Negroes. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina began to describe the privileged class as whites and not as Christians.

One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer perpetual enemies of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?

The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others. When that didnt work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.

But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called a screen of racial contempt. Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white.

As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. (I cant think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so, Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour white and African it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production.

The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.

The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means. Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography, published in 1802, that humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites, or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves. Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan and that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race.

As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noahs son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.

For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what caucasian was supposed to mean; the honorary Aryan status that Hitler extended to the Japanese was no match for the robust complexities of human society.

Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth, and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.

The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction. From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilsons claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation, and to Donald Trumps warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were bringing drugs. And theyre bringing crime. And theyre rapists.

Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.

It was not until the aftermath of the second world war that frank endorsements of white supremacy were broadly rejected in Anglo-American public discourse. That this happened at all was thanks largely to the efforts of civil rights and anti-colonial activists, but the war itself also played a role. Though the horrors of the Nazi regime had been more acute in their intensity than anything happening at the time in the US or the UK, they supplied an unflattering mirror that made it impossible to ignore the racism that was still prevalent in both countries. (A New York Times editorial in 1946 made the connection explicit, arguing that this is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice and race hatred because we have recently witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such a cruel and fallacious policy.)

Political appeals to white solidarity diminished slowly but certainly. In 1955, for example, Winston Churchill could still imagine that Keep England White was a winning general-election theme, and even as late as 1964, Peter Griffiths, a Conservative candidate for parliament, would score a surprise victory after endorsing a nakedly racist slogan. By 1968, however, when Enoch Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech in which he approvingly quoted a constituent who lamented that in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man he would be greeted by outrage in the Times, which called it an evil speech, and expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. In the US, too, where a century of racial apartheid had followed a century of slavery, open expressions of racism met with increasing public censure. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Congress passed a series of statutes that rendered explicit racial discrimination illegal in many areas of public life.

This gradual rejection of explicit, government-enforced white supremacy was hugely consequential in terms of public policy. Yet it did not mean that whiteness, as a political force, had lost its appeal: in the weeks after Powells speech, to take just one example, a Gallup poll found that 74% of Britons supported his suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants ought to be repatriated. It also left unresolved the more difficult question of whether whiteness was truly separable from its long history of domination.

Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange dtente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.

Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.

Even the phrase white supremacy, which predates the word racism in English by 80 years and once described a system of interlocking racial privileges that touched every aspect of life, was redefined to mean something rare and extreme. In 1923, for example, under the headline White Supremacy Menaced, the New York Times would print an article which took at face value a Harvard professors warning that one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today was the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races. In 1967, the US supreme court invalidated a law that prevented whites from marrying people who were not white, on the grounds that it was obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy, and two years later, the critic Albert Murray would use the phrase to describe everything from anti-Black prejudice in police departments to bigoted media representations of Black life to influential academic studies such as Daniel Patrick Moynihans The Negro Family.

By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, white supremacy was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.

Perhaps most perverse of all was the charge of reverse racism, which emboldened critics of affirmative action and other race-conscious policies to claim that they, and not the policies proponents, were the true heralds of racial equality. In 1986, Ronald Reagan went so far as to defend his opposition to minority-hiring quotas by invoking Martin Luther King Jr: We want a colour-blind society, Reagan declared. A society, that in the words of Dr King, judges people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as structural racism, symbolic racism or racism without racists. In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberl Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bells words, ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law.

Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.

In the fall of 1992, a new journal co-founded by Noel Ignatiev, one of the major figures in whiteness studies, appeared in bookstores around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called Race Traitor, the magazine wore its motto and guiding ethos on its cover: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. The issue opened with an editorial whose headline was equally provocative: Abolish the white race by any means necessary. This demand, with its echoes of Sartre by way of Malcolm X, was not, as it turned out, a call for violence, much less for genocide. As Ignatiev and his co-editor, John Garvey, explained, they took as their foundational premise that the white race is a historically constructed social formation, a sort of club whose membership consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society.

For Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness had been identified with white supremacy for so long that it was folly to think it was salvageable. So long as the white race exists, they wrote, all movements against racism are doomed to fail. What was necessary, in their view, was for the people called white people like them to forcefully reject that identification and the racial privileges that came with it. Whiteness, they suggested, was a fragile, unstable thing, such that even a small number of determined attacks objecting to racist educational programmes at a school board meeting, say, or capturing racist police behaviour on video ought to be able to unsettle the whole edifice.

But while whiteness studies produced much work that still makes for bracing, illuminating reading, it was soon mocked as one more instance of the very privilege it meant to oppose. The whole enterprise gives whites a kind of standing in the multicultural paradigm they have never before enjoyed, Margaret Talbot wrote in the New York Times in 1997. And it involves them, inevitably, in a journey of self-discovery in which white peoples thoughts about their own whiteness acquire a portentous new legitimacy. Even Ignatiev would later say he wanted nothing to do with it.

By the mid-2000s, the colour-blind ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)

Meanwhile, younger white liberals, the sort of people who might have read Bell or Crenshaw or Ignatiev at university, tended to duck the subject of their own racial identity with a shuffling awkwardness. Growing up white in the decades after the civil rights movement was a little like having a rich but disreputable cousin: you never knew quite what to make of him, or the extravagant gifts he bought for your birthday, and so you found it easier, in general, just not to say anything.

The absence of talk about whiteness was so pervasive that it became possible to convince yourself that it constituted one of the central obstacles to racial progress. When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard including from my own mouth the argument that the real problem was that white people werent talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.

The trouble with this notion would become clear soon enough, when the presidency of Barack Obama offered the surest test to date of the proposition that whiteness had separated itself from its supremacist past. Though Obamas election was initially hailed by some as proof that the US was entering a new post-racial phase, it took just a few months for the Tea party, a conservative movement ostensibly in favour of small government, to suggest that the opposite was closer to the truth.

In September 2009, Jimmy Carter caused a stir by suggesting that the Tea partys opposition was something other than a principled reaction to government spending. I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, Carter said. (Carters speculation was later backed up by research: the political scientist Ashley Jardina, for instance, found that more racially resentful whites are far more likely to say they support the Tea party and rate it more positively.)

The white backlash to Obamas presidency continued throughout his two terms, helped along by Rupert Murdochs media empire and the Republican party, which won majorities in both houses of Congress by promising to obstruct anything Obama tried to accomplish. Neither project kept Obama from a second term, but this does not mean that they were without effect: though Obama lost white voters by 12% in 2008, four years later he would lose them by 20%, the worst showing among white voters for a successful candidate in US history.

At the same time, Obamas victory suggested to some observers the vindication of the demographic argument: the changing racial composition of the US appeared to have successfully neutralised the preferences of the white electorate, at least as far as the presidency was concerned. (There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win, said one Republican after Obamas victory.)

Whats more, the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which attracted international attention in the summer of 2014, prompted a torrent of demonstrative introspection among white people, especially online. As the critic Hua Hsu would write, half-teasingly, in 2015, it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware.

Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to Take Back Control and to Make America Great Again.

It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially not just the fact of Trumps presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. Trump truly is something new the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president, Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.

In 1860, a man who called himself Ethiop published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyns first public school for Black children. Wilsons essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?

The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof. In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the Aborigines; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing that made the men and women who enabled it into restless, grasping marauders. In view of the existing state of things around us, Wilson proposed at the end, let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?

Much has changed since Wilsons time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent. For some people, such as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whiteness is what it has always pretended to be. Though he acknowledges that races are not genetically defined, Kaufmann nevertheless sees them as defensible divisions of humanity that have some natural basis: they emerge, he suggests, through a blend of unconscious colour-processing and slowly evolved cultural conventions. In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is real, but moot, and he advocates for something he calls symmetrical multiculturalism, in which identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black. What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas.

From another perspective my own, most days whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. (As Du Bois put it, what made whiteness new and different was the imperial width of the thing the heaven-defying audacity.) Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek legitimate expressions, whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

Yet even this does not fully answer Wilsons question. For if its easy enough to agree in theory that the only reasonable moral response to the long and very much non-moot history of white supremacy is the abolitionist stance advocated in the pages of Race Traitor ie, to make whiteness meaningless as a group identity, to shove it into obsolescence alongside Prussian and Etruscan it seems equally apparent that whiteness is not nearly so fragile as Ignatiev and Garvey had imagined. Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as a moral choice, as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.

As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world will not become unracialised by assertion. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness is an idea, not a fact. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds.

This article was amended on 20 April 2021 to correct a reference to Eric Williams being the first president of Trinidad and Tobago. He was in fact the first prime minister.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, llisten to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea - The Guardian

China's Foreign Ministry this month issued the most forceful defense of its policies in Xinjiang to date, calling allegations of "genocide" in the region the "lie of the century."

The statement -- made in response to ongoing calls for a possible boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics -- represents the culmination of a long evolution of China's official narrative regarding its treatment of Uyghurs.

This evolving strategy, from outright denial to hardened public defense, is closely tied to the Chinese government's own increased sense of confidence on the world stage, and its willingness to confront its critics in the West head on, be it over Xinjiang, the South China Sea or Hong Kong, a CNN analysis shows.

In recent months, Xinjiang has become something of a patriotic litmus test, in which those wishing to do business with China must pick a side -- either stand with Beijing in implicit defense of its policies, or face the consequences.

The propaganda campaign has also reached a fever pitch, with state media reporters dispatched to Xinjiang to supposedly "prove" there is no oppression there, a "La La Land"-inspired musical released to make Beijing's case, while critics overseas have faced sanctions and harassment.

While China has always maintained a sophisticated propaganda apparatus at home, its recent campaign over Xinjiang, particularly disinformation and harassment of critics overseas, is more in keeping with similar efforts by Russia, including deploying "whataboutism" in claiming any US denouncements are tainted by the legacy of slavery and genocide on the American continent.

Warning signs

After she was "de-radicalized," Amina Hojamet swapped her burqa for a silk dress, put a traditional flower-patterned hat on her head, and sang "Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China."

She didn't know it at the time, but Hojamet, along with over a dozen other women from her village in Shufu County, in western Xinjiang -- whose story was recounted in a report by the state-run Xinjiang Daily -- would serve as proof of concept for an "anti-extremism" campaign that has engulfed the Chinese region since 2017.

Survivors of the camps report experiencing or witnessing widespread abuse, and incidents of torture, rape and forced sterilization. The crackdown has been denounced as "genocide" by the United States government and the Canadian and Dutch parliaments for its effects on the Uyghur people and their culture.

When reports of the camp system first began to emerge around 2017, China issued staunch denials, or refused to comment altogether. As this has become increasingly impossible in the face of mounting international attention and subsequent condemnation, Beijing has shifted to an angry defense of its "de-radicalization" program, which it has even started to tout to like-minded countries as a way of dealing with their own Muslim "problem."

Meanwhile, evidence of the camp system, such as early reports in state media like one which gave Hojamet's story in late 2014, have been scrubbed from the internet altogether and are accessible only in archived form, a CNN analysis shows. Other materials researchers relied on to expose the camp system -- such as government tenders and official documents -- have also been deleted.

Multiple foreign journalists who reported on the camp system have been expelled from China, while academics, activists and survivors who sought to expose its reach have been denounced, and harassed. Those who have dared speak out inside of China have been silenced or detained.

The clampdown has been accompanied by a new, coordinated propaganda campaign touting the successes of the "vocational training" system, with heavily choreographed media tours for sympathetic outlets, interviews with "graduates" praising the system, and disinformation which aims to sow confusion about the scale of the camp system and the abuses experienced by detainees, while painting Beijing as the victim of both violent extremism and Western misinformation.

Crackdown

Located in the far west of the People's Republic of China, Xinjiang is among China's most ethnically diverse regions. It is home to about 11 million Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, who speak a language closely related to Turkish and have their own distinct culture, as well as significant populations of Kazakhs.

Rich in natural resources, especially oil and gas, the region has seen a large influx of Han Chinese, the country's majority ethnic group, amid recent, concerted efforts by the government to tie Xinjiang closer to the wider economy.

Xinjiang -- the name means "New Frontier" in Chinese -- has long been of strategic importance for its rulers in Beijing. The vast region borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, as well as Mongolia and Russia in the north and Pakistan and India in the south. Its importance has only increased with the advent of President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, a trade and infrastructure mega project connecting China to markets across Central Asia to Europe and beyond.

Information about such incidents was often hard to come by, with reports in state media sporadic and sparsely detailed. Few foreign journalists ever visited Xinjiang, both due to the region's remoteness from Beijing and the harassment and surveillance by local authorities of those journalists who did travel there.

Such controls only increased as the situation became more unstable and the authorities cracked down harder. In 2009, following deadly ethnic riots in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, the entire region was cut off from the internet for almost a year, and many Uyghur writers and intellectuals were jailed.

In October 2013, a group of Uyghurs were alleged to have driven a sports-utility vehicle into pedestrians on Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Five people died in the incident, described by authorities as a terror attack, including three in the car. Some 40 people were injured.

Following the incident, Xinjiang's anti-terrorism budget doubled. The regional government, meanwhile, said it was "determined to curb the spread of religious extremism as well as prevent severe violent terrorist attacks." As part of this, what was called "vocational training" could be provided to those "more easily manipulated by religious extremism."

In early 2014, 31 people were killed, and more than 100 were injured, during a knife terror attack in a crowded train station in Kunming, in China's southwestern Yunnan Province. Four people were convicted of plotting the attack, which the government blamed on Uyghur separatists.

During a visit to the region in April 2014 in the aftermath of the Kunming attack, President Xi called for an all-out "struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism," according to leaked internal speeches published by the New York Times.

Around this time, in a village in Shufu County, near the ancient Silk Road trading stop of Kashgar in western Xinjiang, local officials identified 16 women in need of "educational transformation," according to the Xinjiang Daily article. Their offense? Wearing the burqa.

These women, one of whom was Hojamet, were initially "very resistant and unwilling," but "gradually realized the essence and harm of religious extremism," eventually choosing to abandon conservative Islamic dress for regular clothing.

Another woman also told the paper her husband had been detained by the police for religious extremism and taken for "de-radicalization" in an unspecified location. "I hope that he will receive a good education, transform well, and reunite with us soon," she was quoted as saying.

Cover-up

While in 2014 and 2015 the burgeoning "re-education" system was still years away from reaching its current scale, or from becoming public knowledge, it was clear the situation in Xinjiang had escalated following the high-profile Kunming attack.

Visiting the region weeks later, Ursula Gauthier, a journalist with the French magazine L'Obs, reported an intense system of surveillance, police checkpoints, and widespread fear of being reported or denounced among any Uyghurs she spoke to.

"In Xinjiang, where the police respect legal procedures even less than in the (rest of China), arrests are not reported to families. They simply disappear," Gauthier wrote, adding many Uyghurs reported being constantly afraid, such that fear "creeps into all parts of life, poisons relationships and paralyzes the most serene minds."

This experience was at the forefront of her mind when, about seven months later, ISIS-linked terrorists attacked targets across Paris, killing 130 people and wounding hundreds more.

Disgusted by the bloodshed in her home capital, Gauthier was also dismayed by the reaction from the Chinese government, which she felt was attempting to take advantage of the incident to gain international support for its crackdown in Xinjiang.

In expressing sympathy with France, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China was also a victim of terrorism and complained about a "double standard" in the West in which media and politicians minimized or sought to justify terrorist incidents against Chinese.

In a column for L'Obs, Gauthier noted the astonishing outpouring of sympathy and solidarity she had experienced in Beijing from ordinary people, while pointing out what she felt were the Chinese government's "ulterior motives" in conflating ISIS attacks with violence in Xinjiang.

While other outlets made similar observations -- "China Responds to Paris Attacks Through a Domestic Lens," read a headline in the New York Times -- Gauthier's article struck a nerve.

The Global Times, a nationalist, state-run tabloid, published multiple articles attacking her, and she was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explain herself. She was told to apologize but refused, saying she was being accused of saying things -- such as that Chinese victims of terror deserved to die -- she never wrote.

Fanning the controversy, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang accused Gauthier of having "blatantly championed acts of terrorism and slaughter of innocent civilians, igniting indignation among the Chinese people."

Exposed

While she was not alone in criticizing or exposing China's policies in Xinjiang, or even in calling out Beijing's attempt to conflate ethnic unrest with global terrorism, Gauthier appears to have been caught up in a shifting policy on Xinjiang, as the government became far more sensitive to outside scrutiny.

"We know today that Xi Jinping had made the decision to change the policies in Xinjiang, so in (late 2014) they were preparing the crackdown," she said. "It was just the fact that we didn't know back then."

The scale of this transformation would not be known for several years. Even as people began disappearing into the camp system, which was built up between 2014 and 2017, before massively expanding that year, the heavy surveillance in Xinjiang, ongoing intense censorship of Uyghur issues on the Chinese internet, and its relative remoteness compared to the rest of the country, meant the news did not immediately spread.

But as human rights groups and members of the Uyghur diaspora started reporting increased disappearances and people being taken away for "political education," a number of foreign journalists were able to travel to Xinjiang to see if the stories were true.

In late 2017, a series of on the ground reports were published by US outlets, BuzzFeed, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, all testifying to the intense surveillance all Uyghurs in Xinjiang were subject to, and to the burgeoning camp system.

"Since this spring, thousands of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained," Buzzfeed's Megha Rajagopalan reported.

While officials defended security measures in Xinjiang as necessary for preventing terrorism, at first, Beijing denied reports about the camp system, with a foreign ministry spokesman telling Rajagopalan "we have never heard about these measures taken by local authorities."

According to a CNN review of Chinese government statements from 2015 onwards, officials largely avoided addressing the issue of Xinjiang until around mid-2018, when growing scrutiny made this impossible.

In particular, China appears to have switched strategies in response to a hearing of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August of that year, where it was estimated by the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress that as many as 1 million people could have passed through the camps.

China's representative to the committee said this was "completely untrue," while acknowledging people had been assigned "to vocational educational and employment training centers with a view to assisting in their rehabilitation."

Speaking in mid 2019, Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to the UK, gave a staunch defense of the program in an interview with the BBC, saying "extremist ideas have easy penetration to the poorer areas. The idea is to help the people, to lift them out of poverty."

"They can leave freely. They can visit their relatives. It is not a prison. It is not a camp," Liu said.

While China has sought, sometimes successfully, to muddy the waters on Xinjiang, attacking individual researchers and think tanks, and trotting out family members of survivors to criticize them in dubious videos, much of the evidence showing the scale of the camp system is in fact open source.

For example, the growth of a camp in Shufu County, around 7 kilometers (4.5 miles) from Amina Hojamet's village, can be tracked via satellite imagery on Google Earth. The installation was first built around 2013, though it may have initially been used for another purpose. In the years since, it has more than doubled in size, and what appear to be watchtowers can be seen on walls around dormitory-like buildings, according to a review of historical satellite imagery.

Other open source data helps confirm this: a tender for business issued by the Xinjiang government in 2017, reviewed by CNN, seeks a $21 million refit and expansion of the camp -- described as a Legal Education Transformation School.

As scrutiny over Xinjiang increased, reports in state media about the "de-radicalization" program, as well government announcements about the various camps and tenders for supplying them appear to have been scrubbed from the internet, with only a small proportion surviving in archived form.

This effort appears to have been inconsistent, with some materials surviving online, along with reports in state media that can be used to track the evolution of the "vocational training" system, even as similar articles which had been written about by human rights groups, such as that which contains Hojamet's story, were deleted.

In the past year, Chinese state media and officials have begun attacking researcher Adrian Zenz, who was the first to use government documents to expose the camps, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which popularized the use of satellite imagery to track their growth. Zenz was among multiple academics and politicians in the European Union and United Kingdom sanctioned by China in March.

Beijing has also punished those journalists who helped draw attention to Xinjiang early on. Rajagopalan, the Buzzfeed reporter, was forced to leave China in August 2018, after her visa extension was denied. Two years later, Gerry Shih and Josh Chin, who wrote early reports on Xinjiang for the AP and WSJ respectively, were among a number of American reporters expelled from China in retaliation for Trump administration limits on US-based Chinese state media.

Pivot

While it would continue to officially deny any "camps" exist in Xinjiang, with Foreign Ministry officials reprimanding reporters who used those terms, from late 2018 onwards, there has been a concerted shift in China's messaging on this issue.

In October of that year, the Xinjiang government all but acknowledged reports about the "re-education" system were correct, calling on local officials to expand the number of "vocational skill education training centers" and "carry out anti-extremist ideological education."

The following week, Shohrat Zakir, a high-ranking Xinjiang government official, told state media the Chinese government was fighting "terrorism and extremism" in its own way, and in accordance with UN resolutions.

Former detainees, he said, had been transformed for the better by their time in the "training centers." Instead of being led by religion as in the past, now they "realized that they are firstly citizens of the nation," Zakir said.

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In a white paper published by the State Council Information Office in August 2019, China's top administrative body wrote "Xinjiang is a key battlefield in the fight against terrorism and extremism in China."

"(The government) has established vocational education and training centers in accordance with the law to prevent the breeding and spread of terrorism and religious extremism, effectively curbing the frequent terrorist incidents and protecting the rights to life, health, and development of the people of all ethnic groups," the paper said, adding "worthwhile results have been achieved."

Sean Roberts, an expert on Central Asia at the George Washington University and author of "The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority," said many officials in Xinjiang appeared to have internalized Beijing's narrative on the issue.

"People high up know the real extent of the threat and how minor it is, but I think some of the lower level officials really do believe what they are doing is saving Uyghurs from extremism and terrorism," he said.

At the international level, Beijing has leaned on its allies to push back on criticism from western countries over Xinjiang. After a representative for the United Kingdom issued a statement at the UN General Assembly in 2019 on behalf of 23 countries raising concerns about human rights abuses, Belarus made its own statement on behalf of 54 countries voicing approval of China's "counter-terrorism" program in Xinjiang. Signatories included close allies of China, such as Russia, Egypt, Bolivia and Serbia.

"They have a kind of hubris about this," Roberts said of how China's messaging has evolved since then. "There's a level of confidence in having escaped a lot of criticism from the international community, a sense that nobody is actually going to punish us for this."

As well as securing international recognition (of sorts) for its efforts in Xinjiang, Beijing has also sought to link its "de-radicalization" program with anti-extremism efforts elsewhere, providing a sheen of legitimacy even in practice the comparisons are rather far-fetched.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi, among other officials, has claimed China's system is in keeping with the UN "Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism."

"The Plan of Action suggests early engagement and combining counter-extremism actions with preventive measures," Wang said in a 2019 speech. "That is precisely what Xinjiang has been doing. Visible progress has been made: There has not been a single case of violent terrorism in the past three years."

That same year, Zakir, the region's top Uyghur official, said "most (detainees) have already gone back to society."

"I can say 90% of them have found suitable and enjoyable jobs that bring them considerable income," he said, adding many Uyghurs were originally lacking employable skills and jobless, though records kept by overseas Uyghur groups suggest many intellectuals and highly-qualified individuals have also been sent to the camps.

Both French and British programs involve individuals convicted of terrorism offences or on watchlists, and are governed by both domestic human rights law and the European Convention on Human Rights. By contrast, many detainees in Xinjiang are locked up for non-terror related offences, such as breaching family planning regulations, or for religious practices deemed to be indicative of alleged "extremism," such as wearing the burqa, growing a beard, or reading the Quran.

For its part, the UN plan also notes "violations of international human rights law committed in the name of state security can facilitate violent extremism by marginalizing individuals and alienating key constituencies, thus generating community support and sympathy for and complicity in the actions of violent extremists."

Propaganda

Months after censors scrubbed stories like Amina Hojamet's from the internet in an apparent attempt to cover-up evidence of what was going on in Xinjiang, a new wave of propaganda was pushed out by Beijing, emphasizing both the supposed terrorist threat and the success of the government's so-called "anti-extremism" program in tackling it.

In a video published by state broadcaster CGTN in late 2019, one prominent interviewee suggests -- over footage of the 9/11 attacks and the Boston Marathon bombings -- that the response to such attacks in the West may "have actually served to help the purposes of terrorists and their organizations."

"In their responses, you can see the main reasons why terrorism has failed to be curbed at the root," says Li Wei, a research fellow at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank.

During an anti-terrorism symposium held on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva in 2020, co-sponsored by Beijing's mission to the UN, participants heard how "China is willing to share the 'Chinese experience' with the international community," according to an official write up of the event.

This shift may have been motivated by a wave of leaks -- largely unheard of in Chinese politics -- which exposed both the scale of the camps and the largely inconsequential "offences" which got detainees sent there, as well as the involvement of President Xi and other top officials in putting the system in place.

While China denounced the leaks, secret speeches credited to Xi published by the New York Times appear to line up with coverage in state media from the time they were given. With Xi so publicly identified as one of the architects of what has since been called a genocide in Xinjiang, China's propaganda bureau may have felt obliged to spin the entire situation as a success.

Xi himself said in September 2020 that the policy followed in Xinjiang has been "completely correct," and called on the government to "tell the story of Xinjiang in a multi-level, all-round, and three-dimensional manner, and confidently propagate the excellent social stability of Xinjiang."

Chinese state media, particularly those outlets targeting foreign audiences, have pushed this line hard. While stories such as Hojamet's were scrubbed from the internet in what may have been a kneejerk reaction to international criticism, they have been replaced by a glut of content showcasing happy, successful graduates from the "vocational training" system.

"Through the training, I realized that my past beliefs were completely wrong and religious extremism was our enemy. It's a disease which poisons our body and a drug which leads us to death," one woman told reporters at a press conference held by the Xinjiang government. "I must stay away from religious extremism and lead a normal life."

Foreign diplomats from countries close to China -- including Iran, Pakistan and Russia -- have been invited to tour Xinjiang, even visiting camps, though representatives from the US and other countries have complained of being denied unfettered access to the region.

Such visits have been denounced as "Potemkin-style propaganda tours for unwitting foreigners" by Amnesty International, producing a stream of positive stories about the situation in the camps and China's success in fighting terrorism which often blindly repeat official propaganda.

One of the few US publications able to send a correspondent to Xinjiang in recent years was International Focus, a tiny Houston-based magazine which caters to the city's diplomatic community.

According to a piece by publisher Val Thompson from May 2019, she was invited to go to Xinjiang by the State Council Information Office, joining a multinational group of journalists.

Writing of visiting the government-run "Exhibition of Major Terrorist Attacks and Violent Crimes in Xinjiang," Thompson said the experience was "eye-opening, I had no idea the PRC was dealing with extremist activity."

At the Kashgar Vocational Skills Educational and Training Center, she said she interviewed "several" detainees, who "were, or could be, victims of extremist teaching."

"They were treated well by their supervisors," Thompson wrote in her article, which has been promoted online by China's State Council. "For those who want to believe these young people may have been coerced, I say you can't fake happiness; and happiness is exactly what I saw."

Thompson and International Focus did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent weeks, China's propaganda organs have ramped up their counter narrative, including producing a musical -- "The Wings of Song" -- purporting to show the ethnic harmony that exists in modern Xinjiang.

State broadcaster CGTN, which targets foreign audiences, also dispatched a reporter to Kashgar last month, from where she filed live reports, signing off with the line: "There's definitely no genocide, so to speak. So Michelle, back to you."

One video released by CGTN may have made the opposite point however: a new documentary about the threat of "extremism" that existed prior to the recent crackdown gave as examples textbooks published and approved by China's own propaganda organs, demonstrating how previously innocuous references to Uyghur culture and Islam have become taboo.

Retaliation

Continue reading here:

From cover-up to propaganda blitz: China's attempts to control the narrative on Xinjiang - News-Daily.com

John Rarere with wife Michelle and mokopuna. Photo / Supplied

By Te Aniwa Hurihanganui of RNZ

John Rarere's phone won't stop pinging. Over the last three months, it's been flooded with messages from relatives urging him and others to be wary of Covid-19 vaccines.

"They believe the Government is trying to scam everybody," he says. "Some of them think the vaccine will change their DNA or that it contains nanotechnology which will eventually give the Government the ability to control them."

Hamilton-born Rarere, now living across the ditch in Brisbane, has counted more than 40 of his New Zealand-based relatives sharing ideas like these all over social media. He's never seen anything like it before.

A recent post from a cousin falsely claims China is refusing to inoculate any of its citizens for safety reasons. It encourages people to cure themselves of the virus through "heat therapy", by inhaling steam from a boiled kettle, gargling hot water and drinking cups of hot tea four times each a day. On the fifth day, it says, "you are Corona negative".

Rarere laughs - he can't help himself sometimes. But the truth is he's afraid. He knows of two kaumtua who are also sharing misinformation online, and he's deeply worried they won't take the vaccine. He says the thought of them contracting the virus, and suffering, is inconceivable.

"It's really concerning," he says. "If whnau members are refusing to get vaccinated because of this information, that could influence even more at-risk kaumtua to do the same."

Research by Te Pnaha Matatini shows Mori in their 60s and 70s are twice as likely to die from Covid-19, but the hope is that vaccines will make sure we never see such tragedy play out.

By May, all Mori aged 65 years and older or with comorbidities will have access to the vaccine. But will they take up the opportunity? How do you convince Mori the vaccine is safe when there's a tidal wave of misinformation online telling them otherwise? And why should they trust a health system that continues to perpetuate poorer outcomes for their people?

Eric Teokotai, who works for the Waikato District Health Board, feels helpless watching his own whnau and friends fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, but he sympathises with them too. He says many of them feel displaced and oppressed by the health system, and he doesn't blame them.

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"Very close friends say they're not going to get vaccinated and it comes down to the lack of trust in government processes and departments and agencies, and a history of government oppression and colonialism," he says.

"They'll say, 'nah, we don't trust the Government, it's colonial health issues that have caused damage and destruction to our people', and there's an element of truth in there. Mori are still suffering in health. We have the highest rates of cancer, obesity and even loss of hearing. You name it and Mori are right up there. The feeling is, why should Mori trust the Government now?"

Vaccine hesitancy has long been tied to distrust of colonial systems, says historian and researcher Rawiri Taonui.

"In circumstances where there's been marginalisation and experiences of racism, there's been an element of distrust over vaccines," he says. "Early on in the history of vaccination in Aotearoa, where Mori had a good relationship with Pkeh, they tended to take up vaccines. But in areas where the relationship wasn't so good and they were suspicious of the motives of Pkeh, they tended not to."

He says that's partly why there's a higher level of rejection of vaccinations today among Mori generally, including with infant immunisations and flu vaccinations among the elderly.

Some in Teokotai's whnau are vaccine hesitant for different reasons. Some are worried about the potential side effects of the vaccine, or the pace at which it has been developed and distributed across the world. One of them is his wife, who once had a severe allergic reaction to the Polio vaccine and needed to be hospitalised.

A March survey by Horizon Research and University of Auckland's School of Public Health suggests 9.4 per cent of the population will definitely say no to the vaccine. However, the number of Mori likely to say no has dropped from 27 to 18 per cent since surveys began last year, and that gives Teokotai hope.

He says with greater publicity about the vaccine, confidence should continue to grow. While he understands where much of the distrust stems from, he says Covid-19's threat to kaumtua is far too great, and the vaccine is their best shot at protecting them.

"I will keep engaging with whnau," he says. "And sometimes it's not good enough to say, 'go on the Ministry of Health's website'. You literally have to get that information and put it before them for them to decide whether they want to read it or not.

"I'll just say to them, 'look, you've taken the time to read the information you've given me, so how about you take the time to read this information?' Sometimes you'll get, 'oh, well, let me think about it'."

Teokotai has company. Mori health providers are determined to spread the word that the vaccine is reliable and safe and they're driven by dire statistics.

It's well documented that Mori are more likely to suffer more serious effects of the virus if infected than non-Mori. Researchers from Te Pnaha Matatini, the University of Otago and Auckland University say Mori are more likely to suffer serious effects of the virus because they are more likely to have the underlying health conditions which make surviving Covid-19 more difficult, including cardiovascular and respiratory conditions.

Of the 18 people in New Zealand who have been admitted to intensive care for Covid-19, half were Mori.

Within the next few weeks, Mori health providers will receive 40,000 vaccine doses for Mori aged 65 years and older or with comorbidities. The Government has already allocated a portion of these doses to some Mori health providers in South Auckland, and made $11 million available for providers to set up the infrastructure needed to carry out the work.

For Tranga Health chief executive Reweti Ropiha, meeting with Mori communities kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face) is crucial. So he and other members of his 60-strong team at the Gisborne-based clinic are travelling the length of Tranganui a Kiwa, including to isolated rural communities such as Matawai, Whatatutu and Waituhi, to do just that.

"There's two things we need to consider. One is around the information coming through Facebook and the krero which is presenting a lot of anxiety," he says.

"And the second one is, as we engage with whnau, the experience we give them must be pristine. So when they leave the service and speak to their whnau, they provide the insight to give the confidence for their whnau to participate as well."

Ropiha says if there's a long waiting time, for example, that could potentially put people off.

"So you've got misinformation, yes, but we also need to give people a good experience."

Dr Mataroria Lyndon from Te Tai Tokerau has been attending community hui in his own rohe to provide a clinical perspective to the conversation. One common concern whnau raise is about the potential side effects vaccines could have, including the possibility of death.

"If anything, the vaccine actually prevents death. And that's the purpose of the vaccine, to protect us from Covid-19, both by reducing the risk of acquiring Covid, but also around preventing serious illness that leads to hospitalisation and death," he says.

"Some of the side effects are common with existing vaccines, like pain at the injection site, fatigue, you might get a headache or a minor fever. But that's the vast majority of the side effects. Now in terms of anaphylaxis, which is a major side effect or risk, that's very rare. In fact, Ministry of Health data shows only five out of one million people have a serious allergic reaction to the vaccine."

Lyndon says ensuring as many Mori as possible have this information ahead of the vaccine roll out is vital, and he is pleased the Government has set aside $24.5 million for a vaccine support service, which will make access to information and vaccines easier for Mori living rurally.

Whanganui-based iwi health provider Te Oranganui has re-established the communication team it pulled together during last year's lockdown to get the message out to its community that the vaccine is coming.

Its chief executive, Wheturangi Walsh-Tapiata, says the provider is very aware of the influence misinformation is having on Mori, so Te Oranganui's strategy is to ensure they're approaching everyone's beliefs with aroha. Staff have been encouraged to let whnau know they are welcome through its doors at any stage of the vaccine process.

"It's important to have what I call 'a rolling door', that they may say no right now, but that as a consequence of ongoing conversations and as the vaccine continues to roll out throughout the country, that they still have opportunities to come back to us at a later date."

Despite the heightened risk Covid-19 poses to vulnerable tangata whenua, some Mori MPs have been reluctant to tell Mori they should be vaccinated. The Mori Party's Rawiri Waititi and Labour's Willie Jackson have said it's about mana motuhake and whnau have the right to choose.

But on a grey March day at a community hui at Terenga Paraoa Marae in Whangrei, surrounded by local Mori health workers, kaumtua, parents and children, deputy director-general of Mori Health John Whaanga takes a bolder approach. Standing at the front of the meeting house with his head up and eyes scanning the room, he doesn't hold back.

"I will be encouraging anyone I know and anyone I'm related to take the vaccination," he says loudly.

Whaanga has accompanied the Associate Minister of Health Peeni Henare to the town as part of a nationwide "marae roadshow" to inform Mori communities about the vaccine and alleviate any concerns whnau have. He is the first speaker of the day to say outright that Mori should be vaccinated, and he does so with confidence.

"I grew up with a grandfather who lost three siblings to the Spanish Flu epidemic," he says. "And I grew up with elders who told me what it was like to live through polio and whooping cough. They were horrible. I have no doubt that if we look at the history of Mori health development, we can clearly show that vaccination has helped improve Mori health."

Some sitting around the wharenui look agitated, as though they could stand at any moment to interrupt. When Whaanga sits down, a few take up the opportunity to respond: Why are people losing their jobs because they don't want to get the vaccine? Are there enough vaccines to cover all kaumtua? Will I be able to get vaccinated even though I'm only 64?

Henare says they're all valid and important questions. He assures the community no one has or will lose their job because they don't want a vaccine, and the 40,000 doses currently being supplied to Mori health providers will be topped up when required. He says Mori health providers know their communities best, and he doubts kaumtua who aren't quite 65 will ever be turned away.

"If you're 65 and over, ka pai. But if you've come all the way from a place like Te Kao to get vaccinated and you're 62, I expect that in the way we look after and manaaki our whnau, our Mori health providers will be able to do that."

Henare says many of his own whnau are reluctant to take the vaccine because of the discrimination they've faced by the health system in the past, and he understands. All he can do, he says, is continue to be open and keep encouraging them to engage in the clinical advice.

For Teokotai, engaging with whnau has never been more important. He says lives are on the line.

"I'm keeping the communication lines open, keeping the aroha open and keeping the connection open. It's a matter of going, 'e hoa, whnau, cuz, how about this one here? Have you read this information?'".

- RNZ

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Covid 19 coronavirus: Why should Mori trust the vaccine? - New Zealand Herald

KABUL, Afghanistan Farzana Ahmadi watched as a neighbor in her village in northern Afghanistan was flogged by Taliban fighters last month. The crime: Her face was uncovered.

Every woman should cover their eyes, Ms. Ahmadi recalled one Taliban member saying. People silently watched as the beating dragged on.

Fear even more potent than in years past is gripping Afghans now that U.S. and NATO forces will depart the country in the coming months. They will leave behind a publicly triumphant Taliban, who many expect will seize more territory and reinstitute many of the same oppressive rules they enforced under their regime in the 1990s.

The New York Times spoke to many Afghan women members of civil society, politicians, journalists and others about what comes next in their country, and they all said the same thing: Whatever happens will not bode well for them.

Whether the Taliban take back power by force or through a political agreement with the Afghan government, their influence will almost inevitably grow. In a country in which an end to nearly 40 years of conflict is nowhere in sight, many Afghans talk of an approaching civil war.

All the time, women are the victims of mens wars, said Raihana Azad, a member of Afghanistans Parliament. But they will be the victims of their peace, too.

When the Taliban governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, it barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school, and practically made them prisoners in their own homes.

After the U.S. invasion to topple the Taliban and defeat Al Qaeda in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Western rallying cry for bringing womens rights to the already war-torn country seemed to many a noble undertaking. The cause helped sell the war to Americans who cringed at the sight of a B-52 carpet bombing insurgent positions.

Some schools reopened, giving young women and girls a chance at education and careers that many before them didnt have. But even before American troops touched Afghan soil, some women had already risked their lives by secretly pursuing an education and teaching themselves.

Over two decades, the United States spent more than $780 million to promote womens rights in Afghanistan. The result is a generation who came of age in a period of hope for womens equality.

Though progress has been uneven, girls and women now make up about 40 percent of students. They have joined the military and police, held political office, become internationally recognized singers, competed in the Olympics and on robotics teams, climbed mountains and more all things that were nearly impossible at the turn of the century.

As the conflict dragged on over 20 years and setbacks on the battlefield mounted, American officials and lawmakers frequently pointed to the gains of Afghan women and girls as proof of success of the nation-building endeavor some measure of progress to try to justify the loss of life, both American and Afghan, and billions of dollars spent in the war effort.

Even in the twilight weeks before President Biden made his final decision to pull out all U.S. troops by September, some lawmakers and military officials argued that preserving womens rights was one reason to keep American forces there.

I remember when Americans came and they said that they will not leave us alone, and that Afghanistan will be free of oppression, and will be free of war and womens rights will be protected, said Shahida Husain, an activist in Afghanistans southern Kandahar Province, where the Taliban first rose and now control large stretches of territory. Now it looks like it was just slogans.

Across the country, schools are now being forced to contemplate whether they will be able to stay open.

Firoz Uzbek Karimi, the chancellor of Faryab University in the north, oversees 6,000 students half of them women.

Female students who live in Taliban areas have been threatened several times, but their families send them secretly, Mr. Karimi said. If foreign forces leave early, the situation will get worse.

Human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, schools and businesses are left trying to figure out contingency plans for female employees and students should the Taliban return to power by force or through an agreement with the Afghan government.

In his announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said the United States would continue to prioritize womens rights through humanitarian and diplomatic assistance.

But even now, the gains for women in some places over the past 20 years have been fleeting and unevenly distributed despite the millions invested in womens rights programs.

In Taliban-controlled areas, womens education is extremely restricted, if not nonexistent. In some areas in the countrys east and west, the Taliban have opened schools to girls who can attend until they reach puberty, and in the north, tribal elders have negotiated to reopen some schools for girls, though subjects like social science are replaced with Islamic studies. Education centers are routinely the targets of attacks, and more than 1,000 schools have closed in recent years.

It was my dream to work in a government office, said Ms. Ahmadi, 27, who graduated from Kunduz University two years ago before moving to a Taliban-controlled village with her husband. But I will take my dream to the grave.

If there is one thing that decades of war have taught Afghans, it is that conflict was never a good way to achieve human or womens rights. Since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, war has continuously fueled more war, eventually undermining any humanitarian achievements.

Under the U.S. occupation, education opportunities, cultural shifts, employment and health care have benefited some and barely affected others, especially in rural areas. In those places, some of the wars most brutal chapters played out with many civilians dead and livelihoods devastated.

Often, womens opinions are unclear in these parts, where roughly three-quarters of Afghanistans 34 million people live, and are often unreachable because of geographical, technological and cultural constraints.

Despite real improvements, Afghanistan remains one of the most challenging places in the world to be a woman, a U.S. government watchdog report released in February said. U.S. efforts to support women, girls and gender equality in Afghanistan yielded mixed results.

Still, the Talibans harshly restrictive religious governing structure virtually ensures that the oppression of women is baked into whatever iteration of governance they bring.

The Talibans idea of justice for women was solidified for Ms. Ahmadi when she saw the insurgents beat the unveiled woman in front of her in Kunduz Province.

For many other Afghan women, the governments judicial system has been punishment of a different kind.

Farzana Alizada believes that her sister, Maryam, was murdered by her abusive husband. But a police investigation of any sort took months to start, thwarted by absent prosecutors and corruption, she said. Ms. Alizadas brother-in-law even pressured her to drop the charges by accusing her of stealing. The police asked her why she was pushing the case if her sister was dead.

Domestic violence remains an enduring problem in Afghanistan. About 87 percent of Afghan women and girls experience domestic abuse in their lifetimes, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

I lost all the hope I have in this government. In some cases, maybe the Taliban is better than this system, Ms. Alizada said. No one is on my side.

Ms. Alizadas sentiments were similarly portrayed in Doha, Qatar, at the peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Despite months of negotiations, there has been little progress, especially when it comes to discussing womens rights, which neither side has made a priority.

At a separate peace conference held in Moscow in March between the Afghan government, political power brokers and the Taliban, only one woman, Habiba Sarabi, was on the 12-member delegation sent by the Afghan government. And only four are a part of the 21-person team in Doha.

Moscow and Doha, as well, with its small number of women representatives laid bare the thin veneer of support for genuine equality and the so-called post-2001 gains when it comes to who will decide the countrys future, said Patricia Gossman, the associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

But one of the gains that is almost indisputable has been Afghanistans access to the internet and the news media. Cellphone coverage extends across much of the country, meaning that Afghan women and girls have more space to learn and connect outside their familial bubbles and villages. The Afghan news media, too, has blossomed after large investments from foreign governments and investors, and many women have become nationally known journalists and celebrities.

But even their futures are uncertain.

Lina Shirzad is the acting managing director of a small radio station in Badakhshan, in Afghanistans restive north. She employs 15 women and fears, given the growing insecurity, that they will lose their jobs. Even some of the larger national outlets are looking to relocate employees or move some operations outside the country.

With the withdrawal of foreign forces in the next few months, these women that are the breadwinners for their family will be unemployed, Ms. Shirzad said. Will their values and achievements be maintained or not?

Fahim Abed contributed reporting from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar.

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Afghan Women Fear The Worst after U.S. Withdrawal - The New York Times