Category: Social Justice

New email signatures for white teachers in all-white suburb

by philg

The overwhelmingly white unionized public school teachers in our nearly all-white, all-Asian suburb have begun appending, in a red font, the following signature text to every email message…

Lincoln Public Schools are united in standing with those who are calling out ingrained racism and violence toward people of color in our country and calling for acknowledgement of humanity in one another. This is not just an issue for black and brown people, but an issue that impacts all of our futures. We must:

  • Listen to each other, showing compassion and empathy
  • Never turn our backs on senseless brutality [ordinary brutality is okay?]
  • Continue to denounce injustices
  • Unify our voices to create systemic change

During this painful time, let us work together to be a light to break the darkness that silence can bring. Let us facilitate education, healing, connection, and let us support each other and our communities. Every one of us needs to be part of the solution and we must work together to ensure that there is justice for all.

[Note that relaxing the two-acre zoning minimum so that black and brown people could afford to move into our suburb is not mentioned. And we’re supposed to listen (free), not pay reparations (costly).]

Maybe they will show up to work in these T-shirts?

and for the feet…

Related:

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Princeton case highlights the need for immunity after public confession of racism?

by philg

American Great Awakenings have tended to require public confessions of sin. Stand up in front of the congregation, admit that you’re a sinner, and let the healing and forgiveness begin. This was extended to Alcoholics Anonymous. Stand up and admit that you’re an alcoholic. More recently, this has been adapted for the Great Awokening: stand up and admit that you’re a racist.

Princeton tried this collectively, via a letter from its president, and was not rewarded with the conventional “Hello, Princeton,” but instead with a letter from the Feds demanding to know if Princeton was lying in past years about not being racist (or maybe Princeton is lying now about being racist?).

From a 2008 coast-to-coast helicopter trip (ferrying a Robinson R44 from the factory):

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Fewer retail stores in cities due to higher insurance rates going forward?

by philg

“$1 billion-plus riot damage is most expensive in insurance history” (Axios):

The vandalism and looting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police will cost the insurance industry more than any other violent demonstrations in recent history, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring were mostly peaceful, but the arson, vandalism and looting that did occur will result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims — eclipsing the record set in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers who brutalized Rodney King.

Shops in the suburbs weren’t torched or looted, right? Rational insurance companies will therefore charge higher rates going forward for retail stores in urban areas. Combined with the extra risk of being shut down due to coronapanic, the risk of losing customers as richer city-dwellers flee during coronapanic, and the higher minimum wages that some cities mandate relative to surrounding suburbs, why would rational business owners decide to continue operating a lot of these shops? So the white suburbanites who came into the cities to join the protests, ostensibly to help their Black brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, will have ended up permanently degrading city life for Blacks of all gender IDs.

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Will Black Americans have more spending power after receiving reparations?

by philg

Suppose that President Kamala Harris writes every American who identifies as “Black” (including Rachel Dolezal and, everyone’s new favorite Black American, Jessica Krug) a fat reparations check. Will Black Americans have greater spending power as a result?

Some Blacks are on means-tested welfare programs, such as public housing, Medicaid, or SNAP. If they receive a reparations check, maybe their “means” will now be greater and they’ll have to pay more for housing, health insurance, and food. A 2015 Census report:

At 41.6 percent, blacks were more likely to participate in government assistance programs in an average month. The black participation rate was followed by Hispanics at 36.4 percent, Asians or Pacific Islanders at 17.8 percent, and non-Hispanic whites at 13.2 percent.

The Son also Rises (Clark 2014; Princeton University Press) contains a survey of the academic literature regarding the effect of family wealth and unearned cash transfers on children. In 1832 there was a land lottery in Georgia where winners received a parcel of land roughly equal in value to the median family wealth at the time (i.e., the typical winners ended up with twice as much wealth, about $150,000 extra in today’s money). How did the children of the winners do?

They were no more literate than the children of losers. Their occupational status was no higher. Their own children in 1880 (the grandchildren of the 1832 winners) were again no more literate. Worse, they were significantly less likely to be enrolled in school than the grandchildren of the losers. … Wealth is not statistically higher for lottery winners’ children…

(Clark also reviews a study of Cherokee Indians who, starting in 1998, received substantial boosts to their income from casino profits. For children who had not been living in poverty, “there was no measurable change in any educational outcomes, including high school graduation rates…” This was despite the fact that a child who graduated high school would immediately become eligible for his or her own $4,000-per-year payment.)

“Divorce laws and the economic behavior of married couples,” by Alessandra Voena, a University of Chicago economist, concluded that an increased opportunity to obtain cash via a divorce lawsuit reduced reduced married women’s labor force participation rate. Similarly, successful child support plaintiffs generally reduce their working hours so that cash from the defendant is not turned into a higher standard of living for the child, but rather increased leisure time for the adult plaintiff.

See Long-term effects of short-term free cash (guaranteed minimum income experiments) for a reference to a paper regarding how just a few years of free government cash resulted in a lifetime of reduced labor force efforts. Those who got the cash were more likely to end up on disability and, if not Hispanic, to divorce their husbands and wives (additional gender IDs were unavailable in the 1970s).

Readers: What do you think? Will the free government cash result in higher spending power and standard of living or reduced working hours and additional leisure time for Americans who identify as “Black”?

Related:

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Can University of Chicago expel students who lose interest in Black Studies?

by philg

The home page of the University of Chicago’s Department of English currently contains the following statement:

The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.

For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black Studies page.

I’m wondering how this can be enforced. Suppose that an accepted student, a few months after enrolling (which means turning on Zoom from his/her/zir/their mom’s house?), decides “In demography and in the workforce, Blacks in the U.S. are being replaced by Hispanic and Asian immigrants, so in looking toward the future I would rather do a thesis in Hispanic Studies.” Can the university then expel the student? The department says:

all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African American, African diasporic, and colonized peoples, regardless of area of specialization, as a core competence of the profession.

What if, after a year of reading these literatures, a student says “these authors are terrible compared to what Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans have written in English; I want to do my thesis on the lyrics of K-pop”? Does that student similarly get expelled?

From a cross-country trip in the Robinson R44:

Update, September 22: the home page has been edited to remove the Black Studies-only limitation. But the brave language lives on at archive.org:

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Hollywood says it is okay to be racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ half the time

by philg

“Oscars Announce New Inclusion Requirements for Best Picture Eligibility” (Variety):

For the 94th and 95th Oscars ceremonies, scheduled for 2022 and 2023, a film will submit a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form to be considered for best picture. Beginning in 2024, for the 96th Oscars, a film submitting for best picture will need to meet the inclusion thresholds by meeting two of the four standards.

If these standards are important, why does a film need to meet only half of them? Would we say that a person was a virtuous anti-racist if he/she/ze/they went to only half of the local KKK gatherings?

What are America’s victim groups, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?

•Women
•Racial or ethnic group:
•Asian
•Hispanic/Latinx
•Black/African American
•Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native
•Middle Eastern/North African
•Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
•Other underrepresented race or ethnicity
•LGBTQ+
•People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

(Only “LGBTQ+” and not “LGBQTIA+”?)

Also… when is victimhood measured? At the time that the victim is hired? At the time that the victim first works on the film? At the time that the victim completes work on the film? At the time of the Academy Awards? We wouldn’t deny, I hope, that gender ID is fluid and changeable. Hollywood itself loves to give us examples of people who change their LGBTQIA+ status from negative (cisgender heterosexual) to positive (e.g., homosexual). Racial identification is fluid. Most recently in the news, Jessica Krug, whose brilliant Ph.D. colleagues accepted her as a Black woman (NY Post):

Finally, what actually qualifies under the LGBTQIA+ banner? The actor tells the producer that he/she/ze/they had sex in an LGBTQIA+ manner? How does that move the needle with the general public unless the actor has sex in an LGBTQIA+ manner on screen? Rock Hudson, for example, allegedly identified as LGBTQIA+, but his on-screen characters were cisgender heterosexuals. Why did that advance the LGBTQIA+ movement compared to simply hiring a cisgender heterosexual actor?

(Even a movie with an all-Asian (a victim category for Hollywood) cast and a female lead is objectionable currently: “Disney Wanted to Make a Splash in China With ‘Mulan.’ It Stumbled Instead.” (NYT, complaining that Disney did some filming in a Muslim area of China (wouldn’t the revenue actually be good for Chinese Muslims?)))

Related (going through old posts to see if any of them involve movies that would qualify):

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BLM theme meals at fast food restaurants?

by philg

Stopping alongside one of the elegant restaurants that the Maskachusetts License Raj hasn’t managed to shut down, I was offered a gourmet meal:

If there can be a “Travis Scott Meal”, why not a “Jacob Blake Meal” for those who want to demonstrate their commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement? For those who never think about anything other than COVID-19, a “Dr. Fauci Meal” whose contents may change from day to day? For the politically oriented, a “President Harris Meal”?

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Harvard hires for the Department of Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration

by philg

“[Faculty of Arts and Sciences] unveils anti-racism agenda” (Harvard Gazette, August 20, 2020):

Calling on the FAS community to be “relentless, constructively critical, and action-oriented,” Gay said that she would: restart the search for four new senior faculty in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration (EIM); establish a new visiting professorship in EIM; appoint an inaugural associate dean of diversity, inclusion and belonging; expand the Inequality in American postdoctoral fellows program; initiate a study of racial diversity among senior staff; and create a task force to examine the FAS visual culture.

What happens when you kick everyone off campus five months earlier?

“The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality,” she said. “I am clear-eyed that the work of real change will be difficult, and for many it will be uncomfortable. Change is messy work. Institutional inertia will threaten to overwhelm even our best efforts. If we are to succeed, we must challenge a status quo that is comfortable and convenient for many.”

A lot of echoes in those empty buildings! The mostly-empty campus will have some new signs:

Finally, Gay outlined the charge for her new Task Force for Visual Culture and Signage. Led by Dean of Arts and Humanities Robin Kelsey, the group will be comprised of faculty, students, and staff, and will pursue a comprehensive study of FAS’s visual culture and articulate guidelines for evolving imagery across campus.

What if the new professors of Indigeneity suggest giving the campus back to the rightful owners of the real estate, i.e., perhaps the Wampanoags or the Massachusetts (the tribe, not to be confused with the current Commonwealth of Maskachusetts)? Will Harvard dip into its $40+ billion (thanks, Donald Trump!) endowment to pay rent on the Native American-owned campus?

Related:

  • Not everyone at Harvard got the memo regarding the benefits to natives of migration. From a Harvard economics professor: “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers”
  • also from Harvard’s econ nerds, “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER): For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points. That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.
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Can a university fire a professor who admits to not being Black?

by philg

“Professor Jessica Krug admits she lied about being black: ‘I cancel myself’” (New York Post):

Despite publicly living as a black woman for years, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug admitted Thursday that she is actually a “culture leech” — who is white.

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”

The self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” goes on to detail a lengthy trail of public deception.

Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” which “interrogates the political practices and discourses through which those who fled from slavery and the violence of the slave trade in Angola forged coherent political communities outside of, and in opposition to, state politics,” according to her GW faculty profile.

Can the university, which I attended as a 14-year-old back in the Jimmy Carter malaise years, fire her? If so, on what grounds? Can they say “We hired you because of your skin color and we would never have hired such a weak thinker and scholar with white skin”?

(The Medium essay is pretty awesome. I think she deserves her job:

I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. … my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.

as the story unfolds, I think we will learn that she is primarily a victim:

When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person.

)

Loosely related…

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Election of President Kamala Harris will end the BLM protests?

by philg

From The American Conservative (both of them?):

There once was a general who fought a war to protect slavery. That’s not how he would have described it. He would have said he was fighting to protect his way of life from a foreign invader. Whatever construction he put on it, his so-called way of life rested on the sweat wrung from forced labor on plantations and gold earned from buying and selling black flesh.

That general was Samori Touré. The West African chieftain is honored today by black nationalists for resisting French imperialism in the Mandingo Wars of the late nineteenth century, but thousands of Africans were enslaved by Samori’s raiders in the course of building up his empire. After his final defeat in 1898, for more than a decade, columns of refugees tramped into French Guinea to return to their home villages as they escaped or were liberated from Banamba or Bamako or wherever Samori’s men had sold them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori, after the great resister. That means that Between the World and Me, the best-selling anti-racist tract of the current century, which takes the form of letters from Coates to his son, is addressed to someone named after a prolific enslaver of black Africans.

Unless the U.S. is packed with hidden Deplorables that poll-takers can’t find, at some point in 2021, the U.S. will be led by a president who identifies as “Black” (though we also have to accept the possibility that Kamala Harris changes her racial and/or gender ID between now and then).

Is it safe to say that the BLM protesters/rioters will go home for eight years, starting November 4? We didn’t have BLM riots during the Obama Administration, right? (“Obama Says Movements Like Black Lives Matter ‘Can’t Just Keep on Yelling’” (NYT, 2016) turned out to be prescient!)

Every day of the Obama administration was a day in which life for Black Americans became more challenging (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration,” NBER 2007) Yet as long as there was a person in the White House who identified as “Black,” it apparently did not bother lower-income Black Americans that their jobs, apartments, and infrastructure were taken over by immigrants

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